The Silver Spring Penguin

After endless digging and more digging, construction crews at downtown Silver Spring’s transit center site will begin blasting at bedrock later this month, county reps announced.

Expect the walls to shake, the earth to quake, and perhaps your mind to ache on or after Saturday, Dec 19, Don Scheuerman, with the department of general services, said at last Tuesday’s pedestrian safety committee in downtown Silver Spring.

Daily blasting will go down at 2:00 p.m., during which car and people traffic will be stopped along Colesville Road and Ramsey Avenue. Scheuerman did not say how long the street and sidewalk would be off limits, but a daily blast job in South Silver Spring last year was a 15-minute (or less) routine, as recorded in a YouTube video.

Once the blasting work is completed, crews can begin to lay down the three-tiered transit center’s foundation, David Dise, director of the general services department, told the pedestrian safety committee. That action should start next spring, and by summer 2010, the transit center’s skeletal structure should be apparent, he said.

The transit center eventually will house local and regional bus stops, with connections to the Metro’s Red Line, MARC rail and possibly the Purple Line light-rail system. Dise predicted a spring 2011 opening.

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. (more…)