Third Firm to Test Soil Dumped Near a San Antonio Food Bank

March 13, 2015- The city of San Antonio will hire a third, independent environmental consulting firm to test soil with heavy metals that was excavated and hauled from the downtown Convention Center expansion site and dumped across the street from the San Antonio Food Bank.

Two firms in 2013 issued conflicting reports about whether contaminants in the soil, including arsenic, barium, lead, mercury and selenium, pose a danger to public health.

Geo Strata — hired by Hunt-Zachry, the company selected for the $325 million Convention Center expansion — judged the soil “contaminated” and recommended that “all soils excavated during this project within the study area” be taken to an approved landfill. That would have cost the city $6 million. So the city sought a second opinion, hiring Raba Kistner Environmental, Inc., which concluded the soil could be dumped at a city-owned site across from the food bank and its community garden.

An open-air ditch draining directly from the site runs underneath old U.S. Highway 90 and alongside the garden, where the food bank grows vegetables for low-income families. A school is across from the site.

Mike Frisbie, director of the city’s Transportation and Capital Improvements department, wrote a memo to council insisting the soil was “safe and within residential-use levels as per the (Texas Commission on Environmental Quality).”

Read the full expressnews.com post here.

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