You may be wondering why the Billy Evan’s (replacement) bridge – located on Rt.2 in North Adams MA, has had a delayed construction completion. For those of you unfamiliar with this location, the bridge is adjacent West’s package store on Rt. 2, (aka State Road).
First, during the bridge re-construction process, new steel beams were placed on an existing concrete center pier. Unfortunately, the weight of the new beams was too much for the old pier to support, thus, the beam structure sank a few inches. Clearly, there was a need to re-design the new bridge to create a new pier to support the added beam weight. Months of design time and money allocation time rolled-by and eventually the old pier was (partially) disassembled – to make room for the new pier. Unfortunately, during the old pier removal process, an oily sheen began burping-up from the stream bed – which triggered water sampling to characterize the pollution – to better understand the local water toxicity and how to mitigate it. Interestingly, under State law, (specifically 310 CMR 40.317 – paragraph 12), the Massachusetts Department of Transportation is exempt from working with or reporting to the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection if pollution comes from pier structures. (An odd exemption). Thus, the environmental sampling, testing and mitigation is overseen by an independent Massachusetts’ Licensed Site Professional (LSP) known (on this site) as Strategic Environmental Services. In this case, the water sampling discovered volatile organic compounds (VOCs), semi-volatile compounds(semi-VOCs) and (low level) heavy metals. No PCBs or pesticides were detected. Thus, now knowing the pollutants and their concentration, pollution control equipment was designed to strip/clean the water column of the pollutants – before discharging the waters back into the Hoosic River. The hardware installed on site includes; multiple pumps, water collection piping, basic tank filters – to remove large particles, tank filters of anion flocculant – to remove metals, activated carbon – to capture VOC & semi-VOCs. The pollution control unit is in operation now – and is expected (as a guess) to be active for 3 months. Partial installation of the new pier is to be done in parallel with this schedule – before deep winter sets-in. As an added note, the LSP does not believe the defunct Gibbs gas station or the former Cariddi mill pollution is affecting the on-site conditions.
HooRWA will continue to monitor this pollution mitigation process to better ensure the river is being protected – to the extent possible and plausible.
Andrew Kawczak, President, HooRWA
NOTE: HooRWA is testing for PFAS and heavy metals upstream and downstream of this site. We should have the results from UMASS in a month.