Metamorphosis on Main Street: Superfund site’s progress

A pack of appointed town panelists trudged past radioactive warning signs at the 2229 Main Street Superfund site. 

“Don’t take home any free samples,” Land Use Working Group member Keith Bergman joked. 

After more than 20 years of work, crews are making progress in their cleanup of the highly contaminated parcel. Town officials are entering a new phase in their reuse conversations. 

And on the periphery, some marvel at the vibrant ecosystems that still flourish. 

“It’s a big, open space,” Select Board member Paul Boehm said in a debriefing days after the working group’s mid-August walkthrough. “You can put anything there.”

Security and safety

The land at 2229 Main Street has a long and radioactive history as the site of depleted uranium manufacturing. In 2011, its last owners — Starmet Corp. — declared bankruptcy and abandoned the polluted parcel.

Bruce Thompson from De Maximus, an environmental project management firm, said he remembers the November day when Starmet handed over the keys. 

He said he and a colleague scrambled to find a flashlight as night fell, he told The Acton Bridge. They ended up exploring the site by the light of their phones. 

Thompson said they found half-full coffee cups in offices. They also smelled something “hot and electrical” — and raced to turn off every circuit breaker and light they could find. 

“We can’t have a fire on our first night,” he remembered thinking. 

“Everything in the building was contaminated,” Thompson said — including rooms full of computer monitors that the owners opted to stash rather than jettison. 

As cleanup got underway and workers demolished the buildings, crews added heavy security to defend thousands of pounds of copper from thieves. “We didn’t need contaminated copper leaving the site,” Thompson previously told the working group. 

Now, he said, “There’s not much that people bother with.” 

Pin flags and wildflowers

The Land Use Working Group formed over the summer and visited 2229 Main as part of a tour of Acton properties that could be redeveloped. Before this trip, they walked the old MCI-Acton prison, as well as the town’s failing public safety and public works facilities. The group also toured the vacant Peabody School.

In a trailer office at 2229 Main, a sign featured a photo of Homer Simpson — glowing from a cartoon radiation mishap — and a reminder to staff to practice radiological safety. 

Outside, colorful pin flags dotted the rocky landscape, marking spots where crews checked the soil for toxins. When samples turn up contaminants, Thompson said, workers remove another three feet of dirt and test again. 

Workers are checking debris for radioactive material, asbestos, and industrial chemicals known as polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs. Thompson said crews fill roughly 15 dump trucks per day. Those go to Worcester, where the cargo is loaded onto trains. 

The team finished cleaning one section of the 46-acre property’s southwest flank. They laid topsoil and sprayed the area with wildflower seeds. Now, the field is an oasis of color amid the dirt and sand. 

Major cleanup efforts will continue at 2229 Main Street for several years. If the town or a developer wants to build immediately, Thompson said, his team could leave the area as a level lot with no new topsoil or plantings. If the site lies vacant, he said, they will likely spray seed mix, “just to keep it from being a dust bowl.” 

‘Boots on the ground’

Walking past misting guns set up to control dust, Thompson said that having “boots on the ground is vital” to understand a site like 2229 Main. 

The Land Use Working Group is mulling what to do with police, fire, and public works headquarters. The group is also considering consolidating municipal office space. As site visits continued, co-Chair Sven Weber said “We’re trying to get, as fast as possible, all the information together.”

Boehm wasn’t at the Superfund walkthrough but is well-versed in site happenings as the former chair of the 2229 Main Street Advisory Task Force. He’s now part of the Land Use Working Group in addition to his Select Board gig. 

The advisory task force recommended that the town enter negotiations potentially to acquire the Superfund site. Boehm said those talks were just starting last month and that the Select Board will decide the parcel’s fate over the next few years. Crews expect to continue soil removal until 2029.

During a recent working group meeting, Boehm raised the possibility of a new Department of Public Works campus on the property. With Public Works Director Alan Cathcart in the audience, he joked, “I’m not going to make eye contact with Alan and say that.”

Some have considered trying to attract new businesses to 2229 Main. However, Land Use Working Group member Mark Martines said real estate brokers have told him “it’s just not the place for commercial development.” 

Communication concerns

Bergman said he doesn’t want housing on the site: “The branding would be awful to say, ‘Hey, this is a contaminated waste site; come live here.’” 

Boehm, pushed back, later elaborating to The Bridge that there are areas worth avoiding. For example, crews are building 90-foot walls from the surface to bedrock around an old, unlined holding basin. Workers will cap the area, and future site users should avoid building on that spot.

Boehm said there are also “tens of acres that are clean.”

“We have to have risk communication to the public so they don’t think that there’s nuclear waste all over the site, because there isn’t,” he said.

Back on the property, Thompson acknowledged much of the pollution was legal when it happened. When crews excavated drums of waste, he said, he found an Atomic Energy Commission authorization letter giving the site owner permission to entomb them.

The work continues; he said these are “almost generational projects.” 

There will be an environmental monitoring and maintenance presence on the site even after Thompson retires and after its redevelopment. 

“My goal is to get it through the big construction,” he said. 

At 62, he said, “I’ve got time.”