CLEARLAKE >> The county continued the declaration of a Local Health Emergency as cleanup efforts and asbestos removal from the Sulphur Fire area is ongoing.
As progress is made, there will also be changes and adjustments Lake County Environmental Health Director Ray Ruminski said. Right now the Army Corps of Engineers are changing contractors.
“At this point, the Army Corps is changing prime contractors so some of the players are going to change. The company we were seeing here, the ECC (Environmental Chemical Corporation) is no longer going to work and is being replaced by Ashbritt,” Ruminski said. “I haven’t heard anything official yet but this is what I hear unofficially.”
This will change the management of the project, but he said he is unsure if this will change on the operations side of it.
The ECC is a company contracted through the Army Corps of Engineers to help with the debris removal in Sonoma, Napa, Mendocino and Lake County. This company does mostly large-scale projects to help remediate the environment and revitalize communities that have suffered from natural disasters.
AshBritt Environmental is a similar company and also does disaster recovery and special environmental services. Since 1992 they have completed more than 230 disaster recovery missions.
As of Tuesday morning, Ruminski said that the Army Corps has cleared 85 lots out of the estimated 130 that needed debris removal.
“Nine of those lots have completed the confirmation sampling. There are about 14 or so private contractor lots and two of those are completed on the sampling stage,” Ruminski said.
There are still nine lots that are up for nuisance abatement Ruminski said, two of them are in the county and the other seven are located in Clearlake. The Army Corps contract left out the step of abating lots that are identified as having asbestos and so this led to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to come in and do the asbestos removal of lots.
“They have a contractor and with a list of about a little more than 20, they have cleaned 11 so far of asbestos material. That, of course, does not go to our landfill it goes to a special permitted landfill down in Vacaville,” Ruminski said. “They are doing adequate dust management on those lots.”
County Administrative Officer Carol Huchingson said if people want to check a status of their home or property to see where it is at in the process, the Army Corps of Engineers has set up a link where an individual can put in their address and find out.
“If people come to this website and click there it takes them to an interactive map where they can enter their street address and check on the status of their cleanup,” Huchingson said. “It is an interactive tool for survivors who lost their homes.”
It does require an account to be set up for someone to look up their status.
