Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Disturbance
Beginning in the mid-to-late 19th century, fill material was deposited over and in the vicinity of the Emeryville Shellmound. The purpose of this deposition was to facilitate industrial development of this locale. By the early-to-middle 20th century substantial heavy industry was in place principally in the form of the Judson Steel company manufacturing facility and P.I.E. trucking terminals. These developed uses were atop a layer of fill material measuring three to eight feet in depth above the native soil, shellmound and bay mud; the fill itself derived from construction wastes from San Francisco including debris from the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. Some of the wastes also included waste paints, numerous heavy metals and certain petroleum hydrocarbons.
By the 1980s redevelopment planning for the Emeryville Shellmound vicinity was underway, consisting of planning by private interests and the city of Emeryville. In 1989 Earth Metrics prepared a remedial action plan to assess and remediate soil and groundwater contamination in the vicinity of the Emeryville Shellmound. These studies found elevated concentrations of lead, zinc and certain other heavy metals as well as petroleum hydrocarbons such as benzene and toluene. Most of the contamination was found in the upper fill layers and did not penetrate into the shellmound itself. Substantial amounts of contaminant removal was conducted prior to area redevelopment.
Read more about this topic: Emeryville Shellmound
Famous quotes containing the words nineteenth, twentieth, century and/or disturbance:
“In the nineteenth century the problem was that God is dead; in the twentieth century the problem is that man is dead.”
—Erich Fromm (1900–1980)
“The nineteenth century planted the words which the twentieth ripened into the atrocities of Stalin and Hitler. There is hardly an atrocity committed in the twentieth century that was not foreshadowed or even advocated by some noble man of words in the nineteenth.”
—Eric Hoffer (1902–1983)
“Familiarity breeds contempt.”
—Aesop (6th century B.C.)
“...though one can be callous in Ireland one cannot be wholly opaque or material. An unearthly disturbance works in the spirit; reason can never reconcile one to life; nothing allays the wants one cannot explain.”
—Elizabeth Bowen (1899–1973)