Quote:
Originally Posted by coalminecanary
Not every square foot down there is going to be heavy metal. A lot of area would have been covered with parking lots, warehouses, storage yards etc... At any rate, we can't afford to simply write off these giant tracts of land as unusable...
|
I think this will be more the case. Certain areas will require massive remediation, but others much less. There would probably be soil removal of the worst spots with incineration of things like PCBs. Not sure if they would be able to put new buildings up in those areas without greater cleanup effort, or whether they'd just cap and pave them over to be preserved for surface uses.
We're talking about prime land within a busy port facility that has finite room to expand - basically some water lots are still being filled in at the eastern end, but USS has three large piers (16, 17, and 18). So if any of that pier space becomes available, there is a greater business case to do something. And land close to Burlington Street would be attractive as well.
It would still likely take a long time and a lot of money, requiring federal and provincial funding. Some Spec articles have noted it's 329 hectares in area and that's a huge chunk of real estate (I've also seen 445 ha - maybe that's the total and the 329 is just the parts being shut down?).
There must be case studies in Pittsburgh and other US cities we can compare to, but in Canada the
cleanup in Sydney, NS is supposed to cost $400 million and take 10 years, and that site is not even one-third the size. We don't have "tar ponds" to deal with (though I guess Randle Reef is our equivalent) and the industrial history isn't quite the same, but I'd think there will be similar remediation issues in Hamilton.