For 90 years, the Minneapolis Gas Works on the Mississippi River did the grimy work of extracting a form of gas from coal. The gaslights of the burgeoning city and the stoves that cooked its steaks and potatoes were all fueled by the operations of the coal gasification plant at 19th Avenue and Bluff Street.

The replacement of coal gas with natural gas made these gasification plants obsolete after World War II. The tanks, conveyor belts, smokestacks and walls of the Minneapolis Gas Works were demolished by the early 1960s, and by 1966 the site became the southern approach for the doomed 35W bridge.

But the gas works won’t go away. It lives on, invisible beneath the dirt and limestone of the river bank, in a brew of noxious chemicals. For more than a decade, CenterPoint Energy, the heir to the gas works, has spent millions to clean up the mess. But the company’s manager of environmental programs, Glenn Miller, doesn’t know when it will be cleaned up.

“Right now, I’m banking 50 years,” Miller told me. “The only reason I chose 50 years, that’s what the accounting models go out to.”

On Friday, the public comment period will end for the company’s new five-year permit to treat contaminated groundwater at the old gas works. Deborah Schumann, the state pollution control specialist senior handling the permit, doesn’t anticipate any opposition. After all, no one notices the nondescript structure where the groundwater is run through an oil/water separator and then an activated carbon filter.

Miller sounds a little chagrined that CenterPoint has to shoulder all the burden. “Obviously that area is very contaminated. It’s the birthplace of Minneapolis.” And its children were tank farms, radiator companies, grain elevators and other places where filth of all sorts leaked or spilled into the soil and groundwater. That pollution came with no return address.

“We were left holding the bag,” he said.

The bag could be held by CenterPoint or its successors for decades, perhaps as long as the gas works once provided its precious vapors. Once it’s sullied, as my colleague David Shaffer reported last year, groundwater doesn’t easily relinquish its taint. For now, the treated water of the old gas works, stripped of its gasoline range organics, diesel range organics and polynuclear aromatic hydrocarbons, will be piped into the regional sewer system. But CenterPoint retains its permission to pump it into a storm sewer that empties into the Mississippi River right under the 35W bridge. If you notice water draining out of there on a dry day, it could well be the ghost of the city’s industrial past.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 9th, 2008 at 9:23 am and is filed under Property problems, Public records. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.