A La Plata County contractor is working to clean up limited groundwater contamination near a closed landfill in Bayfield and at the La Plata County jail.
The contamination has been present for years in both cases, and it is not harming anyone. But required cleanup efforts are not expected to end soon, Tim Shangraw of Engineering Management Support Inc. told the La Plata County Commissioners on Wednesday.
In the case of the jail, the commissioners got an update on a phased approach to treating the solvents in the groundwater. A company that used to manufacture lenses for rifle scopes before the county bought the property for the jail left behind the contaminates.
The county sued Brown Group Retail Inc. to force the organization to clean the site. But the judge ruled the county should cover a quarter of the cleanup costs, leaving the Brown Group to cover 75 percent of remediation, said Sheryl Rogers, the county attorney. The county was held accountable for a chemical spill from an underground vault that cracked when it was being dug up by a county contractor, Rogers said.
Both the county and Brown Group are in agreement that a phased approach to drilling injection wells and monitoring their effectiveness is the best option, said Todd Weaver, deputy county attorney.
One of the main challenges for the contractor is working around the existing facilities.
“We don’t know exactly where the source is,” Shangraw said.
A precise cost estimate on the jail cleanup was not available, but Rogers told the commissioners the county has spent between $1 million and $2 million on the project, including legal costs.
The cost for just remediation currently is unknown; it could range from $2 to $6 million, Weaver said. That would be split with the Brown Group.
At the closed Bayfield landfill near County Road 223, the same contractor is continuing to monitor the levels of vinyl chloride that have seeped into the groundwater beneath a few nearby private properties.
Right now, the contractor has installed several pipes to vent vinyl chloride, an industrial chemical, from the well into the air. Once it gets into the atmosphere, it quickly breaks down, Weaver said.
“It’s not a fast system, but it typically is an effective system,” he said.
This type of contamination from old landfills is very common across the county, he said. To do a full reclamation of the site instead of the passive system, it could cost $40 million.
mshinn@durangoherald.com
