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Reclaiming Minneapolis
by Dan Olson, Minnesota Public Radio
May 7, 2004

Pollution officials discovered more than 100 underground storage tanks, a maze of underground pipes and 10 deteriorating buildings at the Warden Oil site. The soil is laced with PCBs and other pollutants, including lead. (MPR Photo/Dan Olson)

Demolition crews knock down the former headquarters building of Warden Oil near downtown Minneapolis on Friday. Neighbors hope the long awaited cleanup of one of the state's most polluted sites marks the beginning of better times for an area used as the city's dumping ground.

Minneapolis, Minn. — All cities have them, places treated the way some use their back yards as an area to store junk. Trucks loaded with recyclable metal, paper and abandoned cars thump across railroad tracks on Humboldt Avenue North. They dump their loads at companies around the corner from Tony Doyle's house.

"I think it's the last undiscovered corner outside the center of downtown Minneapolis," he says.

	Hope in a neighborhood

Doyle is fixing his property, a vacant home built nearly 100 years ago. His neighbor on one side is a scrap metal recycling company, and across the street is the polluted Warden Oil site.

He's optimistic the area will attract residents to nearby homes once the pollution is cleaned up.

For 67 years, the Warden Company's owner's collected and resold two million gallons of used motor and transmission oil a year.

The company folded a decade ago. Pollution officials discovered more than 100 underground storage tanks, a maze of underground pipes and 10 deteriorating buildings. The soil is laced with PCBs and other pollutants, including lead.

Cleanup workers removed 25,000 gallons of waste oil, sludges and the underground tanks. Still to be done is hauling out and replacing tons of polluted soil.

Hennepin County Commissioner Mark Stenglien who represents the area says the neighborhood's proximity to downtown makes it a strong contender for development now that six decades of pollution are being cleaned up.

	Superfund sites make lousy neighbors

"The site lies in the shadow of the downtown skyscrapers of Minneapolis, that Bassett Creek Valley is essentially right underneath the site," he notes.

Officials put the Warden Oil Company cleanup bill at about $1.75 million. Stenglien says some companies that used the site are paying almost $500,000 in cleanup costs. Taxpayers are footing most of the rest through various county, state and federal programs.

"Hennepin County through its sale of tax-forfeited land came up with $250,000 of that, and a good thing, there were some responsible parties still available to go after, but again it's not enough," he says.

There are 83 other superfund sites around Minnesota waiting for cleanup. Hennepin County alone has 30 others either more or less polluted than the Warden Oil site.

One of the state's biggest clean up jobs is the the St. Louis River Inner Lake and Duluth Tar superfund site. The Minnesota Pollution Control Agency's Mike Rafferty says cleanup there will take years and cost up to $50 million.

"Dredging and capping of sediments in the Stryker Bay, which is a very big deal in the St. Louis River, to address contamination that came from gas coking and tar facilities," according to Rafferty.

Rafferty says there's $11 million this year in state money to help pay for cleanup of the state's most polluted land, but the amount proposed for next year declines to $9 million.

About two dozen of Minnesota's most polluted sites have federal Superfund status. But how soon they get cleaned up is complicated by the announcement this that the federal Superfund budget has a shortfall.

Hope abounds among residents and officials in Minneapolis that cleanup of the Warden Oil site, relocation of a nearby scrap metal yard and the prospect of a new Twins baseball park a few blocks away will attract development.

Resident Lee Carlson, reclining on a sofa on the front porch of a duplex, says once the blight is removed there are lots of nice features about the area including its nearness to Wirth Park.

"It's challenged by the fact that it's boxed in by three major freeways, by 394, by 94 and by 55 to the north," he says.

That may be too many roads too close for some, or it may be the kind of access that developers find inviting.

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