Bangor is beginning to clean up the roughly 7 acres of land between Cleveland Street and Texas Avenue that once held the city’s largest homeless encampment, but how the city plans to do that remains unclear.
Heavy equipment was seen cutting and clearing trees in the wooded area behind the Hope House Health and Living Center last week, but trash and personal belongings that were left behind were still scattered throughout the area.
Nearly 100 people lived in tents, vehicles and other rudimentary shelters in the area for years, until the city closed the encampment in late February, though it took a few more weeks for everyone to leave the area. After that, belongings that were left behind were stacked into piles and hauled away.
For years, the site was the city’s most visible example of the region’s homelessness crisis, and many of the encampment’s residents struggled with mental health disorders and active substance use. With the encampment empty, the question remains of what the city plans to do with the land and how much it will cost to clean it.
Bangor officials are now “working to finalize the steps to clean up” the site in “the most appropriate and effective way,” according to David Warren, a spokesperson for the city.
“The cleanup is a two-step process to ensure the site is safe while also working to enhance its potential for development,” Warren said. “Some of the work in the area has already begun, and it will continue until it’s safe and fully prepared for reuse.”
A layer of topsoil in the area needs to be removed, “which is a rather involved process,” and city staff are concerned about used needles and other hazardous waste at the site, Warren said.
Warren declined to explain what the two steps of the cleanup process are and if clearing trees is the first step.
The city doesn’t have a final cost estimate for the work, according to Warren.
Once people are removed from a homeless encampment, it’s common for the site to have biohazards and potentially dangerous waste. This could include used hypodermic needles and other drug paraphernalia, pests, bodily fluids and human waste, said Mike Wiseman, owner of Trauma Services, a Massachusetts-based company that offers homeless encampment cleaning services.
“It’s a meticulous job because there are a lot of hazards involved in it,” Wiseman said. “The actual cleaning of the land is, in some cases, harder to do than an actual home or sheltered environment.”
To clean an encampment, Wiseman said his company, which has not been in contact with the city of Bangor about its cleanup, will first send a few employees to visit the site and take photos. A team of as many as 30 employees will then arrive, break the area into a grid and begin slowly picking up trash by hand in small teams.
The most hazardous materials commonly found in encampments include used needles and other sharp objects, propane tanks, gasoline cans and buckets or other containers that were once used as toilets, Wiseman said.
Crews will then rake through the land with equipment to ensure all humanmade debris has been removed.
Sometimes, Wiseman said an encampment will have an area that was used as a bathroom, or where chemicals once spilled, and the top layer of soil in that area needs to be removed.
The company prefers not to use chemicals to sanitize land unless the contaminated soil cannot be removed, as human waste will decompose over time, Wiseman said.
“What you want to get out of there is the manmade stuff, the chemicals, the gas, the oils,” Wiseman said. “You never really want to add chemicals into the ground unless there’s an area you can’t get to it because it’s so deep.”
Biohazard materials, such as needles or clothing covered in bodily fluids, need to be placed in marked plastic biohazard containers and brought to one of the few facilities in the country that dispose of such materials by incinerating them, Wiseman said.
A small sharps container costs Wiseman’s company $85 to $195 to dispose of while a larger 4.5-cubic-foot box generally costs a few hundred dollars to dump, he said.
The time it takes to clean the site of a former encampment and the cost to do so depends on the size of the property, what materials are needed and the site’s condition, Wiseman said.
The company has previously charged anywhere from $500 to “six figures” to clean an encampment, Wiseman said. For a site the size of Bangor’s encampment, he estimated the cost being “tens of thousands of dollars.”
“They’re all unique because of where the location is and what’s inside the camp,” Wiseman said. “Even if you have two camps underneath a bridge or on the side of a road, they vary so much because of what the people brought into the camp.”
Once the site is cleaned, it’s unclear what will happen to the land and when.
Last October, Bangor city councilors agreed to give a local nonprofit, Dignity First, the option to lease the land before any other entity. The organization hoped to one day use the land to build a tiny home community for people who are homeless.
Dignity First did not return requests for comment regarding whether it still plans to take over the land once it’s clean and ready for reuse.
