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St. Paul Island: TPA Site 15a Telegraph Hill Scoria Pit
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Scoria quarry at Telegraph Hill.
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Telegraph Hill reportedly received its name from the establishment of a military telegraph station atop its summit. This telegraph station was the same facility where the detonation controls were established in 1942 by the U.S. Army, for all the explosives rigged for command detonation of the Village facilities, structures and buildings in the event of a Imperial Japanese armed forces invasion of St. Paul Island. Currently, Telegraph Hill is upgradient to the City drinking water well field.
The quarry is located on the northwest slope of Telegraph Hill. The quarry was originally within the approximately 15 acre bounds of land owned by NOAA, but over the years it has been expanded by Tanadgusix Corporation (TDX) onto adjacent property owned by TDX.
The Department of Defense (DOD), and to a limited extent the Bureau of Commercial Fisheries (BCF), a predecessor agency of the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS), and more recently unidentified entities staged more than 4000 barrels at this location. An unknown number of barrels had contained fuels and used oil, although DOD reported that some barrels had leaked and contaminated the ground. In 1986, DOD operating under the Formerly Used Defense Sites (FUDS) Program removed the vast majority of these barrels and other scrap metal debris. DOD identified this site as FUDS "C". The DOD contractor, Chase Construction, Inc., deposited this debris in a burial pit east of Big Polovina Hill and adjacent to TPA Site 2, the Vehicle Boneyard.
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55-gallon drums at Telegraph Hill
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Between 1997 and 2000, continued scoria mining on the TDX lands unearthed additional buried debris, drums and stained soils. Also, the mining activities inadvertently removed all but two (2) of the property boundaries delineating the NOAA parcel. During 2000, NOAA tasked its contractor to resurvey the NOAA property on Telegraph Hill and to reset boundary monuments. In 2000, NOAA also tasked its contractor to remove other debris and approximately 120 empty barrels more recently disposed at the site. This debris, including the barrels were shipped off island as scrap in September 2000.
In 1999, confirmation sampling was conducted with the discovery of soil contamination at a single location. In 2000, NOAA tasked its contractor to install five (5) groundwater monitoring wells on and at the base of Telegraph Hill. Four of the wells are positioned between the contamination source areas on the Hill and the City drinking water well field. Several wells revealed diesel fuel contamination at levels of 150 parts per billion (ppb) or lower. The Alaska State regulatory cleanup action criterion for groundwater is 1,500 ppb. As a consequence of these findings, NOAA tasked its contractor to perform excavations in areas where barrel remnants had been observed eroding out of the embankments of several quarrying areas. Sampling revealed extensive but low level contamination at one site.
Public Law 106-562 Section 107 prohibits NOAA from expending any funds authorized under PL106-91 or PL106-562 to cleanup Department of Defense related wastes and debris, including petroleum products on the Pribilof Islands. At present, NOAA will not perform any additional site activities at Telegraph Hill with the exception of at least one additional monitoring well sampling during the winter of 2001.
Downloads
Click on the following link to view a copy of the Conditional Closure document. |
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