By Krystal Smalley
ksmalley@wbcowqel.com
The booms that rang out from the corner of Iron Street and East Mansfield Street signified an important revitalization in Bucyrus.
Enviroserve and SME began demolition of the former A/P gas station at 501 E. Mansfield St. Wednesday. With a backhoe pulling up slabs of concrete, city and county officials, along with representatives from The Crawford Partnership, looked on as an eyesore began its first phase into something more.
“There’s two underground storage tanks that used to contain gasoline,” explained Ann Winegar, SME Environmental Project Geologist. “We’re working on getting those out of the ground and then we’re going to backfill that excavation with clean gravel – then we can move on to the next step.”
Crews began breaking up the concrete slabs over the tanks Wednesday afternoon. Before the end of the week, the tanks will be brought up and flushed out. The next step will involve demolishing the convenience store and pulling up the rest of the pavement before the lot gets leveled and seeded.
“We’re probably going to have some more steps where we may be putting in some groundwater monitoring wells and sampling those wells. We may be doing some additional soil boring,” Winegar said as the crashing sound of concrete hitting metal reverberated down the street.
The gas station was abandoned in 2007, according to Winegar. The Crawford County Commissioners received a $100,000 state Abandoned Gas Station grant to clean up the A/P gas station in addition to the USEPA Brownfield Grant.
“It’s just a potential contamination sitting there in the ground,” Winegar said. “You want to get rid of them. The Bureau of Underground Storage Tank Regulations requires that if they’re not being used, they need to be removed. That’s our first step here.”
Michelle Failor, Communications Director for The Crawford Partnership, was instrumental in moving the project forward. She has been the project manager after partnering with SME as part of the Brownfield Assessment Grant the county received three years ago.
“We worked together pretty quickly. There was a lot of red tape,” Failor acknowledged. “The land bank couldn’t have come to fruition at a better time. That really helped us get the property from foreclosure to a neutral territory.”
The owners of the A/P gas station forfeited the property, which was then seized by the county. The County Land Bank is currently holding the property while the revitalization project is ongoing. The City of Bucyrus will be the end user and has tentative plans to turn the area into a pocket park.
“John Rostash (Bucyrus Zoning Administrator) put together an image of what it could become,” Failor said. “I think that will be some good potential for the area – to look at something besides an old gas station hanging out. We’d like to do more, it just depends on if the program is expanded to more projects. We’ll keep looking for funding.”
Standing on the opposite corner with the view of the soon-to-be-demolished gas station in front of her and a hard hat on her head, Failor was excited to see the fruits of her labor.
“I think this is probably the coolest thing I’ve done that’s tangible,” she said. “You start doing a bunch of paperwork, you kind of go through hours of talking to people, and then suddenly you can see giant excavators digging in to something and you’re like, ‘cool, we did this.’
“This is just one of the ways we’re working to make it a better place to live,” Failor added.
“It’s always satisfying when you put in months and months of work,” said Crawford Partnership Director Gary Frankhouse, echoing Failor’s remarks. “It’s always satisfying. It’s kind of like in sports (when) you get a big win. It’s a big win.”
With first impressions making a big difference in a family or business moving to an area, Frankhouse believed the demolition of the A/P gas station was a significant improvement to that area.
“Beautifying anywhere in the county is a benefit because it improves our chances to address the population decline that’s happened for years,” Frankhouse said. “It needs to be our number one priority to attract people here.”
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