Our ultimate goal is to provide an outline for future members of this project to follow in order to carry out a bio mitigation study at the Easton Iron Works property through the lens of the following research questions: What are long term environmental effects of heavy metal contamination? What kind of timeline of contamination is relevant to the Easton Iron Works Sites? Who are the current stakeholders involved in bio mitigation and remedial efforts to clean up the Easton Iron Works? What design elements have to be in place to achieve the goal of bioremediation?
Other important components of our research have involved assessments on how contaminated groundwater impacts the Bushkill Creek and its wildlife, how our project would impact local businesses and residences, and cost assessments. Paying special attention to the community which a project will impact and also their opinions on the progression of a project is crucial to any project’s success. In the case of the Easton Iron Works remediation project, there is evidence of public support as determined by the Nurture Nature Center’s Easton Matters Report. Additionally, Act 2 of the remediation process calls for a period of community feedback, which highlights a broader recognition of the importance of community engagement in public engineering projects. Community engagement is an effective method of approaching engineering development projects that is also more ethical and sustainable than a techno-centric approach. The environmental remediation project that occurs at the Easton Iron Works property will follow the guidelines of Act 2 not only because it is legally required, but also in order to best meet the needs of the Easton community.
Dave Hopkins and the City of Easton are the primary shareholders who will be calling the shots for this project with another shareholder being the Easton Redevelopment Authority. The Easton community will benefit from this environmental remediation project not only because it will better their local environment, but also because by cleaning the contaminated groundwater, the City of Easton is mitigating the impact of its human health risks on the community.
The remediation of the Easton Iron Works site will be a long, ongoing project. With the very little detail that is available, it is almost impossible to speculate how long the project will take and what solutions are necessary to help fix the problem. The next steps in providing further technical analysis will rely heavily on how much information about the site is made public by the City of Easton. However, we have dealt with this challenge throughout our research in a number of ways, including analyzing the most common metal contaminants found at former industrial sites and the potential bio remediation solutions that are best for these various contaminants.
The site characterization of the Easton Iron Works property is a necessary component in establishing which of the remediation technologies will have the most success. The most successful technologies should result in the largest decrease in metal contaminant concentration in the Bushkill Creek. There is only so much we can estimate based on industrial site contamination trends, but it has certainly led our research in the right direction.
The next steps include creating a zone of study where we can monitor and compare strategies and success rates to be able to gather information to pass along to future EGRS Capstone Project groups so that they can carry out the project in its later stages. The research necessary for the progression of this project has been established by our project team and the future of this project will be determined by later groups. A major goal that we have in mind throughout future iterations of this project is to actually monitor and test these bio mitigation methods on a plot or plots at the Easton Iron Works property.
Next: Bibliography (EIM)