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Cleanup Underway At Toxic Miami-Dade Park

MIAMI (CBS4) – A Liberty City park plagued by toxic soil is finally getting cleaned up. Bulldozers have already begun removing the top two feet of lead-contaminated soil at Olinda Park.

The cleanup of the Miami-Dade County Park at Northwest 51st Street and 21st Avenue was prompted by the discovery last year of lead in the soil at concentrations more than 10 times the safe level, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and Miami-Dade's DERM. The park was closed for cleanup on April 18.

Officials say it'll take about four months to replace the contaminated soil with clean fill and new grass. The park's storm sewers will be improved as well to prevent buildup of rainwater that might bring up more contamination from an old incinerator ash dump below. The price tag is between $1 to $2 million, reports CBS4 News partner The Miami Herald.

Complaints about possible health effects from the toxic soil led the health department to offer free lead exposure testing.

So far, no children have turned up positive for lead poisoning and one adult tested positive, according to Dr. Asit K. Sarkar, manager of the county health department's Lead Poisoning Prevention Program. However, Dr. Sarkar said the man tested marginally positive for lead and he was asked to come back for further testing but didn't return.

According to the Herald, testing by the EPA and DERM also found contamination of two other sites near Olinda Park. The pesticide DDT, long-banned, was found in the soil near Ward Tower Senior Social Center at Northwest 53rd Street and 23rd Avenue. Gasoline byproducts were also found in the soil at the Annie M. Coleman Gardens Complex at Northwest 52nd Street and 21st Avenue.

At Ward Tower, the contamination was from pesticides sprayed for weed control decades ago when the area was a junkyard. In the new testing, pesticide levels were below health-threatening levels, but DERM removed and replaced the contaminated soil to be safe, according to Luis Espinoza, communications director of the Miami-Dade Department of Environmental Resources Management.

At Coleman Garden, DERM determined that, since the gasoline byproducts were only in the top six inches of soil, they came from fuel and diesel spills from cars improperly parked on the grass. DERM removed the contaminated soil, replaced it with clean dirt and told residents to park only in paved, designated areas, Espinoza said.

The Olinda Park area was once a county-owned rock pit. In 1936, the county deeded the land to the city of Miami, which used it to dump ash, probably from city garbage incinerators. When it was full, the government covered it up. Then in 1944, the city gave the land to the county, which turned it into a neighborhood park.

Other Miami-Dade parks which were former landfills, including Chapman Field Park, Gwen Cherry Park, and Westwind Lakes Park were all cleaned of contamination before they became parks, according to Doris Howe, marketing director for the Miami-Dade Parks and Recreation Department, reports the Herald.

(©2011 CBS Local Media, a division of CBS Radio Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. CBS4 news partner The Miami Herald contributed material for this report.)

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