What’s Going on at the Starmet/Nuclear Metals Site?

Neighbors to the Starmet/NMI in West Concord could be hearing chainsaws and heavy equipment this week as the contractor tasked with demolishing the superfund site will begin some outdoor activities.

That’s according to a notice posted to the town website, which explained the outdoor activities “will include clearing trees near the buildings and some minor earthwork to prepare staging areas for trucks and to install a truck scale.”

Site work and demolition of the buildings 2229 Main St. comes more than a decade after the Starmet/NMI site was added to the Superfund National Priorities List in 2001. An agreement to remove the buildings came in 2011, after the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), U.S. Army, U.S. Department of Energy, Textron, Inc. and the Whittaker Corporation agreed on the terms.

In recent years, federal environmental officials and contractors de maximus inc. have been working to clean up the property, contaminated by depleted uranium, in preparation for demolition.

Despite the property’s addition to the Superfund National Priority List in 2001 -- not to mention the years of community advocacy and meetings -- the last Starmet employees did not vacate the site until November 2011, according to a Globe report from March 2012.

In that same story, Melissa Taylor, the EPA’s project manager for this site, said cleanup and demolition could take about three years.

“It’s very detailed,” Taylor told the Globe. “There’s a lot of material and equipment inside that we have to remove before we demolish the buildings.”

For more information about the NMI Superfund Site, visit http://www.nmisite.org/

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