Petaluma River cleanup kicks off
Junk and abandoned boats removed; no hazardous waste found.
Philip Riley
Petaluma 360.com
06/10/2011
Since work started last week to clean the Petaluma River of abandoned boats and other refuse, crews have already cleared much of the junk off the river in the areas closest to town.
So far, no surprises have come in hazardous materials testing on the waste, but crews expect to know more as the work continues in the next few weeks and toxicity reports come in.
“There is nothing exotic, nothing that’s going to change our (expected) waste stream,” said Will Duncan, in charge of the project for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Emergency Response section.
The focus of much of the work so far has been an 80-foot barge near the Shamrock cement plant. Crews brought in a 290-ton crane to pick a truck camper, trailers, tires, and a fragile 55-gallon drum of oil off the wooden barge. The “floating junkyard” has been on the river since the 1920s, but the owner died recently before cleaning the barge of items he had collected over the years.
“It’s pretty standard stuff you’d expect to find from these hoarders on the river,” said Todd Thalhamer of state agency CalRecycle, who said 160 cubic yards of wood and other waste and the same amount of metal have been collected so far.
Starting last Thursday, crews from CalRecycle started picking boats and other items out of the river near the Highway 101 bridge. This week, the EPA began its work to analyze hazardous waste that may be left behind after the junk is removed, including engine oil, lead paints, and toxic fluids. In the coming weeks, both CalRecycle and EPA crews will work their way down the river to the Highway 37 bridge in Novato, where the project’s scope ends.
