Bike Trail To Be Closed For A Year

The bike trail through Wyman Woods near the Forest River and Salem Harbor is about to be closed for as much as a year while crews dig out lead-contaminated soil from the old National Lead's Chadwick Lead Mills plant, according to town officials.

The large remediation project, ordered by the state, will likely begin in October, although the contractor has not been chosen, leaving some details unresolved, officials said. Woodard & Curran, an engineering and operations company, is heading the project for NL Industries, which is paying to remediate the site.

"A lot of people are not going to be happy," about closing the trail for so long, said Walter Homan, a board member of the town's Municipal Light Department when Robert Jolly, general manager, told his board last week about the impact of the remediation project.

NL Industries, with headquarters in Houston, Texas, is a worldwide manufacturer and marketer of titanium dioxide pigments.

Town Administrator Tony Sasso and most department heads have been meeting with Salem officials to discuss the impact the remediation project is likely to have on residents of both towns. The town line crosses the property that will be remediated.

The project is expected to impact coastal areas, recreation areas and traffic along busy thoroughfares, officials said. "This is a big project," Jolly said.

The project will have bulldozers scrape a foot of top soil from 10,000 square feet of Wyman Woods and replace that contaminated soil with clean fill dirt to the highest residential level set by the state Department of Environmental Protection. About 400 cubic yards of soil will be removed from this area. "An appropriate vegetative cover" will also be planted, Woodard & Curran said in a letter to the Conservation Commission.

The project will scrape about 22,000 square feet of the bike trail, removing about 2,000 cubic yards of dirt. In some places, the dirt on the tail will be scrapped to four feet down. In others, it may be scraped as deep as 10 feet, the letter said.

On the beach, another 2,000 cubic yards of sand and dirt will be removed from 42,000 square feet, according to the engineering firm.

One of the biggest impacts of the project to Marblehead residents will be the trucks hauling the tainted soil away from the site. The dump trucks will have to access the project from Lafayette Street, a major street, and travel through Salem, town officials said.

"Salem has been very concerned," Jolly said, adding that the trucks would start in October and congest traffic during the town's extensive Halloween festivities.

The Marblehead Light Department is closely monitoring the project because a large electric transmission line crosses the property. Trucks and bulldozers will have to cross the transmission line.

"I am concerned about our line," Jolly told his board, but his department will work with the contractor to protect the line. The contractor will have to bridge over the transmission line with steel plates, he said.

Once the site is remediated, KSS Realty Partners has said it plans to build a multi-family housing development on the former Chadwick Mills site.