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The North End is on its way to a complete waterfront transformation.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency unveiled a new plan to clear the city-owned 103 Sawyer St. property of PCB soil contamination. The updated remediation plan would clear the property of PCB soil contamination up to 3 feet below the surface, filling in with new soil and opening up the property to mixed-use development as soon as next summer, federal officials said.
“We’re just digging dirt and taking it out,” EPA project manager Chris Kelly said in the virtual meeting Wednesday night.
The plan is just the latest chapter in the decades-long efforts to clear toxic pollutants known as PCBs, or polychlorinated biphenyls, from the New Bedford-Fairhaven Harbor, the nation’s largest marine Superfund site. The EPA completed its in-water harbor cleanup in late 2025, but it took longer to develop a plan for the Sawyer Street site that at one point hosted the project’s desanding facility.
Part of the difficulty lies in the fact that the site already hosts a landfill-like contamination containment cell on its easternmost side closest to the water, restricting what that area can be used for in the future. Kelly said the northern edge of the property will also need land use controls since monitors detected PCBs beyond the 3 feet of soil that officials plan to remove.
But for most of the property, “the first 3 feet [of soil] is going to be clean, if you can use that word,” Kelly said. Kelly estimated that the remediation would take about six months to complete and would cost about $9.25 million, including the costs to maintain and monitor the property for the next 30 years. Kelly also said that he expects the city and the EPA to enter a cooperative agreement to continue that maintenance.
“Hopefully by the summer next year this area will be theoretically ready for mixed-use development, so a condo or an apartment building would be feasible,” Kelly said.
South End resident and environmental advocate Buddy Andrade asked how the existing capped cell on the property would impact the area’s groundwater. Peter Zawadzkas, the MassDEP project manager for the site, said that PCBs in the soil have a very small chance of leaking into groundwater; moreover, the city mandates that the area be connected to city water, and the brackish water available on the waterfront site would never be used for drinking.
The City of New Bedford has owned the property at 103 Sawyer St. since the 1940s and today it is zoned for mixed-use, non-single-family development. Although there are no concrete plans to build condos or an apartment yet, the city is in the pre-construction process of building the Riverwalk, an expansive waterfront park system along the upper harbor and lower Acushnet River, which would include the eastern side of the Sawyer Street property.
New Bedford Public Information Officer Jack Thuon said in an email Thursday that the city is “actively pursuing ideas” for 103 Sawyer St., including but not limited to residential housing.
For now, that eastern area is little more than an 11-foot-tall mound of dirt, locking away contaminants known for their inability to degrade. Kelly noted that at one point, the EPA considered burying all of the harbor’s PCBs using the waste cell method, but declined to pursue the method further after community pushback.
Kelly said that over time, grass and vegetation might grow in and help the cell integrate better into its surroundings.
“The hope is that once the Riverwalk is constructed … the thinking is that people may not know that it’s a waste cell,” Kelly said. “Maybe that’s aspirational, but that’s the goal.”
Brooke Kushwaha can be reached at bkushwaha@newbedfordlight.org.
