Cleaning Up: New chapter for Buena as old building falls

By Seth Preston, Communications Manager, Toxics Cleanup Program

BEFORE:


AFTER:

Razing Roby's

Cleanup work in the Central Washington town of Buena got off to a fast — and noticeable — start last week.

Last week, Yakima County used money provided by Ecology to hire workers to tear down the old Roby’s Service Station in Buena, a small community in Yakima County.

The abandoned husk sat on property contaminated by leaking underground storage tanks, which were removed several years ago. Since then, groundwater at the site has been monitored for contamination.

“This is a huge step for us in terms of being able to get at the contamination. We knew the groundwater was contaminated — now we’ll finally be able to address it at the source,” Valerie Bound, who heads Ecology’s Toxics Cleanup Program at Yakima, said in this Ecology news release.

Eastern Washington Clean Sites Initiative

The Buena project is just one of several included in a new Ecology effort that we’re calling the Eastern Washington Clean Sites Initiative. (And, yes, the “CSI” tag has produced some bad puns around Ecology offices.)

The 2011 Legislature provided $6 million to Ecology in the 2011-13 budget to work with communities to clean up several sites in Central and Eastern Washington.

You can read more about the initiative in this earlier installment of “Cleaning Up.”

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