The site use over time had included a wood preserving plant, a municipal landfill, a steel plant, a former shipyard and various manufacturing operations. Extensive soil and groundwater contamination was either known or suspected in each of the project subareas prior to the initiation of the project. The Southwest Harbor project is an example of a site where it is neither technically or economically possible to attain complete site restoration. Extensive groundwater contamination exists at the site. Currently, there is no technology available to restore groundwater to drinking water standards across an entire site when these types of contaminants are present.
Soil contamination is also extensive.
Several hundred thousand yards of contaminated soils are present throughout the site. Excavating and treating all of the contaminated soils is not practical from either a technical or an economic perspective. Use of generic cleanup levels and points of compliance as a basis for remedy selection would have resulted in insurmountable technical and regulatory barriers for the Southwest Harbor project, and the site would have remained underutilized and contaminated indefinitely. The modifications are consistent both with the spirit and the text of MTCA regulations, but represent significant modifications in regulatory practice. The basic regulatory model is a two-step process which involves first defining cleanup standards and then selecting a cleanup remedy.