Hazardous material removal usually doesn’t involve high school students.

But an exception to that rule is happening at the abandoned Lime Cement Plant near Huntington as local students partner with Baker County to improve the industrial property along Interstate 84 about 40 miles southeast of Baker City.

Students in Megan Alameda’s Environmental Science Class at the Baker Technical Institute assessed the site in April to prepare a request for proposals from companies interested in removing asbestos and lead paint from wooden structures on the property, which the county owns.

The assessment was an opportunity for the students to see a type of environmental site that is not very common.

“This is quite a project,” said Baker County Commission Chairman Bill Harvey. “It’s an opportunity they may never have again.”

Harvey said students are more likely to visit sites such as an old gas station or other more common types of properties that are slated for environmental cleanup.

The cement plant is a Brownfield site. The Oregon Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) defines a Brownfield site as a vacant or underused property where actual or perceived environmental contamination complicates its expansion or redevelopment.

Alameda’s environmental science class focuses on Brownfield sites.

The development of the RFP for the asbestos and lead removal is not new to the class.

Alameda’s class has written RFPs in the past for another Brownfield site in Baker County — the abandoned Ostwald Machine Shop building in Baker City that was donated to the Baker School District a few years ago.

“We decided we’d learn about this property,” Alameda said. “As we found out what the process was to clean up a Brownfield, we said ‘Why don’t we let the students do this?’ ”

Students in Alameda’s environmental science classes since then have written several RFPs to solicit companies to provide environmental cleanup at the Ostwald property, and now at the Lime Cement plant.

“The Lime Plant came about so we decided to partner with the county,” she said.

Harvey hopes the cement plant property will be redeveloped.

“There’s an opportunity to take something that’s a detriment and replace it with something that’s good,” Harvey said.

The plant sits on about 150 acres of a 1,000-acre parcel.

Before the land can be reused, though, the structures must be removed.

The first steps of the long-term plan to redevelop the property are the removal of several wooden and concrete structures.

The wooden structures — which contain the asbestos and lead paint — are slated to have those hazardous materials removed by a contractor by the end of August. After that, the county will destroy the buildings and burn them at the site in November, Harvey said.

He said the county also is looking at ways to raise money to pay a contractor to begin demolishing the much larger concrete structures in the future.

The plan is to have the concrete pulverized and used to level the site. The rebar will be recycled.

After that, Harvey said the county would try to sell the property.

Alameda’s students made another trip to the property in early June to map areas on the property where the soil is contaminated with oil or other industrial liquids.

Mike Stevens, a senior engineer with Apex Companies, worked with the students on that trip,. Apex partners with the DEQ to assess Brownfield properties.

See more in the Aug. 5, 2016, issue of the Baker City Herald.