RHINELANDER - You could find EPA crews cleaning chemicals out of a building in Rhinelander Wednesday.
It's been a year and a half since the city decided something needed to be done about the deteriorating Lindey Cleaners.
You might not notice much change on the outside of Lindey Cleaners, but inside crews from the Environmental Protection Agency were hard at work.
The building on Stevens Street has been empty since 2009. EPA workers think 100 to 150 different chemicals were inside the building.
"There's various types of chemicals on site, mainly flamables and chorosives," says Federal On-Scene Coordinator Andy Maguire. "So what we're doing is we're gathering them all, characterizing them and packaging them for safe transportation and disposal."
The Chicago-based crew began the cleaning process Tuesday.
Maguire says the Lindey site is similar to what they see on other jobs. "There's chemicals that were kind of choroding and stored next to chemicals they shouldn't be stored by. There's bulk liquid in the equipment on site. I wouldn't say it's any worse than our typical. It's pretty on par to what we usually see."
The EPA should be done cleaning by Friday. After that the city will take over.
"We're using a site assessment grant through the state, a 50/50 match and we can counter some of the financing, the costs that the EPA is doing we're using that towards that match," said city administrator Blain Oborn.
Oborn says they're happy to be moving forward.
"We're really relieved. It's been a problem for a while. We're happy that the property owners are allowing them to go ahead and come in there ahead of time before we take ownership of it," said Oborn.
The city will take ownership in August or September. They hope to have the building down this fall. A parking lot will eventually be put in its place.
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