In March, city inspectors stopped at an old metal finishing shop on the North Side of Minneapolis to have a look around. Heavy snows pressed down on a partially collapsed roof. Inside the building was a witch’s brew of chemicals in 180 containers, the caustic products and residues of 30 years of metal plating and finishing. They were stored in such a haphazard way, and the building was so dilapidated, that the city inspectors called for help. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s emergency cleanup unit showed up within days, and determined that Ken’s Metal Finishing was an “imminent and substantial endangerment” to the neighborhood, which includes a school, a day care center, a park and homes.

“The roof was literally raining down inside the building,” said Dave Jaeger, supervisor of a Hennepin County agency called the contaminated lands unit. “We just felt this was an unstable situation.”

A toxic threat has to be fairly immediate for the EPA to send in the guys with the moon-suits. In April, the EPA’s On-Scene Coordinator and private contractors set up a secure compound around the weatherbeaten building on the corner of Emerson and 24th Avenue North. Workers in protective suits and respirators emptied drums and cut up metal vats with saws. Air monitors set up around the building ensured that no airborne nasties would escape into the neighborhood. They needed a tanker truck to haul away the 1,320 gallons of “heavy metal contaminated liquids.” That was just part of the cleanup, which included cyanide liquids, acid liquids and other toxic stuff. The work went on through the end of May.

Neighbors must have thought the scene was mighty strange. After all, the LaCroix family had been working with those chemicals for years, chroming custom parts for motorcycles, bluing the steel of gun barrels, Jaeger said. The EPA had already ordered Kenneth LaCroix to cease the plating operations until he got better control of the hazardous chemicals. And the state was in the process of taking the property for non-payment of taxes. Now getting those chemicals out of the building was a federal priority.

With the cleanup operation largely done by June, the immediate hazard was past. What has oozed into the ground or the building itself remains unknown. On June 26, the state became the owner of 2323 Emerson Avenue North, after the owner failed to pay taxes totaling $13,026.88.

Jeff Strand, a Hennepin County official, said he heard the cleanup costs were $300,000 to $400,000, while Terry Branigan, an EPA lawyer in Chicago involved in the case, would only say they were “several hundred thousand dollars.”

Jaeger sounded pessimistic that the EPA would ever collect the cost of the emergency cleanup. I tried to reach Kenneth LaCroix at his Maple Grove home, but I didn’t get a call back. It’s striking to me how quickly a workplace, as soon as the jobs disappear, becomes a community menace.

So who would want this property? The city of Minneapolis has first dibs, if it wants it for some redevelopment project. The real estate listing probably won’t be terribly enticing, given the flyers posted on the building.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 6th, 2008 at 11:17 am and is filed under Government spends your money, Neighborhood nuisances. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.