Town officials last week began removing an “undocumented” underground storage tank from the site of the former Irwin House, a project that should be finished mid-May.
The third tank, which municipal officials didn’t know about until a project to demolish Irwin House and its garage got underway last year, “may have been related to the bomb shelter” on the Weed Street property, according to Joe Zagarenski, senior engineer in the Department of Public Works.
“it was fairly close to the bomb shelter area,” he told members of the Board of Selectmen during their regular meeting, held April 21 at Town Hall and via videoconference.
“There’s a long process that you go through to take out an underground storage tank,” Zagarenski said.
He added: “Stamford Wrecking has a tank subcontractor that removes all the oil from within the tank. And then they excavate for the tank. We check the grave to see if there’s any unsuitable soils underneath. We excavate to the limits of that. We ship it out—Enviroclean is our approved vendor that accepts the waste. And then the licensed environmental professional, which is Fuss & O’Neill, is involved in monitoring the whole process. And at the end we get a report of where everything went and a report where everything was disposed, and the fact that the three underground storage tanks are clean and remediated, it gets filed with the fire marshal’s office so that we have it documented forever.”
The comments came during an update to the selectmen on public works projects in New Canaan.
Shared publicly during last year’s budget season, the town’s plan to demolish Irwin House followed years of speculation about whether and how to use the public building. The brick house was constructed between 1961 and 1963 after the original 1920’s shingle-style house—once owned by IBM founder Thomas Watson, Sr.—burned down in a fire. In September, the town approved a $700,000 contract for the demolition, which was largely finished by Christmas.
First Selectman Dionna Carlson noted that the two storage tanks the town did know about turned out to have “some environmental issues.”
“And now this third tank that we didn’t know about is likely to have some environmental issues that are going to require cleanup, which is going to obviously not only require expense, but also time,” she said.
Zagarenski said the total project budget for the Irwin House site was $872,332, and the estimated cost of completion is under $800,000, “depending on how we close out,” so “our contingency will largely be intact.”
While the town works to remove the final tank, officials will “spread topsoil on the site,” he said.
“[Highway Superintendent] Lou [Boice] is going to help us out and bring over some of the topsoil that we took out of the Waveny Playground project,” Zagarenski said. “And we’re going to bring that over and top that off so we can leave it a nice grassy area over there.”