PORT ANGELES — The environmental cleanup of Rayonier Inc.’s former pulp mill site may by the end of summer be directed by a new agreement intended to put the slow-moving restoration process into a higher gear.
That agreement, known as an “agreed order,” would define a study area where the state Department of Ecology and Rayonier have agreed cleanup will take place.
Ecology and the company disagree over the extent of the entire cleanup site, and the study area is intended to allow further cleanup to occur before that issue is resolved.
Rayonier and Ecology have this month begun to discuss a draft agreement, and negotiations are intended to be complete around September, said Rebecca Lawson, regional manager for Ecology’s toxics cleanup program.
A public comment period on the new agreement would follow.
The study area encompasses the 75-acre Rayonier property in northeast Port Angeles and a section of Port Angeles Harbor that extends about a mile northeast from the shore.
The Rayonier property is contaminated with pockets of PCBs, dioxin, arsenic and other toxins left by the pulp mill, which operated there for 68 years before closing in 1997.
It has been an Ecology cleanup site since 2000.
During that same year, the federal Environmental Protection Agency called the site “moderately contaminated,” perhaps 2 or 3 on a scale of 10.
Cleanup is scheduled to be complete in 2012.
So far, Rayonier has spent $25 million on interim cleanup actions on the property, said Rayonier CEO Lee Thomas on Tuesday.
Whether the cleanup site will extend beyond the study area depends on whether Rayonier is found to be responsible for contamination of soil off its property and other portions of the harbor.
Results of the harbor study and from soil sampling around Port Angeles that both occurred last year may provide that answer.
The results of both studies will be released for public review by the end of the year, Lawson said.
Initially, those results were going to be released in late spring, but that process has been delayed.
The soil sampling outside of the property found that 40 of 85 samples were above Ecology’s residential cleanup level of dioxin, which is 11 parts per trillion.
Ecology has not concluded whether the former Rayonier mill is to blame. The study, Ecology staff said, does not determine the extent of contamination for the properties tested and therefore does not require cleanup or even further testing.
The new agreed order would also direct Rayonier to fill in data gaps in soil and water testing that the company has conducted and replace the two existing agreed orders that pertain to the marine environment near the property and the former mill property itself.
Agreed orders bind a polluter to investigate contaminates and, typically, develop options for cleanup.
The current agreed order pertaining to the property itself requires both, but the agreement on the marine area of the potential cleanup site doesn’t require a cleanup plan to be developed.
The new agreed order would require cleanup plans to be developed for the entire study area.
The new agreed order would also differ from the two in place because the current agreements attempt to define the extent of the entire cleanup site rather than a study area.
Since the new agreement would require data gaps to be filled in and an evaluation of cleanup options for the study area, Lawson said it would allow the nine-year-old cleanup project to complete the search for contaminates in the study area and take a step toward finishing the cleanup itself in about three years.
The data gaps would be filled in by incorporating some marine sediment testing that Ecology did last summer as part of the separate, but connected, project to cleanup Port Angeles Harbor by 2020 and by Rayonier doing more studies on the former mill property.
“[The agreement] would take those reports they prepared and incorporate some additional data and resubmit those, and our hope is that collectively, the upland and marine reports would define the extent of contamination in the study area,” Lawson said in a May interview.
With the property itself, part of the additional studying involves how underground water on the property seeps into the harbor and contributes to its contamination, said Ecology’s Rayonier cleanup site manager, Marian Abbett, in May.
“From my perspective, we are making sure that we don’t miss something,” she said.
“Both upland and marine areas are connected. When you get focused on one rather than the other, you forget that there is a connection.”
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Reporter Tom Callis can be reached at 360-417-3532 or at tom.callis@peninsuladailynews.com.
