Old gas won't delay Riverwalk project

Old gasoline is indeed the mystery substance construction workers recently found in the soil along Naperville's Riverwalk, officials confirmed Tuesday.

But City Engineering Manager Bob Kozurek said the amount of gasoline is minimal and so are the costs to clean it up. He doesn't expect it to cause any delays in the rehabilitation project.

"Most people seem to be concerned it would delay the job, and it's not doing that," Kozurek said. "We wanted to act responsibly and jumped on it right away."

Since February, crews have been working on a $1.44 million project to rejuvenate the original two blocks of the Riverwalk between Eagle and Main streets downtown.

But Thursday, workers uncovered an unusual substance in the soil. As a precaution, fire department officials responded to the scene to keep the substance from spilling into the DuPage River and an environmentalist took samples to test.

"We didn't know initially what we were dealing with so we wanted to make sure we addressed the situation correctly and lined up the disposal of the material so it goes to the right place," Kozurek said.

The tests confirmed the substance was old gasoline as originally suspected, and Kozurek said it may have come from a gas station on the property several decades ago.

A small quantity of gasoline was found in a 10-foot-wide area and is not hazardous.

"The testing that we did was immeasurable. It didn't even come up registering on the scale," Kozurek said. "It's not fluid, it's just some gas that soaked into some of the dirt that was there."

The gasoline will be taken to a landfill later this week or early next week. Work began again the day after finding the substance and is continuing as scheduled.

Kozurek estimated the cost for testing and disposing of the gasoline is minimal -- "a couple thousand dollars."

The project already hit a snag last month when crews discovered that the bedrock they were expecting to find is several feet deeper than anticipated. The city council approved spending an additional $125,745 for redesign, materials and construction.

Due to the bedrock issue and uncooperative weather, the project's completion date was already pushed to Aug. 1, about a month later than originally planned.