November/December 2004

GONDOLA RAILCARS HELP ACCELERATE
SUPERFUND CLEANUPS
by Rick Zink

Cleaning up America’s hazardous waste and contaminated sites continues to be top priority for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and other government agencies.

Two ongoing MHF Logistical Solutions (MHF-LS) assignments stemming from the EPA’s Superfund program – both at former chemical plants, one in New Jersey and the other in Colorado – underscore how our expertise in providing packaging and using gondola railcars for transportation conveyance is playing a critical role in the remediation of contaminated sites. And in the process, we’re saving the taxpayer some serious money.

Plus, I’m happy to report, we’ve recently posted some impressive numbers for shipments completed from both locations.

First up is a former insecticide manufacturing facility in Edison, NJ, where we are working as a subcontractor for Conti Environment & Infrastructure (www.contienviro.com) in their assignment from the United States Army Corps of Engineers (USACE). The project involves removing and transporting hazardous soil contaminated with elevated levels of lead and arsenic, as well as non-hazardous soil. Our role is to provide the packaging liner system to contain the materials in low-sided gondola railcars and then manage the shipments.

The non-hazardous materials are being shipped first to a transload facility in Ohio, where they are put on trucks for the final leg to a landfill nearby. The hazardous waste soil is being transported by rail to disposal sites in Michigan, Texas and Utah.

We first began working at the Edison site in August, 2003. Since then, we’ve moved about 315,000 tons of contaminated soil, currently averaging about 15 railcars per working day. We recently completed our 3,000th railcar shipment. The assignment is expected to last until the end of the year.

One strength we bring to this project is expertise in working with the local railroad, in this case Conrail. The Edison site is adjacent to a Conrail yard and connected by a spur. We’ve been working closely with them to manage the twice-daily car switches and coordinate their rail crews with Conti and MHF-LS staffs.

We’re utilizing our own fleet of low-sided gondola railcars for the work, a significant advantage for the client because our equipment is clean and always in great working condition. That means faster loadings and turnarounds.

For the taxpayer, rail means getting the soil moved at a more rapid pace than a truck alone could get done.

For the hazardous waste soil, we’re providing Super Load Wrapper™ railcar liners, which we manufacture. For the non-hazardous materials, we’re using load wrapper liners which we also produce.

The Denver Radium Superfund site, meanwhile, is similar to the Edison project, though in this case, we contracted directly to the USACE.

The cleanup is of a former facility once owned by the now-defunct Shattuck Chemical Company that processed native ores previously mined in Colorado – including radium, a radioactive material – until the 1970s. For a time, Shattuck also handled uranium as part of the Cold War-era weapons program. The Shattuck site consists of about 10 acres of property that is bordered by land belonging to the Burlington Northern and Santa Fe Railway Company.

As a matter of historical interest, radium was extracted from the Colorado Front Range from the early 1900s until the 1920s, when the radium industry collapsed. When it did, different sites in the Denver area were contaminated with radium residue, and we have been involved with a number of cleanup assignments in the area (for example: www.mhfls.com/news/2003-09-25_DenverStreets.asp).

In January 1992, the EPA opted to stabilize and solidify some of the less contaminated materials in the form of a monolith, which was constructed by mixing the contaminated soils with fly ash and concrete. It was completed in 1998.

However, in 2000, the EPA elected to remove the material to an off-site disposal facility rather than leave it in place. That’s when we were brought in through competitive bidding. We began our work in March of 2003.

Under our USACE contract, we are responsible for managing the packaging, shipping and transportation, as well as the technical support necessary to ensure regulatory compliance. The on-site remedial contractor, Shaw Environmental & Infrastructure, Inc., is handling the dismantling of the monolith soil mixture buried at the site, plus the loading of the railcars.

We have 110 gondola railcars dedicated to the project. They are outfitted with our Super Load Wrapper railcar liners.

To date, we’ve shipped more than 1,200 railcars, totaling more than 130,000 tons of materials, out of the Denver site to a disposal facility in Idaho.

As with many of our other remediation projects, the ability to use rail as the primary conveyance method is a big cost saver. One railcar can hold about 110 tons of soil, about five times as much as a single truckload.

The New Jersey and Colorado projects are just two of the scores of Superfund sites at which we’ve worked. I’ll be profiling others in subsequent issues of the Transloader. If you have a project you’d like to know more about, please contact me.

Rick Zink is executive vice president, operations. You can reach him at rick_zink@mhfls.com.