CLEVELAND, Ohio – Cuyahoga County’s preferred site for a new jail will require some remediation and permanent prevention controls to ensure safe conditions for its future occupants, which the project’s environmental consultant says is not unusual for Cleveland-area redevelopment and nothing to worry about, but some opponents say history would disagree.

John T. Garvey, vice president of Partners Environmental Consulting, Inc., walked cleveland.com through the results of the county’s recently released 338-page environmental study to explain what it says about present conditions at 2700 Transport Road – currently home to Universal Intermodel Services’ shipping container logistics center – and what type of cleanup is required to use it as the site for a new jail.

He elaborated on details previously reported from the study’s executive summary, which showed the county would need to maintain a clean soil cap to prevent exposure to petroleum deposits in the soil, restrict groundwater usage as already required in the city of Cleveland, and install vapor mitigation systems to prevent unwanted gases from entering the building or accumulating beneath it.

Those actions have become relatively routine for any redevelopment project in Cleveland, Garvey said, and have been used elsewhere with success.

“This is not a scary property,” Garvey said. “Petroleum concerns are some of the most routine things that we deal with and there are sound engineering control practices that are employed every day throughout the state, throughout the country to address these kinds of things.”

If that were the case, however, then why wasn’t the land remediated for residential use in the first place, wonders Paul Wright, founder and executive director of the Human Rights Defense Center and editor of the prisoner rights publication Prison Legal News. Wright said he’s seen too many examples of toxic waste dumps being turned into warehouses for poor and minority communities to detrimental effect.

He spoke of the Avenal and Pleasant Valley State Prisons in California’s Central Valley where inmates have died from valley fever, an infection caused by inhalation of a soil-borne fungus. New York City pledged to close the Rikers Island jail, which was built on a toxic waste landfill, following multiple methane gas explosions and several lawsuits in which prison staff alleged adverse health effects from the environmental conditions, but it remains open while a new jail is being built. And prisoners at the Fayette State Correctional Institution in Pennsylvania were reporting higher rates of respiratory issues and cancer that they believed resulted from breathing in coal dust from the dump site next door.

Wright quoted an analysis by Truthout that said, based on geographic information for state and federal prisons from 2010, “at least 589 federal and state prisons are located within three miles of a Superfund cleanup site on the National Priorities List, with 134 of those prisons located within just one mile.”

Yet, governments continue to build jails or prisons on those types of sites “because there is little else to do with such land,” Wright said.

“If government officials think the land is so safe now, why aren’t they building their own government offices on it or residential housing? I think the answer is obvious: no one given a choice will live there,” Wright said. “The actual track record of prisons and jails built on toxic waste dumps is pretty bad, and I don’t see anything to make anyone think this would somehow be any different.”

Remediation

The preferred site in question, sandwiched between the Cuyahoga River and Broadway Avenue just south of downtown, was once part of a former Standard Oil refinery found to be riddled with potentially hazardous chemicals.

Previous reporting by the Plain Dealer dating back to the 1980s noted there a number of chemicals and solvents used in making gasoline and asphalt on the property, as well as the possible presence of PCBs, a highly toxic industrial compound that can cause developmental and neurological problems in children. But recent tests this summer showed conditions have changed in the last four decades.

There are higher than accepted levels of Total Petroleum Hydrocarbons (TPH) – hundreds of chemicals found in crude oil -- in the soil and groundwater, but Garvey says there is little to no scientific study to say they pose a potential health risk. But, as a precaution, he recommended maintaining a clean soil cap to prevent direct contact.

Everyone is exposed to TPH compounds to some degree when they pump gas, clean up oil spills on the driveway or use other household chemicals, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention website says, but potential health effects depend on the type of compound, dosage and level of exposure. Still, “there are no regulations or advisories specific to TPH” the website says.

Most of the volatile components the CDC does regulate “are at fairly low levels,” Garvey said. “The only thing that we have there that is of concern from a risk standpoint is benzene,” he said.

According to the CDC, benzene is the only TPH compound known to be carcinogenic. It is absorbed rapidly through inhalation or ingestion and may cause central nervous system depression and arrhythmias in people who are acutely exposed, the CDC’s website says. Longer-term exposure may cause anemia, alterations to the immune system, and leukemia.

The toxin was found in the property’s groundwater, which Partners said in its report is not a concern for ingestion because the city of Cleveland and an environmental covenant already prohibits its use for drinking water. However, the report notes precautions should be taken to protect construction workers who may encounter groundwater on the job.

Potential inhalation can also be prevented by installing a vapor barrier – like a spray-on substance or a plastic liner – under the building, Garvey said. He also recommends installing a pipe beneath the jail that would pull vapors from underground and discharge them above the jail’s roof, where they will be further diluted.

That strategy would also help alleviate any concerns of methane gas pooling beneath the building, Garvey said.

While methane is not considered a hazardous substance, it is a flammable and potentially explosive gas under specific conditions. Recent testing showed methane levels at the property were at the lower range of explosive risk, which Garvey said is not usual as crude oil and other organic chemicals continue to biodegrade. There was also no indication of pressure building from the gas, he said, but a vapor mitigation system would help prevent that from ever becoming a concern.

The systems are installed in 90% of the projects Partners’ works on and “are becoming routine on brownfield redevelopment sites,” Garvey said, comparing the process to a large-scale radon reduction system that some people use at their homes. They’re especially common in projects in California and Texas, he said, given their histories of oil production.

While the study cautions that the conclusions and remediation recommendations were based on a limited number of samples and “may not be indicative of conditions in areas of the property not evaluated by Partners,” Garvey said he is confident that his report reflects the work to be done and doesn’t expect any surprises later.

He agreed with the conclusion drawn by the project’s main consultant, Jeff Appelbaum, that the county can safely place a jail at the site.

“Absolutely,” Garvey said. “This is normal urban redevelopment.”