Dioxin cleanup begins near future interchange

Jeffrey Libby

Tuesday, Aug. 13, 2002 | 9:28 a.m.

A private landowner started cleanup Monday of 18 acres that the state highway department may need for a planned $90 million interchange at Interstate 215 and U.S. 95 in Henderson.

"We are exercising good citizenship," said Tom Hnasko, an attorney in New Mexico for Levy Realty Trust. The company plans to dig up 10,000 tons of dioxin-contaminated ash and soil southwest of U.S. 95 and Lake Mead Drive.

The cleanup also should position the Levy Realty Trust more favorably for a land sale as the state nears its planned groundbreaking in February 2003, said Scott Rawlins, project coordinator for the Nevada Department of Transportation.

The state has no plans to build on the 18 acres, but will need to at least buy "a control of access" to the property to build the interchange, Rawlins said. Access alone would not require a cleanup of the land, he said.

Aerial photographs from the 1940s and 1950s show the burning of waste in natural flood washes at the site, Hnasko said.

The U.S. government probably oversaw the dumping of industrial and household waste at the site, Hnasko and state environmental officials say, although no written records have been located.

Soil samples collected in March 2000 by the state Department of Environmental Protection showed dangerous levels of dioxin, a cancer-causing toxin, at the site, said Shannon Harbour, a case officer for NDEP.

Samples taken in the nearby McCullough Hills neighborhood and Acacia Gardens Park, due to open in October, showed no elevated levels of dioxin, NDEP officials said.

The contaminated soil will be dumped at U.S. Ecology, a licensed disposal facility near Beatty.