Nuclear Clean-Up Almost Complete

A dilapidated former nuclear factory building has been taken apart piece by piece, and hundreds of containers of asbestos, lead dust, and uranium-contaminated debris have been trucked out of Newhallville — clearing a Shelton Avenue brownfield for a new use after decades of toxic disrepair.

The question now is: What will fill that space next?

The 2.7‑acre lot in question is located at 71 Shelton Ave.

Up until earlier this year, that site held a crumbling, former United Nuclear Corporation manufacturing plant that was decommissioned in 1970 — but that nevertheless remained in place, along with its various radioactive and non-radioactive health hazards.

After winning City Plan Commission approval last fall, General Electric, the Middletown-based contractor Arcadis, and the subcontractor Stamford Wrecking have led a federally funded cleanup of the site under the watch of regulators from the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) and the state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection (DEEP).

On Friday, GE Corporate Brownfields Program Manager James Van Nortwick told the Independent that the deconstruction and removal of the above-ground building and underground structures is now complete.

He said the site’s last remaining impacted soil — three 55-gallon drums currently stored in an intermodal container on the property — will soon be trucked away for off-site disposal.

Other than that, roughly 400 intermodal containers of radioactive waste and another 100 containers of lead dust, asbestos, and debris have already been trucked out of the site. The former was ultimately taken by rail to a disposal site in Utah, the latter by rail to a disposal site in Alabama.

Now that the demolition and removal work is done, the private contractor and state and federal inspectors are in the process of completing three sets of independent environmental reviews.

Van Nortwick said that, while Arcadis has been conducting soil sample reviews throughout the entirety of the year-long project, the contractor completed a final status survey roughly two weeks ago. That’s to make sure that the now-vacant parcel is indeed free of any lingering radioactive hazards.

While Arcadis finalizes that last survey report, state and federal regulators are double- and triple-checking their work.

A NRC spokesperson confirmed that federal inspectors completed their confirmatory survey work last Thursday, and that their results should be back in the next four to six weeks.

Van Nortwick said that DEEP inspectors are set to begin their own confirmatory field activities at the Shelton Avenue site starting on Tuesday.

“What they do is a walkover with a gamma monitoring device that would pick up any radioactive components,” Van Nortwick said about the NRC’s review process.

Inspectors walk the whole length of the property, row by row, tracking their movements by GPS and taking soil samples along the way. If they find any remaining radioactive hazards missed by the contractor, they can pinpoint exactly where on the site the private contractor needs to continue its cleanup work.

“It’s very thorough,” Van Nortwick said. Based on Arcadis’s testing of nearly 500 samples as part of its own remediation review, he said he’s confident that the site is indeed clean and safe. He said he expects the various government regulators to provide their respective final sign offs in a few weeks.

Then, starting in late October or early November, Stamford Wrecking Company will backfill the excavated site with clean fill material, grade and smooth out the property, and repair its fences. Those site restoration activities should take roughly three to four weeks to finish.

Van Nortwick said he hopes to have the whole project finished and the cleaned-up site handed back to the property’s owner, Schneur Katz of Zsy Development LLC, by the end of the year or by early next year at the latest.

$10 – 15M Cleanup

He said the entire cleanup project, funded in large part by the federal Department of Energy, cost roughly $10 – 15 million to complete.

“From everyone’s perspective, taking the building down was the right call,” he said. ​“You had a building that was falling down. Clearly just the lead-based paint and asbestos issues would be 10 times worse if you let the building fall down.” And that’s not to mention the trace amounts of uranium impacting the concrete and steel structure.

“You had to control it,” he said.

Van Nortwick said that the contractor had no air quality issues at all over the course of the project. No problems with radioactive dust, lead dust, or asbestos dust that would have impacted any of the neighbors.

“We had six air monitors set up all around the site,” he said. ​“We really controlled any kind of dust generation throughout the entire project.”

What proved more challenging than keeping down the dust, he said, was continually learning just how deep underground the former building went. He said the building was quite old, and that it was used by Westinghouse and Olin before UNC took it over.

“Some of the substructure was tremendous,” he said. ​“I’m talking about very thick equipment foundations, underground concrete basins, and a lot of asbestos covered piping in the utility conduits.”

Van Nortwick said that the contractor found slab after slab after slab built out underneath the property’s surface. Sometimes they would find one concrete slab, peel it away, see six inches of soil … and then find another slab right under that, sometimes on top of a concrete vault.

“It took a lot of time to deal with the sub-slab structures.”

And then, halfway through the site demolition and removal work, the Covid-19 pandemic hit.

Van Nortwick said that his team implemented a variety of Covid precautionary measures. They included disinfecting trailers, offices and portable bathrooms every few days; daily questions of personnel about their general health and contact with infected people; daily body temperature checks for all site personnel; enforced social distancing whenever possible; the use of an exterior hand wash station, as well as hand sanitizers and cleaners; and the wearing of face coverings while at the site.

“In general, GE has done an effective job and its planned remediation activities have gone well,” a NRC spokesperson told the Independent by email, ​“although the contractor (Arcadis), like so many other firms, had has to overcome a number of challenges due to the restrictions stemming from the Covid-19 public health emergency. In response, the company has implemented the wearing of face coverings, social distancing, the repeated sanitizing of surfaces and overall heightened vigilance.”

High Marks For Communication

Prospect Hill/Newhallville/Dixwell Alder Steve Winter, who represents the part of the neighborhood that includes 71 Shelton Ave., and Shepherd Street block watch captain Addie Kimbrough, who closely followed the site remediation process, both praised GE and Arcadis for providing regular progress reports on the cleanup.

“I have felt that they have been really clear, consistent and inviting communicators,” Winter said. He said they sent updates every few weeks to the neighborhood alders and management team, and hosted a few in-person tours of the site — before the pandemic hit — to talk through what the remediation work entailed.

“It’s been really helpful to see exactly what it’s been like,” and to see, for example, the ​“huge water sprayers they set up over the summer to control the dust.”

“They explained everything in detail, which I liked,” Kimbrough said.

She said she wasn’t enamored with the project’s trucking plan, which had trucks driving through the Newhallville, Dixwell, Prospect Hill, East Rock, and Fair Haven neighborhoods on their way to the railyard in North Haven. But besides not liking the idea of having trucks go through so many different neighborhoods, Kimbrough said, she didn’t hear any specific complaints from residents about life disrupted by the truck travel.

Winter also lauded the separate sample surveys conducted by Arcadis, the state, and the federal government.

“With the history of contaminated sites in the area and lingering questions about whether things have been fully cleaned up, it is really important that we have multiple layers of review confirming that this site has been completely remediated. The neighborhood deserves nothing less than that it’s double and triple checked that it’s fully cleaned up.”

What Comes Next?

What happens next at the site, after the cleanup and regulatory sign offs are officially complete, is still up in the air.

The property is not owned by General Electric, which the federal government charged with cleaning up the site because of its purchase of United Nuclear Corporation. It is owned by a holding company controlled by local landlord Schneur Katz.

Katz did not respond to a request for comment by the publication time of this article.

On the commercial real estate website LoopNet, however, Katz’s company, The New Haven Business Center LLC, has put the remediated parcel up for sale along with the adjacent office building he owns at 91 Shelton Ave. for a combined sum of $11.6 million.

The listing advertises the two parcels as next to Science Park and within an Enterprise Zone/Opportunity Zone. The site is also immediately adjacent to the planned new 399-unit apartment complex to be built at 201 Munson St.

“This notable property abuts Science Park and consists of two separate parcels; 89 – 91 Shelton Ave, 71 Shelton Ave (demolition has been completed),” the real estate listing reads. ​“The building consists of approximately 148,000 +/- square feet on 5.75 +/- acres. Current use is primarily office and multi purpose space, however the building floor plates makes this property an ideal apartment conversion, storage facility and/or mixed use project.”

According to the city assessor’s database, Katz’s holding company ZSY Company LLC purchased 71 Shelton Ave. from the city for $50,000 in 2007. The city last appraised the site as worth $332,500. Another one of Katz’s holding companied purchased 89 Shelton Ave. for $1.5 million in 2005, and the city last appraised that property as worth just over $1.9 million.

When asked what he would like to see 71 Shelton used as going forward, Winter cited the neighborhood’s twin needs for quality, affordable housing and for safe, positive and engaging places for youth.

“Those are always things on my mind when we’re looking at a big open space like this,” he said. ​“How can we meet those two goals?”

Newhallville Community Management Team Chair Kim Harris had a similar, and even more concrete, vision for how the space could be put to use.

“I would love to see some tennis courts,” she said. ​“A bocci court. Horeshoes. Benches. A water fountain. A skating rink. That would be so beautiful.”

Harris said she plans on calling Katz’s company this week to talk with him about how the space might best serve the neighborhood.

And she plans on inviting GE and Arcadis to this month’s management team meeting to give the neighborhood a full progress report on the cleanup.