BAYKEEPER WARNS U.P.: Local watchdog Humboldt Baykeeper notified the Union Pacific Railroad Company last week it intends to sue unless UP cleans up its "Balloon Track" property in Eureka -- home of the proposed "Marina Center"/Home Depot development that got its first hearing at the Eureka City Council Tuesday night, after the Journal's press time. The property, notes Humboldt Baykeeper in a news release, used to be "an undeveloped tidal marsh" before train tracks were looped through it and a maintenance, switching and freight yard installed in the late 1880s.
Pollution from the operations has been seeping into the tidally influenced groundwater, the bay and nearby slough ever since, says Pete Nichols, program director for Humboldt Baykeeper. UP has been under a clean-up and abatement order since 1998, Nichols says, "and they haven't completed the monitoring or really complied with the order yet."
Nichols says a proposal to change the zoning of the Balloon Track property from public use to commercial use would result in a lesser quality clean-up. "If it's zoned commercial -- if it's not going to be residential -- you don't have to consider the impacts to public health. You can just pave it over. Union Pacific polluted this for a hundred years. It should clean it up. It shouldn't just be limited to commercial use because it's polluted."
A Union Pacific official referred inquiries about the threatened lawsuit to the Association of American Railroads. The only person allowed to talk about it over at AAR, Kirk Marckwald, was out of the office and will be unreachable until he gets back at the end of this week.
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