[CPEO-BIF] Housing at former Pacific Refinery site, Contra Costa County, California

[Lenny Siegel <LSiegel@cpeo.org>]

Is this East Bay refinery-turned-housing-development a model for reclaiming contaminated sites?
Contra Costa County officials take a hard look at what will happen if remaining area refineries close

By KATIE LAUER
Bay Area News Group
May 2, 2024 


HERCULES - On the surface, Victoria by the Bay is a charming neighborhood of 926 homes only a short walk from the shores of San Pablo Bay.

But the ground beneath the roughly 200-acre development was once home to the former Pacific Refinery Co., a facility built in 1966 that produced 55,000 barrels of oil daily and stored other hazardous substances in the northernmost corner of Hercules, adjacent to Rodeo. Amid a bleak economic outlook for the fossil fuel industry at the time, the facility was decommissioned in the summer of 1995, and demolished not long after.

It was replaced by a plan to transform its contaminated “brownfield” land into the residential subdivision that was completed in 2003 - a vision of coastal-view homes and preserved greenspace that required extensive remediation of the soil and groundwater that had been polluted there over three decades.

…

For the entire article, see
https://www.mercurynews.com/2024/05/02/is-this-east-bay-refinery-turned-housing-development-a-model-for-reclaiming-contaminated-sites

—

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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