Neighbors Wary As UI Unveils English Station Plans

United Illuminating is ready to start the long awaited clean up of the mothballed English Station power plant, but it doesn’t yet know how it will alert families if the toxins it kicks up make their way across the Mill River to a nearby soccer field and school.

Those two facts emerged at a community meeting held Thursday evening between United Illuminating, a subsidiary of the Spanish electric company Iberdrola, and Fair Haven neighbors and environmentalists gathered at the Martinez School cafeteria, just across the river from the island site.

The meeting was an update for residents and city officials on the company’s plans to clean up the soil, the water and the remaining stations of the long-shuttered power plant. UI sold the 8.9 acres located at the southern end of Ball Island in the Mill River back in 2000 to Quinnipiac Energy LLC. The site was divided into two parcels in 2006 and then sold to ASNAT Realty LLC and Evergreen Power LLC., which never proceeded to build on the it and lacked the money on its own to clean up the PCBs in the soil. Those two companies still own those parcels and will maintain control of them after they are cleaned up. UI officials projected Thursday that the cleanup would be complete by August 2019.

UI is handling the cleanup thanks to a deal brokered by Mayor Toni Harp and State Attorney General George Jepsen that got the company to set aside at least $30 million as part of the state’s finalization of its $3 billion acquisition by Iberdrola. (Read about the city’s initial objection to the Iberdrola takeover here, Jepsen’s stepping in to save the day here, and the eventual deal here.) The city sees great potential in developing the site once it gets cleaned, whether for housing or commercial uses or perhaps renewable energy production.

The Plan

Chuck Eves, a UI project manager who will oversee the cleanup, outlined a two-part plan that involves investigating what kinds of contaminates are on the site and then actually cleaning them up.

The investigation phase involves building temporary roads to create a ​“clean corridor” for bringing vehicles back and forth to the site to pick up and remove contaminated material and waste and truck it out without cross contamination. Eves said during that investigation phase, which is expected to get underway next month, UI will be looking for asbestos along with hazardous and nonhazardous material. The company also will be collecting soil samples by hand and machine, along with water samples. UI will install monitoring wells too, he said.

Once the condition of the site is determined, UI must provide a report and a remedial plan of action to the state Department of Energy & Environmental Protection for its review and approval.

“They may approve it or ask us to do further investigation,” Eves said. Once that’s done, UI can get to work cleaning up the site starting with removing and disposing of contaminated debris it the buildings, and the excavation and removal of contaminated soil and water. The plan for keeping the contaminated soil, water, and building material from impacting the sounding community involves creating containment areas, sealing off buildings, and using a ventilation system that uses high-efficiency particulate air or HEPA filters and creates negative air pressure to keep the air flow contained to areas being cleaned up.

Additional containment plans include wetting down the soil and keeping it covered with hay when work is not in progress will be used to keep any contaminated soil contained on site until it is ready to be removed.

What About The Kids?

Listening to those plans, Adeli DeArce wasn’t reassured. She lives in the neighborhood and has an asthmatic son. She also works as a teacher at Lulac Head Start. She asked what UI plans to do to keep people informed if any contaminates should escape during the cleanup process.

“What happens if one of those plastic coverings just blew open?” she asked. ​“My concern is for the kids who are playing at the soccer field just over there.”

She was already skeptical given that had it not been for a friend, she said she would not have heard about the meeting in the first place.

Tom Judge, a senior project manager for UI, said federal and state laws are pretty strict, so why UI has hired the Windsor-based engineering and environmental consulting firm TRC to monitor the project and perform quality checks to make certain that contaminates stay on site until they are ready to be removed. He also said that the state Department of Energy & Environmental Protection would have to be notified if a hazardous material became airborne.

DeArce asked specifically how UI will notify the public if any contaminate gets away from the site. Judge said he’ll have to get back to her with an answer.

What About The River?

Environmental activist Lynne Bonnet asked if UI would go one step further and take samples of the river and river bed during its clean-up process and notify the public of whether it should be fishing and eating from the Mill River.

Rob Greenberg, who sees the remediation of the site as the first step in finding a new use for the two iconic structures in the city, had similar concerns about the river.

“My biggest concern is what’s going to happen to the river,” he said. ​“That river bed also needs to be cleaned. People are fishing in it. People are using the waterways now for kayaks and it’s a big concern that I have. How much contaminate did that particular company put in the river?”

“The state of Connecticut should hold the company responsible for cleaning it up,” he added.

Activist Aaron Goode asked if an assessment has been done to determine the structural integrity of the bulkhead.

“I might be the only one but I have nightmares about English Station. Those nightmares have to do with the deterioration of the bulkhead on the south side of Ball Island, and English Station crumbling into the New Haven Harbor,” he said.

Judge said there are discussions about what’s happening to the Mill River, but UI’s role and its protective measures are limited to the Ball Island site. He said the tunnels that go out to the river will be plugged with silt sacks to prevent any water releasing from the site, but there are no plans to test the water that goes downstream or the river bed.

He said the bulkhead had some failures in the past, and the entire bulkhead had to be replaced from 1999 through 2004. Judge said currently the bulkhead is relatively new in terms of its lifespan, but TRC will do an assessment of the condition of the bulkhead. He said UI’s concern is if there is further deterioration that it is addressed before remediation so that there are no future releases.