Dana-Farber Cancer Institute Center for Cancer Care

GEI Consultants provided integrated assessment, environmental, and geotechnical services for the construction of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute Center for Cancer Care in the heart of the Longwood Medical area in Boston, Massachusetts.

This new structure will essentially be an addition to the award-winning Smith Research Laboratories, which GEI also worked on for Dana-Farber. The redevelopment project includes replacing an antiquated two-story building with a fourteen-story, approximately 300,000 square foot state of the art building for clinical, research, laboratory, and office use. Seven stories of underground parking are also planned. Construction has begun and the project is expected to be completed in 2010.

During the planning stages for the project, GEI performed a subsurface investigation and a records search to evaluate the geologic conditions and to identify potential sources of contamination. Because of access limitations, only minimal subsurface investigation was performed in the footprint of the then existing, two-story building. This area was further investigated as part of construction, immediately after the building was demolished, and some data suggested that there might be gasoline contamination present. While there was no record of gasoline storage at the site, approximately three days after this condition was identified, three underground storage tanks (USTs) were uncovered in the former footprint of the demolished building.

The USTs were removed as an Immediate Response Action (IRA) and, to keep the construction project on schedule, GEI immediately performed a subsurface investigation to identify the extent of the gasoline contamination. Within two weeks of the USTs first being discovered, GEI prepared and submitted a combination IRA Completion Report and Release Abatement Measure (RAM) Plan to the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) documenting that construction could proceed and that approximately 80,000 cubic yards of soil will be excavated with up to 10,000 cubic yards of the soil being managed as remediation waste.

The next challenge was that the contractor scheduled to install slurry walls at the site had neither the proper training nor a desire to handle gasoline-contaminated soils. To prevent impacts to the schedule, GEI worked closely with Dana-Farber, the construction manager, the slurry wall contractor, and the excavation contractor to arrive at a solution. The excavation contractor (with the proper training) excavated 30-foot-deep trenches along the planned alignments of the slurry walls where gasoline contamination was expected. The contaminated soil was removed and the trenches were backfilled with flowable fill, creating clean corridors for the slurry wall contractor to perform his work. This innovative solution allowed slurry wall installation to proceed according to schedule, and there were, once again, no delays in construction.