No more moonscape

Until 2004, the old Southern Pacific rail yard across the tracks from Alkali Flat and downtown Sacramento was a mystery. Then Seventh Street was punched through and extended north via an underpass, connecting the industrial area along Richards Boulevard with downtown; it now traverses a barren moonscape heretofore unfamiliar to most local residents.

On this pleasant spring day, that moonscape is a busy place.

Just west of Seventh Street, beyond the railroad tracks that separate the rail yard from downtown, a full-scale version of how schoolboys, before video games, used to amuse themselves on sandlots with Tonka trucks is taking place. A bulldozer shears off the corner of a mound; a water truck wets the newly torn earth to mitigate airborne dust; a giant backhoe scoops a chunk of earth and dumps into the cargo hold of a tractor-trailer, four scoops per trailer, as a line of trucks awaits.

It appears to be the only current activity on the site, which Cal-EPA Department of Toxic Substances Control acting deputy director Stewart W. Black called crucial to the state’s focus on recovering abandoned industrial land. “I believe this is the largest brownfield in the state,” he said, “and one of the largest in the country.”

But that’s about to change.

On April 23, a groundbreaking ceremony was held near the water tower, east of the massive locomotive repair structure that still stands across the tracks north of downtown, to mark the beginning of infrastructure development on the 244-acre site by Atlanta-based Thomas Enterprises, the company that purchased the rail-yard site from Union Pacific in December of 2006.

The first phase will involve moving the railroad tracks north from their current location, which parallels H Street before turning north before Seventh Street; Fifth and Sixth Streets will be extended north, and a new Railyards Boulevard—roughly aligned with C Street to its east—will be built. After that, depending upon the speed of economic recovery, will come a massive construction project that will double the size of downtown.

The cleanup cost—estimated at $100 million—was borne by the site’s owners, with the DTSC named as the point agency, as per Assembly Bill 2061, which allows the California Environmental Protection Agency to designate one state or local body to oversee a project.

As Fernando Amador, the DTSC unit chief/supervisor assigned to the project, put it, the site is now shovel-ready. It’s taken over two decades, since the DTSC began its oversight of the rail-yard site, to arrive at this point.

According to Paul Carpenter, the DTSC hazardous substances engineering geologist overseeing the rail-yard job, the cleanup effort was structured to address three areas of concern: soil, groundwater and soil vapor. The first area, soil, has been completed; some 800,000 cubic yards of contaminated earth was trucked out to a hazardous waste site in Utah; contaminants included lead, asbestos, cadmium, beryllium, volatile and semi-volatile organic compounds, fuel oil contaminants, anthracene and chrysene—the result of on-site activity beginning in 1865, over a period where management and workers were not quite as concerned with environmental pollution as we are today.

“As of three weeks ago,” Carpenter said, “we’ve opened up about 180 acres of the site for infrastructure development, so that’s a huge accomplishment. In terms of groundwater, we’re still getting the final remedies in place. I guess those are going to take decades, but right now we’re working through our regulatory process to identify the remedies, so that’s ongoing. As for soil gas, they’re performing studies and looking at engineering measures to prevent any exposures on site.”

While soil-contaminant removal needed to be accomplished prior to construction—“Outside of the central shops area, for the most part the soils have been cleaned up to the levels that would allow infrastructure to begin,” Amador said—the groundwater and soil-vapor issues are to be addressed during the construction process.

“The old way of thinking may have been, you’ve got to clean all three of them up before anyone can set foot on the site,” Carpenter explained. “That helps no one.”