Plan eyed for tainted soil near Engine 503
Published 8:41 am Monday, October 1, 2018
By Ken Stickney
The future of the city of Port Arthur’s historic locomotive, Engine 503, remains in limbo as the city and a contractor seek a site remediation plan to move forward.
Gaylyn Cooper, assistant city attorney, said Friday the city is working with a Beaumont company to develop a remediation plan for addressing lead that remains in the soil beneath where the 503 used to rest.
He said the lead poses no apparent health risk to park patrons or the neighborhood nearby.
“The environmental engineering company will be done within the next 30 days,” Cooper said. The plan draft will be sent then to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality for approval.
TCEQ rejected the city’s previous effort to clean up the former engine site in a corner of Bryan Park at the intersection of Gulfway Drive and Augusta.
Neighbors complained in the wake of Hurricane and Tropical Storm Harvey in 2017 that the engine and attached tender, which has been kept at the park for six decades, contained asbestos and was leaking oil. The fear was that the environmental problems would spread during flooding into the neighborhood.
The city exhausted TCEQ’s deadlines for action, but finally, after TCEQ extensions, addressed the problem last spring by moving the train onto new tracks and digging up the soil left behind.
Soil samples of the completed work were sent to TCEQ, which said more work was needed.
“We remediated what we thought should be remediated,” Cooper said.
Cooper said the city has spent about $50,000 in addressing the train’s problems, but that the next phase of clean up, which won’t involve moving the engine and tender, should be less expensive.
Cooper said lead is natural to the soil and the city is trying to determine if the engine was the source of the problem or if the lead was from the soil itself.
He said the city has no further plans for the train, pending the completion of the environmental work.
The City Council tasked former councilmember John Beard to raise funds for restoring the historic engine, a steam locomotive around a century old. Beard established a website, Friends of KCS Engine No. 503, but there has been no action on the site for almost two months.
He did not respond to a message on his cell phone.
