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Oil spill who-done-it continues as clean up winds down

Date: 4/28/2009

By G. Michael Dobbs

Managing Editor



HOLYOKE -- For National Decon, a company specializing in the hand demolition of former mill buildings and recovering recyclable materials, the assignment to take apart a long un-used mill at 22 Water St. seemed to be pretty routine.

The job of recovering bricks and wood from the site, though, has brought the company to near financial ruin and a contentious legal proceeding thanks to the accidental release of fuel oil through the remains of the buildings and into the Connecticut River last May.

Now months after the release, the clean up is almost complete, but the financial aftermath and the court case to determine responsibility is not settled.

On an overcast day last week, National Decon President Jonathan Gross walked around the property recounting what happened.

"We focus on primarily decommissioned mills that can't be repaired," he explained. He added the company has demolished buildings in New, York, Tennessee, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina and Indiana.

His workers were taking a break from assembling pallets of used brick and not far from them were carefully stacked and strapped piles of wooden flooring. Although the current economic conditions have slowed the demand for recovered materials, Gross said there is still a market, particularly among companies interested in "green" materials. So far the company has recovered one million bricks and one million board feet of antique hard pine from the former factory.

He noted the factory had 61 foot-long pine beams in it.

The company started the process in January 2008. The mill had been built in 1881 and was a sprawling 200,000 square feet. It had long been abandoned and the new property owner wanted it removed. In this era of seeking non-polluting energy sources the old mill had a valuable feature -- working electrical turbines powered by the Connecticut River flowing through the lower canal.

One of the building's features was a 100,000-gallon exterior oil tank still filled with thousands of gallons of fuel oil. Gross said that his company had no expertise in removing the oil from the property, so he contracted ENPRO, a company based in Portland, Maine, that is certified for the removal of hazardous waste.

Sometime around May 8, 2008 something happened during the process of removing the oil. The result was about 2,000 gallons of fuel oil flowed from the tank into the boiler room. From there, the oil traveled through the plant into the turbine area and exited through the water outlet into the river.

Gross said he was told the actual amount that got into the river was about the size of a card table. Holyoke Gas & Electric personnel discovered the spill on May 8, 2008.

A cleanup was immediately started with Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) issuing Notices of Responsibility to both National Decon and ENPRO.

Gross' reaction was to take the necessary steps to clean up the spill and "figure [responsibility] out later." He hired Environmental Compliance Services of Agawam ad Western Massachusetts Environmental of West Springfield to work with his employees in undertaking the cleanup.

It was exacting handwork, he said, completed with vacuums and wire brushes. He said that a pinprick size drop of oil on a surface warranted a scrubbing then followed by a new coat of grout.

A series of barriers was placed in the channel leading to the river to keep the oil from flowing further. A portable dam then capped the channel.

Today the cleanup is nearly complete and National Decon is continuing its work. Final testing by DEP is days away, he said.

The oil spill caused a three to five month delay in the completion of the demolition, Gross said. Most of the mill has been removed and one major job remains the towering smokestack.

The cleanup cost gross $1.6 million and he has only partially paid the companies whom he hired. ENPRO and its insurance company, AIG, have not acknowledged any culpability in the case, according to Gross.

The two companies have their own explanations for the accident. Gross maintains that ENPRO, after heating the oil so it could be of a pumping consistency, had not sealed off the pipe that carried the oil to the boiler room.

"Before we went to court we spent a lot of money on forensic testing. I was convinced ENPRO's role in causing this oil release was very clear," Gross said.

Geoffrey Brown, vice president of ENPRO, declined to comment for this article, but did release the letter he sent to the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection dated May 16, 2008.

In it, he maintained the oil was released because "in February 2008, the boiler room building of the former facility was demolished by a demolition contractor. During the demolition of the boiler room, the four-inch feed and the two-inch feed return lines were cut off by the demolition contractor at the point at which the lines entered the former boiler room and were left uncapped and subsequently left buried under brick rubble."

The 2,000 gallons of oil came not from the tank they were cleaning, but from the pipes that hadn't been purged or capped before they were cut, Brown wrote in the letter.

Gross said, "Our reputation is at stake . that's the reason we're fighting this so hard."