By Katie Kieker and Serdar Tumgoren
Gilroy
– In a quirky twist to South County Housing’s plans to restore
the old, decrepit cannery site into a mixed-use development, an
old, decrepit rail tanker car was found buried underneath part of
the slated 12-acre property and needs to be unearthed.
By Katie Kieker and Serdar Tumgoren
Gilroy – In a quirky twist to South County Housing’s plans to restore the old, decrepit cannery site into a mixed-use development, an old, decrepit rail tanker car was found buried underneath part of the slated 12-acre property and needs to be unearthed.
South County project manager Nancy Wright said it is fairly likely there is diesel fuel lurking underneath the tanker, but she does not anticipate it will cause problems.
The former owners of the Gilroy Canning Co. completed almost all of the site’s cleanup when the business shut down in 1997, Wright said. Additionally, she said, diesel is a “well-behaved” substance that doesn’t seep into groundwater.
South County is applying for a $75,000 grant from the Environmental Protection Agency that would fund the removal and remediation of the tanker, as well as backfilling the hole and hiring an environmental consultant to test the soil, Wright said.
The tanker is located underneath the southwest quadrant of the 12-acre site South County plans to develop, near the west side of Lewis Street and the north side of Monterey Street. That area is slated for offices with residential units rising above, Wright said.
Working to remove the tanker is just one more step in the site’s redevelopment, Wright said. The final product will include 200 residential units, an office and retail complex.
“This is part of our due diligence,” Wright said. “We’ve been working on this acquisition for over a year now … We’re just really putting all of our best into the project.”
Back in the 1920s and 30s, it was common to use rail tanker cars as storage tanks for diesel fuel, so the fact that this one is buried here isn’t all that uncommon, Wright said. She spoke with a number of people at an EPA conference in St. Louis in September who said they also had dealt with buried tankers, especially in the Midwest.
Apparently, a number of tankers were buried underneath the site. But when the state’s underground storage tank program went into effect about 15 years ago, it required companies to remediate any gasoline storage tanks they stored underground.
“Everybody had to go out and dig up their old tanks and replace them with non-leaking tanks,” Wright said.
In the 1990s, the Gilroy Canning Co. removed and remediated two conventional gasoline storage tanks. But workers decided to clean up a third tank and leave it in intact underground.
The Central Coast Regional Water Quality Control Board in San Luis Obispo gave the company a closure letter stating it had fulfilled requirements to clean the tanker in order for it to be left underground, Wright said.
Until the tanker is dug up, no one knows what’s inside or how it looks. But Wright said she has heard rumors about it’s condition, including that its wheels were removed and it was filled with a substance such as concrete or sand.
The application for the grant is due tomorrow. Recipients will be announced in April with funds available in September or October. Wright said the process of extracting the tanker is not expected to delay the project’s completion in late 2007.
The bulk of the grant will go toward removing the tank, although some of it will fund testing the soil. The Santa Clara Valley Water District would oversee the tanker’s extraction and advise any subsequent steps, Wright said. Most likely, a contractor would cut the tanker into chunks and dispose of it.
“We just want to be absolutely certain there are no remaining issues at the site before we begin redeveloping it,” she said.
The grant is part of the Brownfield Cleanup Act, which allows organizations to request up to $200,000 to fund cleanup of dilapidated sites that detract from economic opportunity because they just sit there for years on end, Wright said.
“There are sites all over the country like the cannery, where there’s a perception of contamination,” Wright said. “The government – especially the current administration, our governor and the president – have made it a high priority to fund these situations so these sites don’t sit there being an economic downturn. The point is to get them back into use for vibrant activity.”
