Foundry Park bid moves forward after gas leak
The smell of gas was the first hint.
Through Capital Project Sales Tax funds, Greenwood city and county government officials have been working to get a public park built on the corner of Foundry Road and Main Street South. The 16.6-acre lot is heavily wooded now, but for 50 years, it housed a Greenwood Mills foundry.
Part of the land is a brownfield, complicating the park’s construction because of contaminants in the soil. In September 2021, Greenway Construction posted a $1.2 million bid for the construction of Foundry Park — the bid ran high of the county’s $1 million budget and didn’t include any playground equipment.
Early concept drawings of the park included playgrounds, walking trails, a multipurpose field, basketball hoops and a gazebo, although this early illustration wasn’t a final design. The lot the park will be built on stretches from Main Street South nearly to the John Lamb Community Center.
The following month, the smell of gas threw a wrench into the process. Crews, including Greenwood Metropolitan District and local firefighters, checked the area after someone noticed the odor and reported it to the state Department of Health and Environmental Control.
DHEC officials identified the source of the odor: a release of fuel from a gas tank at the Quick Pantry gas station across the street, at 1802 S. Main St., Greenwood. State officials instructed the owner to run tightness tests on the underground fuel storage tanks, along with abatement, assessment and cleanup efforts. The tank owner was back in compliance Feb. 9 after correcting all violations.
“The tank owner is actively cleaning up the petroleum from the ground and monitoring the petroleum constituents,” a DHEC official said in an email.
According to online DHEC records, the Quick Pantry staff abandoned one of its three underground tanks in January, having filled it with foam to seal it off.
“Because of the high bid we received and now the gas leak, we decided to not award the bid and try again with bidding later,” Skinner said. “In the end, the city would just have to place a few monitoring wells on the Foundry Park site near the road for a year or so to make sure the soil continued to test well.”
While DHEC and city officials worked to test and clean the site, county officials discussed rebidding the park project. Skinner said they took the original plans drafted by Davis and Floyd for the park and split it in two: Environmental remediation and the park’s construction. Skinner announced the new bid to County Council on May 3, but the following day planners with Davis and Floyd shared some logistical issues with splitting the bid that needed to be worked out.
“Their concerns were valid, but nothing we couldn’t work through, I don’t think,” Skinner said. “In the end, we decided to try again using the original bid plan — one contractor and one lump sum for environmental cleanup and park construction.”
This bid was posted on the city’s website May 17, and the bid due date is June 28. Skinner said he’s hoping to get more competitive bids, since the bid prior to the gas investigation was over budget.
Originally Published by Index-Journal on:May 26, 2022
By DAMIAN DOMINGUEZ ddominguez@indexjournal.com