Local Firm Wins Contract Silver Valley Contractor First Area Company To Win Piece Of Bunker Hill Superfund Cleanup

Finally, a Silver Valley contractor has gotten a piece of the Bunker Hill Superfund cleanup.

DG&S Co. in Kingston outbid six others for the chance to dredge gypsum from a pond at the Bunker Hill complex.

Local companies for years have lamented the inability to win federal contracts. Typically, large, well-established companies from throughout the West are awarded such work.

“It’s the bonding that makes it difficult,” said Gene Nearing, 70, who runs the excavating company. “The big bonding amounts have kept a lot of us locally out of the contracts.”

The project the DG&S won is worth $541,716, and is the first major contract between a local company and the federal government, said Mark Ohlstrom, project manager for the Bunker Hill cleanup.

“I don’t think I’ve actually ever seen gypsum - I don’t know what it’s like,” Nearing said. “But I think we’ll be able to move it.”

DG&S beat out regional firms such as Wilder Construction Co. of Bellevue, Wash., and Envirocon Inc. of Missoula for the job. Those two companies had the next-lowest bids.

Silver Valley business developers this year had campaigned for the Environmental Protection Agency to involve local contractors in the cleanup work.

Nearing’s company has six months to move 115,000 cubic yards of gypsum from a pond east of the Bunker Hill area to a spot near the old lead works at the Superfund site.

Ohlstrom said the Army Corps of Engineers wants it done by late October or early November, before the weather worsens. Gypsum had already been piled there by former Bunker Hill operator Pintlar Corp.

Bidding for federal contracts requires up to $1 million in bonding insurance. Contractors can’t bid without that insurance, and that’s where some of the smaller outfits in the Silver Valley get squeezed out.

Nearing bid for other Superfund contracts this year, but lost out to bigger, out-of-state outfits.

“We don’t have the overhead that a big company has,” he said from his Kingston home Wednesday. So this time, “we cut our bid down - probably a little too much, maybe.”

The family business employs about 10 or 12 workers off and on. Nearing’s been in the business all his life, he said.

The job calls for a few dump trucks and some loaders. The gypsum, a by-product of the refining process from the smelters at Bunker Hill, needs to be moved into one area for removal later, Ohlstrom said.

Only a handful of contracts haven’t yet been bid on in the current phase of cleanup, Ohlstrom said.

The demolition of the buildings at the Bunker complex will last through 1996, he said.

, DataTimes