Trainsong Park’s chemical mess just got messier — and somebody brought it there

So much toxic soil lies in Trainsong Park that it could fill 800 dump trucks, according to new sampling conducted by the city of Eugene.

But it likely won’t all be hauled out because doing so isn’t realistic — and would be too expensive — Emily Proudfoot, principal landscape architect for the city’s Parks Department, told a room of residents in a small church Thursday, May 28. 

Instead, she and her team are weighing cleanup options that are a mix of excavation and containment, removing soil in some places and capping it in others to keep it buried.

The Trainsong community in West Eugene has waited five years to learn the extent of the pollution in their five-acre park, where chain-link fencing separates the playground from the cancer-causing dioxins in the ground.

In 2021, the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality detected the chemicals in the park as it bore 6-inch holes across west Eugene to gauge pollution from J.H. Baxter & Co., a wood-treatment facility — now a Superfund site — that used chemicals linked to dioxins. 

DEQ was testing the soil to use it as a comparison, like a baseline, because dioxins can occur naturally, Proudfoot explained in a presentation.

“This was not the baseline,” said Proudfoot, who now oversees the park cleanup since DEQ handed over responsibility to the city, recalling when she learned about the contamination in the park. “It was super surprising.”

And the surprises keep coming. 

This winter, Proudfoot and environmental consultants working on the project dug deeper than DEQ could afford to years earlier. Using a $1.5 million grant from the Environmental Protection Agency, they sampled soil 24 inches deep at 70 locations. They did not expect to find contamination extending all the way down.

“The soil gets more contaminated the further you go down,” Proudfoot said. “Whoever brought in this fill, it was very contaminated, and it’s heartbreaking.”

Highest readings near homes, playground 

The highest concentrations of contaminated soil are along the park’s eastern edge, near residential homes and the playground, with some areas testing at levels eight times higher than Oregon’s cleanup benchmark.

Scientists measure dioxins in tiny amounts: parts per trillion, or roughly one drop of water in 20 Olympic-sized swimming pools.

According to DEQ reports about J.H. Baxter, concentrations above 40 parts per trillion can pose health risks to children younger than 6 who regularly come into contact with bare soil over a year or more. Regulators established a lower threshold for the park because people typically spend less time there than at home, setting 20 parts per trillion as the benchmark for cleanup.

Soil between the playground and skatepark tested as high as 160 parts per trillion, while the park’s northeast corner measured 39 parts per trillion, according to a map Proudfoot presented and the city distributed to residents. 

Proudfoot describes the pollution as distressing. In total, she and her team estimate about 8,000 cubic yards of contaminated soil is in the park. 

“This is supposed to be a safe, welcoming space for people to come to, and for us to have to close off public park space because of contamination is so antithetical to the work we do,” she said. 

Residents will have to wait at least another year before cleanup begins.

Proudfoot and her team emphasized that the dioxins are not moving offsite, and they’re bound to the soil, with no water wells drawing from the groundwater near it. 

Her team is finalizing cleanup designs and plans to return to the community later this year with more details. Construction is expected to begin in spring 2027 and take about 13 weeks to complete.

Among the elements of the proposed plan:

• Cover contaminated areas with 12 inches of clean topsoil placed over a woven plastic liner.
• Keep the park under city ownership and place a deed restriction on the property requiring approval and safety measures for any future digging in capped areas.
• Create a long-term management plan and conduct periodic inspections to check for erosion, fallen trees or other damage, repairing the cap as needed.

Dust rose to the top of residents’ concerns.

Even if control protocols, like wetting soil during excavation, are in place, nearby residents should be protected and supported with air conditioning units or air purifiers, they said.   

“So that they can close up their windows and be safe,” said Arjorie Arberry-Baribeault, Beyond Toxics environmental justice coordinator. 

“Air purifiers are not going to fix dioxins,” she said, but noted they can control dust particles.

Arberry-Baribeault added, “And it’s also shocking to me why they didn’t test that little part [between the park and backyards]. People live right there. Kids are going to play in that little space.”

Residents also raised unresolved questions about contamination in nearby yards after DEQ ran out of funding for broader cleanup.

Residents caught in the middle 

Following the discovery of dioxins in the park in 2021, DEQ tested nearby residential properties and detected traces of the chemicals there, too, according to Chris Clough, an environmental scientist and consultant on the project.

But “they ran out of funding before they had completed everything they hoped to,” he said. 

As the park owner, the city was left with the responsibility to clean up the park, he said, adding “the responsibility of further testing of the residences and cleanup potentially fall on those owners.”

“So, we’re screwed,” said a woman in response, who lives three houses down from the park and has been asking for a sample of her well. 

Frustrated, the woman left before the meeting ended. She did not want to share her name with Lookout Eugene-Springfield but said her two sons grew up playing in the park and that she has struggled to find help navigating the contamination.

Rachel Rainwater, a member of the Trainsong Neighbors, later spoke on the woman’s behalf. 

“Obviously, someone was upset. It’s incredibly expensive and exclusionary,” said Rainwater, adding she also talked to DEQ about soil testing. The agency told her it had run out of the money for the project and told her to ”go ask the city,” she said. 

“Oh,” Proudfoot replied. 

“I mean how does that even land in the city? These aren’t our properties,” she said in reference to residential properties. 

After the meeting, Lookout asked Proudfoot about agency finger-pointing over support for residential cleanup. Similar grievances have surfaced among Bethel neighborhood residents living near J.H. Baxter.

One family, whose yard tested positive for dioxins, was promised assistance but is now waiting on the EPA, with little clarity about what comes next. 

“We need their [state] partnership,” Proudfoot said. “Our resources are very constrained.” 

Without responsible party, taxpayers fund cleanup 

State and city agencies have not identified who is responsible for the contamination at Trainsong Park. Proudfoot and Clough reiterated Thursday that pursuing the individual or company that brought the soil to the site may not be the best use of resources, particularly if that party no longer exists or lacks the money to pay for cleanup.

DEQ has repeatedly told residents and the media that it cannot link contamination at Trainsong Park to J.H. Baxter because dioxins are “ubiquitous” in the environment. But when Lookout asked whether the agency had compared the chemical makeup of the dioxins found at Trainsong Park with those found at the J.H. Baxter facility, spokesperson Dylan Darling said it had not.

Still, Thursday’s presentation confirmed publicly that contamination arrived as imported fill. Proudfoot said the material was brought to the park before the city purchased the property in the 1980s.

Without a responsible party, the costs of testing and cleanup fall largely to taxpayers. The city received its $1.5 million in funding through a federal brownfields grant from the EPA. 

Proudfoot said the goal is to leave the park in a low-maintenance condition that requires minimal oversight. She pointed to Tugman Park, which was built atop a former landfill, as an example. 

“We had to put a clay cap on it, and all we have to do is check and make sure the cap is there. That’s our monitoring responsibility,” Proudfoot said. 

But designing the solution for Trainsong Park will have its own set of unique challenges, because contamination levels vary across the park and at different depths. 

The challenge is creating a cap that keeps people safe despite the differences, she said, adding, “it’s like a giant four-dimensional puzzle.”  

This story was updated to clarify when the city purchased the park property and the cleanup benchmark for dioxin contamination.