Officials with the U-S Environmental Protection Agency recently visited southeast Iowa, touring abandoned industrial sites that are being cleaned up using eight-and-a-half million dollars in federal brownfields grants. Jim Macy, regional administrator for the E-P-A region that covers Iowa, Missouri, Nebraska, and Kansas, says the grants awarded to Keokuk add up to the largest pool of brownfields assessment and cleanup funding for a single site in the region.
Turning the Elkem (EL-kum) Carbide site into a blooming flower is still a work in progress. The 80-acre site housed a zinc smelting facility and manufactured carbides before being abandoned about two decades ago. Macy says cleanup has included demolition of buildings, assessments of what’s in the ground, and how the city will address it.
Macy says. The E-P-A is also awarding of a pair of one-million-dollar grants for other projects in southeast Iowa, including one to Burlington. The city will use the funding to start work on the long-abandoned Klein Memorial Hospital property. Burlington City Manager Chad Bird says they’ll need to remove asbestos and leaky underground storage tanks. Like in Keokuk, Bird says it’s not just a matter of cleaning up the site, as they want to re-use it.
The hospital building dates back to 1962, while it closed in 2009. The E-P-A also awarded a one-million dollar grant to the Southeast Iowa Regional Planning Commission, which will use the funding for two projects each in Keokuk, Fort Madison, and Donnellson.
