[CPEO-BIF] "Cottage cheese injections and electric shocks: Emeryville [California] attempts to reclaim toxic soil"

[Lenny Siegel <LSiegel@cpeo.org>]

Cottage cheese injections and electric shocks: Emeryville attempts to reclaim toxic soil
Industrial chemicals were dumped on city land for a century

By KATIE LAUER
Bay Area News Group
March 23, 2023

Emeryville is still digging itself out from under its industrial past.

For years, the city has cleaned up vast swaths of land contaminated by the scores of commercial warehouses that used to dominate the East Bay shoreline community. By the early 2000s, Emeryville earned a reputation as “one of the foulest industrial wastelands in the Bay Area,” according to one news outlet, which said the soil was “so toxic that anyone treading it had to wear a moon suit.”

In 2004, for instance, 15,000 gallons of cottage cheese was injected into the groundwater below an abandoned factory, cleaning up the toxic hexavalent chromium — a substance some have dubbed “the Erin Brockovich chemical” — that was produced while manufacturing car bumpers in the 1950s and ’60s.

This week, city officials kicked off the complex task of cleaning up roughly 78,000 square-feet of contaminated soil on another city-owned property just across the railroad tracks from the popular Bay Street Emeryville shopping center — which was also excavated before construction.

…

For the entire article, see
https://www.mercurynews.com/2023/03/23/cottage-cheese-injections-and-electric-shocks-emeryville-attempts-to-reclaim-toxic-soil/

—

Lenny Siegel
Executive Director
Center for Public Environmental Oversight
A project of the Pacific Studies Center
LSiegel@cpeo.org
P.O. Box 998, Mountain View, CA 94042
Voice/Fax: 650-961-8918
http://www.cpeo.org
Author: DISTURBING THE WAR: The Inside Story of the Movement to Get Stanford University out of Southeast Asia - 1965–1975 (See http://a3mreunion.org)

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