The Silver Spring Penguin

Photo: Rainy days and toxic mud pits always get me down. Credit: J. Deseo/SSP.

Here’s the good news: Some of the construction work at Silver Spring’s transit-center site is cooking with oil. The bad news: It had also been cooking with nasty chemicals in the soil.

Crews at the Colesville Road site removed soil tainted with unspecified petrochemicals as part of their excavation work, David Dise, director of the county’s general services department, told The Penguin at Saturday’s library book fest. Peg that petrol on a fuel storage facility that Dise said was on that site back in the day.

“There are guys in Tyvek suits and respirators digging up what looks to be an underground conduit of some type,” Penguin reader Michael observed two weeks ago. “They are keeping the dust down with a water spray, bagging the material in plastic, and putting it into dumpsters lined with plastic. It must be some type of hazmat.”

“Amusing thing is watching the supervisor with no protective gear on at all standing right next to the workers. At one point he was even hosing down the debris himself,” Michael added.

The yawning dirt pit next to the Silver Spring Metro station also contained naturally occurring asbestos that had to go, Dise said. According to the US Environmental Protection Agency, the cancer-causing agent is no big whoop if it isn’t disturbed or sent airborne. However, blasting is slated to go down on the site, the general services department announced in a newsletter last month.

On the upside, crews have replaced phone, gas and sewage lines, and a fat Pepco duct bank (whatever that is) that cross the site. Work also wrapped on temporary erosion-control gear, including storm-water management ponds near the corner of Colesville Road and Wayne Avenue, the newsletter described.

Construction on the three-tiered bus station began one year ago, and the work was expected to roll for at least two years. The job is now predicted to roll into February 2011, Dise said.