Contaminated soil at Su-Valley will cost $20,000 to remove

MAT-SU -- The Matanuska-Susitna Borough School District plans to include a $20,000 contaminated soil clean-up cost in its proposed bond package this fall. The contamination, located at the far corner of the Su-Valley Jr./Sr. High School parking lot, was discovered in the summer of 2001, when contractors were removing an underground power production tank from that location.

"It is not a large-scale spill," said the district's public information specialist Kim Floyd. "The spilled heating fuel does not impose an immediate threat, but that doesn't mean we don't want to clean it up as soon as possible."

In the meantime, the site is surrounded by an impermeable membrane, both below and above the soil, so it doesn't contaminate underlying soils. Floyd said that unless it is ingested in large quantities, the soil poses no danger. The spill itself was a result of an overfill of the tank while the tank was in operation; there is no way of knowing exactly when the spill occurred.

The discovery of the spill was the result of soil testing done when the tank was removed from the parking lot. The district removed approximately 25 underground tanks during the summers of 2000 and 2001, replacing them with 500-gallon, double-walled, above-ground steel tanks with protective spill guards. Each tank removal cost the district around $6,000, and the total cost of replacing the tanks will be no more than $200,000, Floyd said. Two of the sites did not receive new tanks, instead the district had them hooked up to the natural gas pipeline -- an even cheaper alternative to the above-ground tanks. The district changed over the tanks to comply with federal EPA regulations.

"Soil testing was done at all sites," Floyd said. The Su-Valley spill was the only one detected during the change-over. Only schools that do not have access to natural gas continue to use any type of fuel tanks.

The $20,000 will be used to hire a qualified contractor to remove the soil for disposal and remediation, a purifying process to remove the contaminates. If the bond package does not come to be, the district plans on finding other ways to pay for the removal of the soil.