The Bureau of Land Management this week started cleaning up the site of an illicit rifle range at 7 Mile, a $366,000 project aimed at removing soil contaminated with lead, antimony and arsenic from spent rounds.

But shooters have since moved to another roadside area near 25 Mile Haines Highway, the site of a recent cleanup of car batteries, automobiles and other junk.

Accumulation of rounds presents health risks relative to their concentration and location near ground water and surface water sources, said Anne Marie Palmieri, an environmental specialist for the state Department of Environmental Conservation.

“This is a common problem across the nation. Anytime you have a shooting range, you have this kind of contamination issue. Metals in soil pose a risk,” Palmieri said. “The best place for people to do their shooting is at the shooting range. That’s an area that’s contained.”

Workers from Northwind, Inc. on Monday started loading the most contaminated soil for shipment to a location in the Lower 48. According to Dennis Teitzel, a BLM field manager based in Glennallen, as much as 540 cubic yards of fill will be removed, accounting for much of the project’s cost.

“The area became a catch-all area for people to dump whatever they wanted. Then people used those items as targets,” Teitzel said. “With extensive use, it became a hazmat contamination issue and a site with other contamination issues.”

The work is being done to protect health and safety while enabling the BLM to transfer a lot there to the State of Alaska, Teitzel said. Much of the removed fill will come from an embankment that served as a backdrop for shooters. Property closer to the road will be scraped to a depth of three inches, said Paul Dries, a Northwind official who was at the site this week.

Soil sampling will determine the extent of the contamination and the size and scope of the project, Teitzel said. Soil sampling and testing so far has indicated contamination is isolated and hasn’t spread, he said.

DEC’s Palmieri said workers would be testing samples as soil is excavated to determine how the soil must be disposed. Sampling will determine metal concentrations as well as whether contamination matches guidelines for “listed hazardous wastes.”

“They have a pretty good idea where the majority of the contamination is, but until they start excavating, they don’t know the exact boundaries,” Palmieri said.

Removed fill will be replaced with clean fill to promote native vegetation growth, BLM’s Teitzel said. “We’re not just leaving it as barren rock and gravel.”

Teitzel said the site was apparently created as a gravel pit during construction of the Haines Highway in the 1940s. Recreational shooting and trash dumping were prevalent on about a .75-acre parcel there, he said.

Resident Tim Ackerman, who pushed for a cleanup of trash at a Native fishing site at 7 Mile across the road from the rifle range, recently said that residents need a low-cost spot for sighting-in rifles and suggested a $35 cost to use the Haines Sportsman’s Association rifle range was too high.

This week, Sportsman’s Association vice-president Charlie DeWitt said the group has previously left the range unlocked for a week previous to hunting season, but that has led to incidents where people dumped trash there.

“We’d like to do that as a service, but people abuse it. People take TVs up there… They shoot bottles. We have to go in there and clean up the mess,” DeWitt said. The $35 fee for using the site includes a $25 membership in the association plus a $10 fee for the key to the range gate.

DeWitt said the group needs the fees to pay for liability insurance for the site. “I don’t think we can do it any cheaper.”

One alternative is for shooters to go with group members. “As a member, you can take a guest,” DeWitt said.

Besides the cleanup at 7 Mile, the BLM is making a parallel but separate effort to address future use of the site, including as a possible parking area and relocated 7 Mile trailhead for Mount Ripinsky. The BLM has identified for removal a boardwalk trail built with chemically-treated timbers, but will wait on that, as the boardwalk currently serves as the only access to the trail.

The BLM recently asked for public comments on what should happen at the site. One option is to make the cleanup area a parking spot with access to a rerouted 7 Mile trailhead.

“We’re pulling together comments, analyzing them and developing options,” Teitzel said. “We’ll do that this winter so we have a project ready for the next field season.”

Comments included ones from residents who are happy with the current configuration of parking on the highway shoulder and ones from users who find the parking there hazardous and support moving the trailhead, he said.