Last Thursday, Josh Buck was sprinting through the Balloon Track in Eureka. The executive director of the Clarke Museum was working on a time crunch to save something of historical significance from the property — a freight car weighing around 40 tons.The historic railroad track, and the locomotives it hosts, have sat in limbo for years. But now, property owner Security National has started phase one of cleanup, which means the removal of surface debris on the site.Casey Self, a spokesperson for Security National which bought the property in 2006 to develop it, said “they’re cleaning up the site and going through the piles and sorting the debris.”Security National hopes to complete the phase by 2025, she said, but didn’t know what phase two would mean — or why it’s started now.Kenny Carswell, Security National’s lead for the project, did not immediately respond to a phone call Thursday on the future of the site.“I’m assuming they wanna develop, you’d have to ask them exactly what that might be, but I think that’s their intent,” said Eureka City Manager Miles Slattery.Eureka approved the coastal development permit for this phase of the cleanup in June 2024.Jennifer Kalt, executive director of Humboldt Waterkeeper, an environmental nonprofit that has filed lawsuits against the development of wetlands at the site, said this phase involves removing the debris and foundations on the site without impacting any of the wetlands, plus some testing underneath the foundations to see how extensive contamination there is.“Humboldt Waterkeeper is excited to see the contamination cleaned up, as long as it is done right,” she said — which for Waterkeeper means a thorough cleanup and mitigation of impacts to the wetlands. The contamination stems from its time as rail yard plus an above-ground fuel storage facility, and includes heavy metals, petroleum hydrocarbons, dioxins and polychlorinated biphenols.She said the second phase, whatever it is, would mean a whole new public process and permitting, given its location on wetlands and in the coastal zone.The site’s zoning is stuck in limbo. Its public use zoning never officially changed after a ballot measure was passed to rezone the property to mixed-use zoning since the company never finished the permitting process to amend the local coastal program with the coastal commission, said Slattery. In the past, Security National’s aims were to develop the property to include a Home Depot at the proposed Marina Center.Keep Reading
