'BRUTAL' CHEMICALS USED AT BRIDGE SITE
Metal Wire Recovery used acids, fire to strip plastic from wire at Driftwood bridge replacement site

Workers from an environmental clean-up company donned protective clothing and filtered masks Wednesday to collect soil samples from a site where Pennsylvania's Dept. of Transportation (PennDOT) has begun a bridge replacement project.

PennDOT called on another state agency last week, the Dept. of Environmental Protection (DEP) to help determine what might have caused noxious fumes to emit from the ground when construction workers excavated a small area along Route 555 in the Borough of Driftwood, where a replacement bridge is planned.

DEP called on Neumeyer Environmental Services, a Pittsburgh-based remediation firm, to collect soil samples of the area and haul them back to Allegheny County for evaluation.

Eleven soil samples were taken. Results of the tests are expected by mid-week, according to Neumeyer workers on the site Wednesday.

While PennDOT officials await results of the test, local residents and former employees of Metal Wire Recovery, a factory that occupied the site through the 1960s, fear the worst.

"The chemicals they used to strip the wire were brutal," an employee of Metal Wire told Endeavor News. "For a long period of time, they used all different kinds of acids to strip the wire and back in those days, who knows where the acid ended up."

PennDOT and DEP personnel look on as environmental workers drill for soil samples at the site of a planned replcement bridge over Route 555 in Driftwood. Hooftallen Photo

The company was in the business of collecting valuable metals, mostly copper, from old lines that had been dug up and replaced.

Before the company started using chemicals to strip the wire, they doused truckloads at a time with fuel and burned the plastic off, often right on the Driftwood site, although other sites were used as well.

Thousands of tons of soil was hauled from the site in a clean-up effort that began in 2002, but the remediation took place mostly in what is now the parking lot of the Driftwood Store and PA Pellets and Millwork. The problem bridge workers found is next to the stream on the Benezette side of the Driftwood Bridge.

A resident who lived in Driftwood in the 1940s and 1950s told Endeavor News that the company that occupied the site before Metal Wire Recovery could be responsible for whatever is in the soil there. That company made electrical conductors.

In either case, he said the clean-up could be "a piece of cake or a really nasty job."

PennDOT acquired the .62- acre parcel from PA Pellets and Millwork, owned by Tom and Ryan Gooch. They conveyed the land "in lieu of condemnation," which basically means that they were forced to sell it to the state or lose it through eminent domain. No sale amount is listed in the deed.

The Gooches bought the 13- acre piece from the Grahams in 2006 for $110,000.

In 2006 a site clean-up effort was completed by a private environmental company and then approved by DEP.