nothin Deeper Dive OK’d Into Polluted Newhall Soil | New Haven Independent

Deeper Dive OK’d Into Polluted Newhall Soil

Sam Gurwitt hoto

St. Mary Street, in neighborhood where remediation took place.

Hamden is expanding a decades-old plan to clean-up” the Newhall neighborhood — a reminder that the town’s long road towards environmental justice remains in need of new paving.

That’s the upshot of information discussed Monday night of the Legislative Council’s Economic & Development Committee.

The committee unanimously approved two agreements allowing the State Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection (DEEP) to store equipment on the abandoned former middle school at 560 Newhall St. and to remediate ten properties built on top of contaminated soil.

DEEP Environmental Analyst Ray Frigon called the new initiative — scheduled to be voted on by the full Legislative Council on Aug. 15 — a continuation of a neighborhood-wide soil clean-up effort.”

Between 1800 and 1950, the wetland area around Newhall Street in the Highwood neighborhood of southern Hamden was used to dump waste, mostly from the Winchester Repeating Arms Company. The dumping contaminated soil under many residential blocks in the neighborhood, as well as at the old Michael J. Whalen Middle School, the community center next door, and open spaces like Rochford Field and Villano Park.

The Connecticut Department of Public Health reviewed Newhall soil samples collected by the Environmental Protection Agency in 2004, finding elevated levels of lead, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, and arsenic. Such discoveries led to the closure and abandonment of the Newhall Middle School, where redevelopment has been postponed largely due to a lengthy remediation process. (Read more about that here.)

The Regional Water Authority, DEEP, the Olin Corporation, and the Town of Hamden split responsibility for investigating and financing soil clearing projects on the Middle School parcel, 300 residential properties, and Rockford Field and Villano Park.

In 2013, The New Haven Register reported that The Newhall Remediation Project is, for the most part, complete,” after contaminants were removed from the soil of 240 residential properties. While Olin and DEEP fixed 300 properties, Hamden healed the public parks, and the water authority concluded their remediation of the school site in 2019, the original plan is still technically not completed,” according to Frigon.

Contaminants are a health hazard when they may be inadvertently ingested or inhaled, so the organizations’ common solution was to ensure that four feet of soil stood between ground surface and the polluted soil. In the case of the middle school, Frigon said that more work may need to be done, for example, if future developers install utility lines like water, electricity, and gas because waste material deeper down could endanger the health of construction workers.

In the case of residential properties, he said, DEEP sat down in 2005 to define the perimeter” of their project area. He estimated that 99.9 percent of filling activities” were addressed by extracting contaminants and adding additional soil to the 300 chosen homes, and that the ten properties they plan to decontaminate within the next six months are part of the 0.1 percent of contaminants left underneath residential spots.

Within the original consent order boundary area,” he said, contaminants essentially stretched curb to curb on the entire block.

Outside the boundary,” he continued, contaminants appear very much isolated, maybe contained beneath the driveway or the corner of the property.” DEEP decided to excavate properties outside of the initial boundary lines, he said, because the owners of those properties asked them to. It’s still waste fill, and it’s still contaminated,” he said, but what appeared there was very light, sporadic, and somewhat benign.”

We’re making really quick progress for a project of this magnitude,” he stated.

Sam Gurwitt file photo

Justin Farmer: “This will never be close to complete.”

Fifth District Legislative Council representative Justin Farmer, who represents the area, called Monday’s vote a good step.” But he said significant work remains in order to confront centuries of contamination in Newhall and to promote environmental and racial justice within Hamden.

The remediation efforts, he said, will never be close to complete … because you had a whole entire area that was built literally entirely on the town dump.”

That will eternally devalue this neighborhood,” he stated, by affecting the value of hundreds of homes. He said there are roughly 100 homes” he knows of that are still in need of remediation, houses that are slowly sinking into the ground.”

There is not enough money to really do the work on the houses” that is deserved after two centuries of environmental exploitation, he said.

Farmer said one of his aims is to educate and empower current and potentially future homeowners” to opt in to the clean-up process, which is free of charge for all, and know their rights as Newhall residents.

Contributed photo

The Olin Powder Farm.

Farmer has also been pushing for Olin to remediate and open a privately owned 102.5‑acre forest and wetlands site called Powder Farm so that residents can finally enjoy the closed-off land. Powder Farm, which also stretches through Southern Hamden, has suffered from the same history and contamination as other sites in Newhall.

In a Black and brown community that has been disenfranchised … that has a super high asthma rate and is overdeveloped compared to the rest of Hamden,” Farmer said. There should be public space. Especially after Covid.”

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