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ADDRESS: 3300 N Williams Ave.
YEAR TORN DOWN: 2010
SQUARE FOOTAGE: N/A
MARKET VALUE: $139,740
OWNER: 3300 N Williams Avenue LLC
HOW LONG IT’S BEEN EMPTY: Since 1986
WHY IT’S EMPTY: A dry cleaner contaminated the site with perchloroethylene.
The empty lot at the corner of North Williams Avenue and Northeast Cook Street is weird, even for Portland.
A series of white plastic pipes run along the ground with short branch lines that plunge into the crabgrass. They’re connected to a thing that looks like a horse trailer, which, in turn, is connected to two forbidding steel tanks.
It looks like a rig the kids from Stranger Things would use to probe the Upside Down.
History helps explain what’s going on. Back in the 1940s and ‘50s, a building on this corner housed a saw sharpener, a lawn mower repair shop, and a real estate office. Ellis Dry Cleaners opened in 1950 and operated for 36 years. Every week, according to filings with the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality, the owner got rid of about a half-gallon of dry cleaning fluid containing perchloroethylene, a chemical that makes an excellent non-flammable solvent for food stains on fancy clothes. Unfortunately, it’s also been associated with bladder cancer, non-Hodgkin lymphoma, and multiple myeloma.
It’s not clear how the owner got rid of the perc. “Disposal site and method not known,” a filing at DEQ says. For many years, the store’s equipment was hooked up to a drain that may—or may not—have led to the sewer system. After the business closed in 1986, the state hired a contractor to drill a hole 32 feet deep. They found perc at 1½ feet and 29 feet. They discovered perc gas—the nasty vapor that comes off perc and collects in soil—at other levels. Inhaling the gas can cause kidney dysfunction, dizziness and mood swings.
An entity called 3300 N Williams Avenue LLC bought the narrow property, and a similar one just north of it, for $15,000 in April 2013, a screaming deal if not for all the carcinogens.
A filing at the Oregon Secretary of State’s Office lists Steven M. Berne as a member of the LLC, meaning he has an ownership stake in it. But Berne, reached by phone, says that’s an error. He’s just the registered agent, a non-ownership position. The owner is a man named Lynn Green (who’s listed as the registered agent). The names got switched, Berne says.
Green is the owner of Evren Northwest, a firm that does “natural resource and environmental investigations, regulatory compliance and permitting, cleanup and remediation, hydrogeologic and geotechnical studies, and assessment of human health and ecological risk.”
Evren got involved with the property in 2012, when DEQ asked for more testing, according to a work plan filed by the company in November 2022 that gives the history. In July 2013, Evren started pumping compounds into the ground to oxidize the perc, including “iron catalyst” and hydrogen peroxide (it’s not just for cleaning cuts, as it turns out).
To deal with any stray perc gas, Evren set up a “soil vapor extraction” system, a system of pipes connected to a blower that sucks the gas out of the ground, pushes it through a carbon filter (like in a fish tank), and vents the scrubbed gases into the atmosphere.
The rig ran through July 2022, sucking a total of 1,870 pounds of perc out of the ground, according to the 2022 work plan, which was Evren’s last filing with DEQ.
Reached by phone, Green confirmed he was a member of the LLC that owns the site. He got his share in return for doing the cleanup, he says. Green, who holds a Ph.D. in environmental engineering and a slew of other degrees and certifications, has experience. He remediated another dry cleaner farther north on Williams.
“This one is taking longer than we thought,” Green says. The pandemic played havoc with his partner on the project, a developer, and with the state’s bureaucracy. The cleanup has gone according to plan, though. He no longer must run the soil vapors through the carbon filters because the amount of contaminants is so diminished.
If all goes as planned, the Upside Down on North Williams could be turned right side up.