A longtime eyesore on the Providence River, RI Recycled Metals is being cleaned up

PROVIDENCE – The waters off the riverfront site of Rhode Island Recycled Metals look different these days.

A graveyard of derelict boats owned by the scrap metal company on the Providence River is nearly gone. The ferry Boston Belle, its rusting mass once visible above the waterline, was pulled ashore and broken apart. An old barge that had floated alongside met the same fate.

So, too, did the most infamous of the company’s junk vessels, a Soviet-era submarine that had occupied a place in the waters near its property for the better part of a decade before it was dragged onto land and cut up for scrap that was shipped overseas.

The tugboat Akron, still resting on the river bottom, is all that remains. It could be removed any week now.

When the boat goes, it will mark a milestone in a years-long legal saga that has pitted Rhode Island government authorities against the owners of Recycled Metals over the state of the company’s 12-acre Allens Avenue property and the waters nearby.

The Department of Environmental Management first cited the company for polluting the river in 2012. Three years later, the agency joined with the attorney general’s office and filed suit in Superior Court in what they say was a necessary effort to force Recycled Metals to clean up its act.

Completing the removal of the vessels in the river would represent the most noticeable progress in the case so far.

“We’re optimistic now that we’re down to this last vessel that if things keep moving, we’ll get there,” said Susan Forcier, deputy director of environmental protection at the DEM. “It’s definitely been a long process.”

Alleged violations date back more than a decade

Recycled Metals went into business in 2009, when it got the job of salvaging the Russian submarine Juliett 484, which had once served as the set of a Harrison Ford movie and, until it sank in a nor’easter, a floating museum in Providence's Collier Point Park.

Recycled Metals set up shop on a former brownfields site stretching from Allens Avenue to the Providence River that was home to an electronics-recycling operation in the 1980s. The company had the submarine towed to the waters off the property and soon brought in many other deteriorating vessels.

But problems quickly ensued. In 2010, DEM inspectors said that the company was discharging stormwater into the river without a permit. Later inspections found that it was dismantling cars without a permit. Recycled Metals even failed to get a permit for ship-breaking, the original purpose of the business, according to the DEM.

The agency issued violation notices and eventually reached a settlement with the company, requiring it to install a stormwater system to control runoff possibly tainted by heavy metals and oils, remove the vessels and restore the site by the end of 2014. When the deadline passed without action, the lawsuit followed.

But the case has progressed at a snail’s pace, and environmental and community groups, most prominently Save The Bay, have complained that the site remains an eyesore as well as a threat to the health of the Providence River, which flows into Narragansett Bay.

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Michael Jarbeau, Narragansett Baykeeper for Save The Bay, blames Recycled Metals for the ongoing blight but also says the DEM must take some responsibility for what he describes as lax enforcement in the early years of the company’s operation.

“If timely enforcement action had taken place, it would have been easier to remove the vessels,” he said.

But Richard Nicholson, a lawyer for Recycled Metals, argues that advocacy by Save The Bay biased the DEM against the company and that politics are driving the lawsuit.

Jared Sevinor, who owns the company with his father, Ralph, also disputes the notion that they’re bad actors who don’t care about the environment. He says that Recycled Metals has been unfairly blamed for oil sheens in the river and other alleged contamination that was the responsibility of others.

“It’s been frustrating,” he said on a recent tour of the site that’s marked on the street side by a heaping mound of twisted metal and on the shoreline by a rough-hewn graving dock that was gouged out of the shoreline so Recycled Metals could bring the Juliett and other vessels onto land.

Work being planned to clean up waterfront property

Now that there’s an end in sight to remediating the river portion of the property, focus is shifting to the land.

A site investigation ordered by Superior Court Judge Brian Stern is underway to determine whether current or historical activities have resulted in oil or other hazardous substances being released into the soil or water on the property. Neighbors were notified of the investigation several weeks ago.

Recycled Metals hired Lake Shore Environmental, a Smithfield-based consulting firm, to carry out the investigation. A report on its findings was due to the DEM by Nov. 10, but an extension requested by Recycled Metals was granted until Dec. 1. The DEM said Wednesday that Recycled Metals had missed the new deadline.

"We are evaluating our enforcement options," DEM spokesman Michael Healey said.

The last time a similar investigation of the site was conducted was in the 1990s, long before Recycled Metals went into operation. While it’s known that the property was contaminated by PCBs – polychlorinated biphenyls – and other toxic substances left over from the site’s previous use, it’s unclear whether there’s been more recent contamination, or if activities by Recycled Metals compromised a preexisting foot-deep soil cap on the property.

“That’s what the investigation will answer,” Forcier said.

One concern is that Recycled Metals may have released toxins when it dug out the graving dock. Excavated dirt, estimated to total nearly 2½ tons and believed to contain portions of the soil cap, stands in two piles near the shoreline covered in tarps weighed down by tires.

Nicholson said previous tests have shown that toxins in the soil are “within industrial limits.” He said the current site investigation is nearing completion and he expressed confidence that the tests will find no new contamination from the scrap metal operation.

“When all the testing is done, it's going to show that the characteristics of the site remain generally the same,” he said.

Long-term future of site remains uncertain

The site investigation report’s contents will go a long way to determining what, if anything, needs to be done to clean up or cap the property.

“We won’t know what the remedy will be until we know the nature and extent of contamination at this time,” Forcier said.

As to larger questions about the property’s future, one option appears to be off the table. A spokesperson for the Narragansett Bay Commission says it has dropped a plan it had been working on with the Providence Redevelopment Agency to take over the site and use it to dump dirt excavated from Pawtucket to make way for an underground tunnel that will capture overflows of stormwater and sewage.

According to minutes from a meeting of the commission’s board of directors in September, chairman Vincent Mesolella said the plan was abandoned because of “a lack of movement” by the redevelopment agency, which would have taken the land through acquisition or eminent domain. The commission instead started trucking the tunnel spoils to the Central Landfill in Johnston.

When asked about the proposal, the City of Providence referred only to the ongoing court case.

"The city is monitoring the Superior Court case to ensure that any potential violations are addressed," said Josh Estrella, a spokesman for the city.

Nicholson said Recycled Metals was involved in the talks and was eager to sell the property. After being capped with the tunnel dirt, it could have been used by the nearby Port of Providence and another property next to the Recycled Metals site that the Sevinors bought earlier this year.

“It was a beautiful project that would have set the footprint for a ProvPort expansion,” Nicholson said. “It would have provided new revenues, new economic opportunities, jobs, a tax base.”

Asked if there are other plans for the property, he declined to discuss specifics beyond following what the court decides.

Next step is removal of sunken tugboat in Providence River

It’s taken so long to do something about the Akron because it can’t simply be towed out of the Providence River as the other vessels were.

Recycled Metals brought in a marine salvage expert who tried over several months to float the tugboat to the surface, but his team concluded that the vessel had deteriorated to the point that it was impossible to pump out water fast enough to make it buoyant.

The company instead was granted permission by the court to shear apart the boat in the river using a guillotine that’s powerful enough to cut through steel plate.

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Because of the risk of releasing contaminants into the river, the work required approval by the state Coastal Resources Management Council, which has been granted, and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which is still pending. Once permission from the Army Corps comes through, Recycled Metals will have 60 days to remove the tug.

For now, it sits under 40 feet of water, its location marked by a white buoy not far from shore.

Jarbeau said the difficulties of removing the boat add to the argument that the DEM should have acted more aggressively.

“That’s what happens when you wait a decade-plus to take action,” he said.

He believes that authorities have been acting with more urgency in recent years but is still skeptical about the amount of progress that’s being made.

“I think overall it is a positive step that a site investigation is starting to take place, but it’s hard to project optimism until remediation activity actually happens,” he said.

If there’s one thing that he would agree on with Nicholson and Jared Sevinor, it’s that the court case has slowed what’s being done about the property. Nicholson said that work on the site would have moved faster if the state hadn’t sued Recycled Metals.

“And it’s my clients that are paying the price,” he said.

But state authorities say the company is at fault, not only by dragging its feet on cleaning up the property but also by flouting agreements not to take in more vessels. The attorney general’s office said the company did just that with another tug that was removed earlier this year, and a crane barge.

“Not only do these delays increase the burden on the state in having to handhold the parties each step of the way, but it also allows the very real environmental violations to persist,” said a court motion from the office last May. “Through these multi-year proceedings, it has become obvious that [Recycled Metals] will not operate at the site compliant with law without significant and constant oversight.”

On a sunny afternoon recently, an excavator dug into a heap of old washing machines, fridges, water heaters and other scrap metal on the Recycled Metals property. A bright-red Coca-Cola sign stood out, a splash of color in a sea of white and gray.

As Jared Sevinor looked on, he talked about why he and his father had bought the land in the first place.

“It really is amazing real estate,” he said.

This article originally appeared on The Providence Journal: Lengthy fight to clean up Providence scrap metal site is paying off