USEDOM DUMP CLEAN UP
Task: Clean, dispose of contaminants, and remediate soil in drilling sludge trenches
Time frame: February 2000 to May 2000
Substances: 11,000 tons of highly contaminated soil, drilling sludge and pollutants
Usedom dump clean up
Exploratory drilling for oil on the Usedom island has left behind a number of drilling sludge catch basins. Two of those basins in the vicinity of the Lütow community contained highly contaminated soils and sludge that had to be removed to eliminate actual endangering of environment with the goal of preparing the land for farming.
Information
The varieties of contaminated substances in the drilling sludge, as well as the differing types and levels of contamination, necessitated a comparable variety of clean-up and disposal tech-nologies. Compounding the problem, the mixtures contained foreign substances that had to be sorted out and removed. Lobbe's vertical cutter was used to condition the sludge to solidify it to the point where it could be landfilled.
Following that, the recovered materials were disposed of and the trenches backfilled with top soil from the area. The entire project - conditioning 11,000 tons of sludge - was accomplished in the record time of less than 10 weeks.