Wynn Everett Details its Strategies for Cleanup of Site Contamination

Wynn Everett officials unveiled details last week about the environmental cleanup of the future casino site on Lower Broadway, once home to the noxious chemical franchise Monsanto.

Jamie Fay of Ft. Point Associates in Boston said they have a good idea of the three major areas of pollution on the site, and that his company learned a good deal when working on the Big Dig – lessons that he said would be applied to the Everett cleanup in the coming months.

“We spent 13 years working on the Central Artery project and managed the environmental reporting review process,” he told a crowd gathered at a public meeting in Charlestown on Feb. 11. “We learned a lot from that project about how to do this well. A lot of those lessons will be incorporated into this project.”

“We see this development as an opportunity to really correct the sins of the past,” he continued. “We will remediate this to where its safe for open space and outdoors play. It’s really going to be remediated to a very high standard that you don’t really see in these projects. If it’s a shopping mall or a housing development, you remediate the soil and then pave over the rest of the area and call it a day. Here we intend to remediate to a higher level so that Everett and Charlestown residents can reclaim that waterfront and open space.”

One of the more interesting tidbits to Fay’s discussion – at least historically speaking – was that the site and the waterfront there were once a very highly-valued and intensively-used oyster farm.

“We actually found out that the original owner of the Union Oyster House in Boston operated an oyster farm there and an oyster flat that he used to harvest oysters to serve in his restaurant,” he said. “At one time this was a very lovely estuary with tremendous environmental resources.”