(Courtesy of ADEC)

By December, Sand Point should be able to close the book on a five-year cleanup project at the abandoned quarry. That’s when the last few barrels of hazardous waste will be put on a boat, and shipped out of town, says city manager Paul Day. 

"And when I say hazardous, it wasn’t nuclear — it’s just stuff that we can’t dispose of locally," Day says. "We can’t burn it. So it had to be shipped out of Sand Point for disposal."

The city never intended for its quarry to become a public dumping ground. It was supposed to be the site of a city program to junk old cars. To do that, they needed to drain the used oil and antifreeze. Sand Point stored that liquid in drums, which were set on top of impermeable liners to protect the soil.

"That’s where we dropped the ball," Day says. "We left them sitting on that liner for a number of years — four or five years. It was one of those [things]: ‘We’re going to get around to getting those drums cleaned up and out of town one of these days.’ Well, that just never happened."

The liners didn’t hold, and the drums started leaking toxic liquid into the ground. For seven years, the dumping continued: Private citizens snuck into the quarry to use the drums, and local marine vessels joined in, offloading dirty oil.

By the time the Department of Environmental Conservation started investigating, they were dealing with 120 leaky drums of oil, fuel, and antifreeze. They ordered Sand Point to clean the site in 2007.

John Brown, with the DEC, says the pollution wasn’t nearly as bad as it could have been. 

"The city’s drinking water storage facility is just down the road, almost a mile," says Brown. "We wanted to make sure there [were] no impacts to the water quality there. The city had already been testing a lot for those types of things, anyway. The city was on top of that."

Day says the contamination was limited to a small area.

"The actual site that had the drum problem was smaller than half a football field," says Day. "Besides the drums that were cleaned up, all the material, all the contaminated gravels and soil that we could scrape up has now been put onto a liner and covered."

The contaminated soil should break down safely in those new containers. The city was also able to recycle a significant amount of used oil to heat municipal buildings.

Brown says the DEC isn’t going to fine the city for the pollution. But they have made Sand Point pay for the entire cleanup — including site visits and testing by the DEC. Over the past five years, that’s come to about $200,000.

Sand Point co-owns the quarry with the Shumagin Corporation, but Day says the city decided not to ask them to split the bills. The car disposal program was the city’s idea, and Day says it was in the public’s interest to clean the site as fast as possible.

Sand Point has paid off the cleanup as costs arose, and they won’t take on any debt as a result.