An excavator breaks up concrete from a former site foundation.

A cutting torch used for demolition work on site.

Pieces of steel are all that are left after a storage tank was dismantled using an acetylene torch.

Bruce Treworgy and Gordon Engstrom get a better view of the demolition operation from above.

This is one of eight tanks that are being removed from the site.

 

Above - The final phase of site demolition and dismantling is underway at the former HoltraChem plant in Orrington, Maine.

After

To the right, an architect's rendering of the site as it might look if it were redeveloped by the Town of Orrington for light industrial development. It is up to the community to decide how much, if any, development it wants on the site to generate tax revenues for the town. The Penobscot River curls around the wooded site.

Moving Beyond HoltraChem

A methodical cleanup effort at the site of the former Holtrachem chlor-alkali manufacturing plant in Orrington, Maine, is now at the center of a legal dispute after the Maine Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) in 2008 issued an order for Mallinckrodt to remove upwards of 360,000 tons of soil from the site. Mallinckrodt, the successor to one of the former owners of the site, assumed responsibility for the cleanup after other corporations with ties to the site failed to do so. The company responded quickly to issuance of the Maine DEP Order by appealing the Order to the Maine Board of Environmental Protection (BEP) to prevent what Mallinckrodt termed an "unwarranted" action. "Removing a significant quantity of soil that is currently contained in monitored landfills would risk exposing the public to mercury that is already secured," said Kathryn A. Zeigler, Director of Environmental Remediation for Mallinckrodt. "We challenged the Maine DEP's Order because we believe there was no technical justification for this remedial option.

That appeal proved to be correct when the BEP in August reduced the scope of the Maine DEP order and left in place three of the five landfills that the Maine DEP had ordered removed. Mallinckrodt has appealed the order to remove Landfill #2 and seeks to install new caps for the remaining landfills when needed, rather than immediately.

Since it first became involved in the cleanup effort some 15 years ago, Mallinckrodt has spent more than $40 million on site investigation, monitoring, cleanup and demolition activities and continues to monitor the site daily.