The KPly remediation work will come to a halt this week due to recent excessive rainfall. The Port of Port Angeles’ contractor, Engineering / Remediation Resources Group, Inc. (ERRG), will resume the remediation operations in the summer of 2016 once the site has dried out.
Soil saturated with water in the excavation site won’t allow for the clean fill to be compacted properly. If the fill is not compacted properly, settlement issues could arise later when the site is redeveloped into a marine trades industrial park. “Everybody involved in the project wanted to see it finished, but to continue to work the site during poor weather would have done more harm than good”, said Chris Hartman, the Port’s Director of Engineering.
ERRG has removed all of contaminated soil from the KPly site since beginning work in August of 2015. ERRG removed 53,766 tons or 3,360 16 ton dump trucks worth of soil contaminated with gas, diesel and hydraulic oil. The contaminated soil was hauled by truck to Bremerton where it was placed on railcars destined for lined landfills in central Oregon.
After the contaminated soil was removed, ERRG began backfilling the 13 foot deep excavation site with clean fill. Approximately 19,000 tons of crushed concrete from the Elwha Dam removal projects provided clean fill for this project. ERRG has completed about half of the backfilling process to date and has about 3 to 4 weeks’ worth of work left to complete in mid-2016.