EPA finishes cleanup plan for Eastside site; real cleaning still in future

Excerpt from Jacksonville.com, December 22, 2016. Read the full article here.

A 31-acre strip of Jacksonville riverfront is a tiny step closer to being useable for the first time in decades.

But it will stay fenced and plastered with warning signs for at least another year before the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency can start construction to clean up pollution that scientists once said could make people sick within weeks if they lived there.

The EPA finished a first, general plan this month for $69 million worth of work needed to decontaminate the former Kerr-McGee Chemical Corp. property at 1611 Talleyrand Ave., where pesticides and fertilizers were made or warehoused for almost a century.

Michael Ori