City Light to start cleanup work at Dakota Substation site tomorrow

| Environment | Genesee Hill | West Seattle news

Alert for Genesee Hill residents – cleanup work starts tomorrow at the former Dakota Substation. This is one of the “surplus” ex-substation sites whose fate has yet to be decided. Here’s the official announcement we received:

Seattle City Light will start work this week to cleanup the former substation located at 4918 SW Dakota Street. The work is expected to take approximately 2-3 weeks to complete. Planned work will remove soil, debris and some vegetation due to contamination. Pesticide contamination at the site is many times higher than the state’s required cleanup level. This work will not involve planned electrical outages.

Removal of soils in treed areas of the property is necessary; however, City Light plans to preserve the trees in these areas. To protect tree roots, City Light will use vactor trucks to remove the contaminated soil. The vactoring technique has been successful at each of the sites in which City Light has used it, including the Fauntleroy site in West Seattle. The utility has received recognition and thanks from community members for the successful protection of the trees on the Fauntleroy site.

Work will include operation of heavy equipment such as backhoes, dump trucks and vactor trucks. This vactor soil removal process will result in louder noise levels than conventional methods of excavation. Noise studies have been performed on this type of work and have indicated that sound levels are considered safe for residents near the work site.

A communications rep for the project tells WSB that notices have been circulated to neighbors already via e-mail, and that door-hanger notification is under way too. The Seattle Green Spaces Coalition, which began as a West Seattle-based group but has expanded to a citywide focus, has been working to find ways to keep sites like this one saved as open space.

Born on Alki December 2, 2014 (1:46 pm)

Awesome! Lets hope this can be kept as green space in conjunction with the new Genesee school, as this will be directly across the street form the “new” main entrance. Thank You SCL.

Mary Fleck December 2, 2014 (7:46 pm)

Interesting timing! PlantAmnesty is in the middle of writing a grant proposal for a pilot project on this very site to use “bioremediation” methods to clean-up the soil, which could save Seattle City Light money and be less damaging to the trees and plants on the site. We told Seattle City Light about this unique opportunity, but instead of agreeing to sit down to discuss the grant, Seattle City Light sent out notices that the big removal equipment is coming.

Mary Fleck, Elaine Ike, Tod Rodman, co-chairs, Seattle Green Spaces Coalition

Karen Lyons December 3, 2014 (7:03 am)

Really bad news! Just look at what Seattle City Light did to the Andover and Dumar substations. Both, a muddy mess of destruction. The Dakota substation is a beautiful green oasis across from the new, larger elementary school being constructed. It shouldn’t be destroyed!

AB December 3, 2014 (1:52 pm)

How long ago did they use the vactoring method to remove soil around tree roots elsewhere? Established tress can take long time to show stress, and then signs of dying, then death, so how do we know this works in saving trees? Very disappointed to read that City light is not willing to discuss lower impact alternatives. This is a beautiful site and I’m afraid they will eventually kill the trees and ruin the site.

John December 4, 2014 (8:10 am)

Please drive by the Andover and 21st site to see the ‘muddy mess of destruction’.

Born on Alki December 4, 2014 (8:51 am)

Unfortunately that beautiful oasis contains unacceptable levels of pesticides and some low level PCB’s that were used in transformers decades ago. Hydro-excavation is the most responsible method of comtamination removal available today, short of a complete excavation. It may look a muddy mess for a bit, but in the long run will be beautiful once again. Kudos to SCL for acknowledging it needs to be cleaned up and doing something about it.

Spanky December 4, 2014 (7:48 pm)

Unfortunately, it probably doesn’t matter whether the trees are harmed during clean-up or not; I can’t imagine SCL not selling this lot to a developer, who will then split it and put up two houses, which will leave no room for many trees.

I’d also like to take exception with SCL’s claim that they have been in email contact with neighbors. I received a phone call a few weeks ago, and the pleasant woman I spoke with told me the work had been pushed back to January, but they would be in contact with us before that work began to give us a better idea of when we could expect to be deafened. This Monday, they dropped a door hanger on our front porch telling us the work would occur between November and January, and there was a 25-cent pack of foam earplugs attached. Classy. I realize the hangers were printed earlier, but at least hand-write a note that the work was scheduled to begin Wednesday, or follow up on your promise to call us. As it was, we found out about the work Tuesday night on the blog.

Finally, today they posted “no parking” signs in front of our house, prohibiting us, effective immediately, from parking there 7am-5pm for a month straight (they don’t even specify weekdays only). There is plenty of parking on Dakota, as well as on 50th next to the SCL lot, that wouldn’t block anyone’s house, so I’m not sure why they can’t use that space instead. And I’m not sure why they didn’t give us any advance notice on this.

Hopefully I kept the tone of this post civil, but I’m really irritated with the way SCL has handled this. I understand the work needs to be done, but they have not shown much of an interest or care in informing the neighbors of their plans.

WSB December 4, 2014 (8:04 pm)

Spanky – FWIW, when we received this notice, it said “this week”; I got the Wednesday info from a followup question. We went over today for a look and it did not appear any work was under way, so I have another followup out to the consultant who sent the notice in the first place. I did see those no-parking signs with a start date of next Monday.