CREST HAVEN – At the Oct. 8 freeholder caucus, Freeholder Director Gerald Thornton questioned a resolution to award $97,500 to Tetra Tech, Inc. for engineering and licensed site remediation services at the Cape May County Airport.
The resolution was approved during the regular meeting.
“Didn’t we put an amount on that project before,” Thornton asked Acting County Engineer Robert Church. “We did,” replied Church. He said Nancy Mauro, director of the Engineering Department, could provide more detail.
Mauro noted three items surfaced that were out of the original scope of the project.
One item, according to Mauro, was a leak at the fuel farm from a 30-year-old, above-ground, single-walled pipe. The pipe leaked and soil was removed in June 2018, she said.
The pipe was replaced in April 2019. “It’s underground, it’s double walled, and it’s monitored, so should there be a leak it’s contained.”
When putting in the new pipe, Mauro said, “They found that there was contamination underneath the concrete pad at the fuel island from leaking dispensers.” That side of the island was remediated (there are two sides) “because that’s where the new piping was going. On the other side of the island, we knew there was contamination. We had to delineate that,” she continued, “so, the $32,750 for the county fuel farm is to excavate, remediate, and restore the fuel island.”
The contamination underneath the fuel island was unforeseen, said Mauro. “The fuel island has been fixed, the dispensers have been fixed, it’s just a matter now of completing that other side of the fuel island,” she added.
Another item that surfaced was the disposal of the Imhoff tank, an above-ground, naval-era, open-air septic tank. The tank accounts for $45,250 of the award, $44,000 of which is for disposal costs, said Mauro.
“It’s had 60 years worth of sludge in there, and because it was connected to other buildings in the airport, people would just dump things down the drain,” said Mauro. “This sludge is not normal sludge.”
When it came time to remediate the sludge, which was contaminated with heavy metals, gasoline, etc., Mauro said, “We could not find a place to take it because the sludge was too contaminated to take it to a wastewater treatment plant.” Soil facilities said it was too wet, according to Mauro, “because it had liquid in it. It was open air, it had rainwater in it.”
According to Mauro, the solution, which took a year to figure out, is “that we’re taking soil from the drying beds, incorporating it into the sludge to solidify it, adding lime to it per the disposal facility in Pennsylvania, that’s for vector control, and then that solid sludge has been removed offsite.”
Adding the drying-bed soil to the sludge increased the disposal volume, “so that was an unforeseen cost,” said Mauro.
The good news, according to Mauro, is the tank is made out of concrete. “There was concern that below the sludge line, because it was sitting there for 60 years, that the concrete would’ve absorbed some of the contaminants, and that would be a disposal cost, as a contaminated cost, for the county. I just found out that the concrete has been tested, and it’s clean so that concrete can be recycled.”
The last item that surfaced was an increased cost to investigate the northern part of the airport. “There are a lot of wetlands there,” said Mauro. “An investigation in that area is not only subject to normal remediation requirements, but ecological standards as well, and that has increased the cost because additional testing is required because of the ecological standards that have to be met, and also more samples have to be taken, and then you also have to evaluate the species in the area, and then determine if there’s contaminants, how the species would be affected by that contaminant, and how you would have to remediate it.”
Thornton said that he understood the contamination from the Navy, “but that other contamination there wasn’t caused by the Navy.”
“The Imhoff tank,” asked Mauro. “Yes,” replied Thornton.
“It (Imhoff tank) was connected to all those old naval buildings,” said Mauro. “It was the Navy’s septic system for the airport back then, so we can’t really say who or how it was there because it’s been there so long.”
Thornton asked if the entire award was for the naval contamination. Mauro said that it was.
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