Utah firm to aid West Concord cleanup
Office will open at Superfund site
A Utah company will set up a field office early next month at
The project is slated to be completed by March 31, 2006. It had been scheduled to start in March of this year and to be wrapped up seven months later, but negotiations over costs forced the timetable to be moved back.
The issue was an increase in the original cost estimate from $5.2 million to $8.3 million, reflected by two out-of-state contractors' bids. State officials then had to ask the US Army to pick up the revised tab. The Army's involvement stems from the manufacture by Starmet's predecessor company, Nuclear Metals Inc., of uranium-tipped bullets from 1970 to 1999 for military use.
The Army's agreement early last month to pay for the additional costs set in motion final contract talks between the state Department of Environmental Protection and Envirocare of Utah Inc., one of the two contractors that submitted bids. The name of the other contractor has not been revealed.
On Aug. 10, the department issued a notice to proceed to Envirocare, which is based in Salt Lake City. The company is already familiar with the Starmet property and will establish a field office around Sept. 5, as the environmental protection department has requested, said Johnny Bowne, director of business development.
When it arrives next month, Envirocare will first verify the number of barrels of uranium stored in Starmet buildings and then send out samples of what's in the barrels to laboratories for analysis, Bowne said. After that, he said, the contents of the barrels will be packaged securely and taken to the company's uranium-disposal facility near Salt Lake City.
This was greeted as overdue but very encouraging news by a leader of a Concord activist group that has been closely monitoring the Starmet site since June 2001 when it went on the US Environmental Protection Agency's list of the nation's most contaminated properties.
''The removal of the barrels will remove a potential [public health] threat" and speed up the Superfund [cleanup] process, said James West of Concord, technical assistance coordinator of the Citizens Research and Environmental Watch group. It has a $50,000 technical assistance grant from the EPA.
Environmental officials have emphasized that the barrels of depleted uranium in Starmet buildings do not constitute a danger because they are guarded 24 hours a day.
In another development, the project manager for a company conducting a remedial investigation of the site said work will begin in October on obtaining additional soil samples and seven more monitoring wells to the 99 spots that are already at the site.
Bruce Thompson of De Maximis Inc. said some surface soil samples have revealed some uranium, which, he added, ''is not unusual," given the nature of the work that had been done for the Army. ''But we'll want to go deeper in the soil, looking for uranium," he said. ''And, of course, we'll be keeping abreast of the work that Envirocare will be doing."
The company is evaluating air, soil, and ground-water data on behalf of the Army and four other parties cited by the EPA in 2003 for contaminating the Starmet property. The others are the US Department of Energy, Whittaker Corp. of Simi Valley, Calif., 
