A carcinogenic threat has been lurking under the Chapel Hill Police Department for decades.
Now, with a recent public comment session, a draft legal agreement and two remediation options on the table, that might be changing.
“Something will very likely be decided about this agreement this fiscal year,” said John Richardson, Chapel Hill’s community sustainability manager.
Chapel Hill Town Council and several town departments have been collaborating with the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality for over a decade to develop a cleanup plan for hundreds of thousands of pounds of coal ash.
This ash, known to be hazardous to environmental and human health, has been sitting under the building at 828 MLK Jr. Blvd for almost 50 years.
Chapel Hill had no legal obligations to deal with the ash when they acquired the site in the early 1980s.
But now, following a 2013 environmental assessment confirming the presence of coal ash, Chapel Hill is obligated to act. The clean-up process is two-fold: First, Town Council and NCDEQ need to agree on how to remediate environmental damages. Then, Town Council needs to determine what, if anything, will be built on that land.
What has already been done?
Chapel Hill and NCDEQ removed a thousand tons of coal ash from the nearby Bolin Creek Trail in 2020.
NCDEQ also held a public comment meeting in September to hear feedback from residents and share details about the draft Brownfields Agreement. This agreement is a joint document between NCDEQ and Chapel Hill specifying future land use restrictions and clean-up options.
Every day, several people walk and run on the trail without knowledge of the 2020 cleanup, the nearby coal ash, or the decade-long series of assessments and public meetings about how to handle it.
Katrina Dobler, a 21-year-old student and resident of Chapel Hill, walks the trail multiple times a week. She said she didn’t think there had been a “public warning” about the coal ash.
Cindy Marsh, a 70-year-old who walks the trail every Monday and Friday with friends, didn’t know about the public comment meeting either.
“I don’t think they’re making it a big issue, apparently, if we don’t know anything about it.”
What are Chapel Hill’s options to get rid of the coal ash?
The first remediation option is to cap and cover the coal ash. This calls for building retaining walls and burying areas with visible coal ash under a layer of soil.
It also calls for removing all coal ash from the Bolin Creek Trail, a public greenway downhill from the contaminated site.
This option wouldn’t allow for housing developments on-site, according to the draft Brownfields Agreement. However, a municipal services center, recreational space, transit access station and parking would all be permitted.
This option costs between $1.5 million to $3.5 million, according to an estimate from Hart Hickman, an environmental consulting firm hired by the town.
The second option is full removal.
This means the cleanup crew would dig out all the coal ash and take it to another landfill.
Preferably, that location “is lined and has leachate collection, and is able to, obviously, take the ash and other materials and hold them safely,” said Richardson.
This option is significantly more expensive, in the ballpark of $13 million to $16 million.
Although full removal is pricey, it might open the site to more development options.
“I think if the town decided it wanted to do full removal, I’m not even sure we would need to do a brownfields agreement at that point because there’s no contamination,” Richardson said. “At that point, you’ve literally cleaned the site to where it’s a normal site again.”
Town Counciland NCDEQ will make concrete plans about what will be developed and how to pay for it after they decide what to do with the coal ash.
Whatever they decide, Chapel Hill will be spending millions of dollars to pay for this cleanup.
How did we get here?
The contaminated plot of land was privately owned for decades. In the 1950s and 60s, the site was used as a borrow pit where private organizations dug out materials like soil and rock.
In the late 1960s and 70s, the site was filled back in with a mix of soil, construction debris and coal combustion products like coal ash. The Town acquired the site in 1983 to construct the police department building that stands today.
“When the town acquired the site, there was an understanding that it was a fill site,” said John Richardson, the town’s community sustainability manager.
But Richardson said that wasn’t a legal issue to prior construction or land use because the landfill was “pre-regulatory” and therefore not subject to federal standards on toxic waste disposal.
Still, some state and federal statutes like the Clean Water Act would have applied to this site when the police station was built, according to Nick Torrey, a senior attorney at the Southern Environmental Law Center.
He said Chapel Hill authorities didn’t do their “due diligence” to see if the ash was a problem at the time, but now there’s “every reason to clean it up.”
“This is highly toxic industrial waste containing high levels of arsenic, mercury, lead and radioactivity that has been in an unlined pit on a steep slope where it’s eroding down above public Greenway and Creek,” Torrey said. “And so, you know, this is about as unsafe a situation as you could imagine.”
What about CHPD?
CHPD is unlikely to stay on the site because they recently signed a 15-year lease on Mill House Road.
This move is not because of coal ash concerns but because the “building is falling apart,” according to Chapel Hill Media Relations Manager Alex Carrasquillo.
“The fact that it’s a 15-year lease in the new space gives us some time to make some thoughtful decisions along with the community,” Carrasquillo said. “But, you know, I don’t know anything.”
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