The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is giving the city of Atlanta and its economic development agency —Invest Atlanta — $800,000 to study and cleanup contaminated land, including part of the Atlanta Beltline, the agency announced this week.
The Beltline is a city project to convert more than 20 miles of former railroad tracks encircling the city into a multi-use transit path.
A half million of the EPA funds will be used to clean up polluted land on the Beltline’s southside corridor from Windsor Avenue SW to Milton Avenue SE. The site is 0.85 miles of an abandoned railroad corridor that was an active freight route between 1899 and 1914 and is currently being used as an unpaved interim trail.
“It is contaminated with heavy metals and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons,” according to an EPA press release.
The other $300,000 will be used to study and develop cleanup plans that target the Groundwork Atlanta/Chattahoochee River area, Proctor Creek Watershed, Atlanta Area-Wide Plan area, and Jonesboro Road Rail Corridor, according to the EPA.
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