LETTER: Residents Wary Of Marblehead Transfer Station 'Plan B'

This letter was submitted to Marblehead Patch from Green Street resident David Lieberman:

I am writing to urge the Board of Health not to approve the recently submitted proposal to revise the existing plan to complete the Marblehead Transfer Station project and not to recommend this plan to the Marblehead Town Meeting scheduled for May 2, 2022.

The proposed change, known as "Plan B," would route all incoming residential and commercial Transfer Station traffic to the Green Street access road instead of the current entrance at Woodfin Terrace. As you weigh the options before you, I ask that you consider yours to be a choice between impacts.

One option, now called "Plan A," is the plan that has been on the table for a number of years and which is, compared with the current use of the Transfer Station, neutral in terms of its impact on the lives of people who live and work in our town. The newly proposed second option, designed with an eye to decreasing the cost of the project, will significantly and permanently change the quality of life of dozens of Marblehead families for the worse.

We, residents of the Green Street neighborhoods that will be most affected by this change, understand that the project to refurbish the Transfer Station has been fraught with difficulties and delays, and we share in the town's frustration with this. We do not, however, see the fairness of forcing our community and our community alone to bear the brunt of meeting those challenges and resolving those frustrations.

Under this proposed plan, we will be shouldering an outsized share of the legacy of planning missteps, mistakes and failures in the town’s stewardship of this land reaching back years and decades, purely in the hope of sparing the rest of the town the burden of additional expenditure.

There are real public health and safety concerns raised by Plan B that its proponents have not sufficiently considered or addressed. I believe the Board of Health cannot proceed with the adoption Plan B without requiring a fair, full and objective assessment of the risks it raises for this community.

Traffic Issues

The proposal to shift all residential and commercial incoming Transfer Station traffic from Woodfin Terrace to the Green Street access way appears to show no concern for the impact on traffic on Green Street itself. The plan will inevitably result in increases in both residential and commercial traffic on both directions of the street, heading south from West Shore Drive as well as north from Elm Street byway of Creesy Street.

The intersection of West Shore Drive, Green Street and Beacon Street is already one of the more unsafe intersections in Marblehead. Owing to the topography of the land as well as the angle of the intersection, drivers of passenger cars attempting to turn left from Green Street onto West Shore Drive have difficulty seeing oncoming and not infrequently fast-moving vehicles approaching from Beacon Street on their right.

Vehicles turning right from West Shore Drive on Green Street, as nearly all traffic headed to the Transfer Station via West Shore Drive must negotiate a turn that is sharper than a 80-degree angle, at a steepening incline.

Two of our neighbors in the new Marblehead Meadows condominium complex at that intersection report having seen a boat spill into the road from its trailer when a driver failed to negotiate that right turn safely, just within their brief period of residence there.

The potential for more accidents of this type will only rise as a result of a plan that requires much more commercial traffic to make that turn than is the case now or would be under Plan A, the current Transfer Station plan. With the Transfer Station entrance shifted from Woodfin Terrace to Green Street, I believe a significant portion of the traffic will also shift away from the current primary route straight up West Shore Drive to Beacon Street and instead opt to come up the "back way" from Elm Street.

As I sit at this minute, I can see through the window of my home office a gap in the fence that runs along the Arnold Terracecomplex's western property border on Green Street, marking the location where a hit-and-run driver lost control of a vehicle on a slippery patch of curving, hilly roadway and crashed into it.

If that vehicle had been moving just a little faster or been just a little heavier, such as, say, a commercial vehicle with a load of material bound for the Transfer Station entrance, the additional momentum could very well have enabled it to complete the remainder of the short journey from the fence line to my home itself, where, I think it is safe to assume, the resulting damage would have been rather more substantial than the soon-to-be-repaired eyesore it is now.

My neighbors and I have long been under the impression that a traffic study had been conducted by the town several years ago that determined, presumably based on considerations like those I've outlined here, that regular use of the Green Street access way to the Transfer Station was inconsistent with public safety and that it would therefore be restricted to very limited use if any.

It appears, however, that a search of the town records has turned up no evidence of any such study. The planners responsible for the Transfer Station project have interpreted that as a license to go forward immediately with a plan to open the access way to all traffic.From a public health and safety perspective, I argue that exactly the opposite approach is warranted here.

Granted, what I am offering is a non-expert opinion of what seems likely to follow as a consequence of implementing Plan B, along with a pair of illustrative anecdotes. Anecdotes, as they say, are not evidence, and that is entirely true. Even less evidence than anecdotes, however, is the total lack of evidence of any kind, and in the absence of the study many of us assumed to have existed, a total lack of evidence of any kind is all the planners have in favor of the Plan B proposal.

I urge the Board of Health to consider that there is, at best, not enough information to move forward with Plan B consistent with public safety and that no reasonable decision on its merits can be made before a professional, fair-minded and objective assessment of its impact on public safety by a competent third party is completed.

Exhaust Exposure

One of the chief concerns of the homeowners in the Arnold Terrace condominium complex whose homes directly abut the access road is the clearest and most obvious consequence of the proposed change. With all inbound traffic, and particularly the commercial traffic with its larger proportion of diesel-fueled vehicles, passing within feet of their homes continuously during business hours every day, these families will be faced with constant exposure to exhaust fumes.

Steady, long-term exposure to exhaust is well understood in the public health community to pose significant health risks. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration notes that people enduring such exposure "face the risk of health effects ranging from irritation of the eye and nose, headaches and nausea, to respiratory disease and lung cancer."

This concern has been a significant factor in changes municipalities across the country have adopted as they evaluate how traffic patterns and exhaust exposure affect the well-being of neighboring communities, after acknowledging — belatedly, it must be said— a long and discouraging history of neglect of this issue.

When the Plan B proposal was outlined to the Board of Health at the Board's February 2022 meeting, I took the opportunity during the public questioning period to ask Public Health Director Andrew Petty what mitigation measures to protect the residents of those homes most immediately affected by the route change had been considered in the new plan, apart from the planting of a handful of trees at the far end of the property that already constituted the Plan A mitigation.

His answer was: none.

This failure even to reflect on or acknowledge the impact of exposure to diesel exhaust on the families immediately abutting the access road is flatly unacceptable. I urge the Board of Health to consider that any action to move forward with the implementation of PlanB must at a minimum include a good faith effort to identify and implement effective mitigation measures designed to protect the health of the immediate abutters to the access way from the effects of constant exhaust exposure.

Since by Directory Petty's own admission no such effort was factored into the calculated cost of Plan B, the only reasonable conclusion to draw is that the proposal before the Board does not accurately reflect the total cost of the plan and inflates Plan B's projected cost savings as compared to Plan A.

At the very least, no honest vote on the relative merits of these two plans can proceed until the costs of defining and implementing such measures are calculated and factored into the Plan B proposal.

Exacerbation of Soil Contamination Issues

As I believe the Board of Health is aware, several of the homes in the Arnold Terrace complex along Green Street sit atop a reservoir of soil contaminated with volatile organic compounds, the lasting legacy of a business that operated on this site decades ago.

I have reviewed the documentation surrounding this history in the archives of the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection; the dossier is a thick one, and the controversy between the town and the landowner seems to have rivaled in intensity the problems that have plagued the Transfer Station project itself.

The vapors from the VOCs in the soil are known carcinogens. The homes affected by the contamination are protected by a layer of the substrate beneath their foundations and by continuously operating remediation systems, designed to mitigate residential exposure to radon radiation but effective for this purpose as well.

These systems, in turn, depend for their efficacy on the structural integrity of our homes’ foundations. The DEP recently conducted a round of periodic testing in the homes atop the contamination zone, and determined that the contamination persists and that the remediation systems must remain in place.

As I’ve noted, with the shift of ingress traffic to the Transfer Station from Woodfin Terrace to the GreenStreet access road, we should expect an increase in the use of Green Street by heavier commercial vehicles making their way north from Elm Street. With heavier commercial vehicles moving along Green Street comes increased ground vibration, and with increased ground vibration comes to the increased risk of cracks appearing in the foundations of our homes, cracks that undermine the effectiveness of the installed remediation systems and increase the risk of exposure to the VOCs in the soil beneath us.

Indeed, one homeowner in our community, whose home is directly beside the gate to the access road, has already noted cracks in his walls that were not there before the road was put into its
current limited use as an entry and exit for the trucks that daily haul away the contents of the TransferStation pit.

I urge the board to consider that subjecting us to increased risk of exposure to known carcinogens by undermining the effectiveness of the systems that protect us from them is not consistent with the mission of a Board of Public Health.

I sincerely hope that this issue can be resolved in a way that fully acknowledges and accounts for the real risks to public health and safety the Plan B proposal entails. As a resident of the town and a user of the Transfer Station myself, I have every interest in seeing the renewal project brought to an effective conclusion. I believe the best, and perhaps only option to achieve that goal safely and fairly is to proceed on the path we are currently pursuing, what the planners are now calling "Plan A," and to persuade the town's residents that the Transfer Station is a community resource worth preserving and financing, irrespective of the challenges that have brought us to our current difficult position.

If, however, the town, having been informed of the concerns the Plan B proposal raises for our community's health and safety, opts to move forward with that plan regardless of the risks to us, if, in short, the town consciously decides to do us harm, we will have no choice but to pursue every option we can identify to prevent that from happening.

I very much hope, and in fact, I believe, that we will not reach that point.

The record of public health in this country is riddled with episodes of governments at every level, federal, state and municipal, asking smaller communities to carry the burdens and assume the risks of shared problems rather than inconvenience larger, more powerful ones.

I will not believe that Marblehead wants to add a chapter of its own to that sad history.