Funding to continue staging cleanup of the former Guterl Specialty Steel Corp. site on Lockport’s west end has been announced by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Buffalo District.
The Fiscal Year 2025 Work Plan for Army Civil Works allocates $1 million for the corps to continue obtaining necessary real estate access agreements and secure the initial remediation contract that’s to be awarded in early FY 2026.
The Guterl Steel site is where Simonds Saw and Steel Company rolled the radioactive metals uranium and thorium for the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, predecessor of the U.S. Department of Energy, between 1948 and 1952.
Through the Formerly Utilized Sites Remedial Action Program (FUSRAP), the Army Corps of Engineers put forth a soil-and-groundwater cleanup proposal with an estimated price tag of $249 million as of September 2024.
The site consists of nine acres and nine buildings where more than 25 million pounds of uranium steel billets were rolled into rods for the United States government’s post-World War II atomic defense effort. Guterl Steel acquired Simonds Saw and Steel in the 1970s, and when Guterl was in turn acquired by Allegheny Ludlum Corporation (now ATI Specialty Metals) in 1984, the affected nine-acre parcel was excluded from the sale.
Remediation will involve dismantling the nine buildings on the site and disposing of the debris off-site, removing contaminated soil to protect groundwater and using extraction wells and an on-site trench to treat groundwater contaminated by uranium.
The corps has been monitoring the site since the early 2000s, and has said consistently that the site poses no immediate threat to public safety or human health.
The Buffalo District also announced an allocation of $16.9 million to continue work at the Niagara Falls Storage Site, another FUSRAP target in Lewiston where Manhattan Project waste was deposited.