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www.CTGreenGuide.com FALL 2016 • CONNECTICUT GREEN GUIDE 17 Transit operator reclaims Middletown's orphan landfill T here aren't many potential uses for a landfill full of incinerator ash, but Middletown Area Transit (MAT) and its engineering project manager found one. Today the orphaned landfill, located at the inter- section of North Main Street and Pease Avenue, is the site of a 20,000-square-foot bus garage with office and maintenance areas and a washing station. The project cost approximately $10.5 million. In order to reuse the brownfield site, the quasi-municipal agency and its contractors, including Hamden engineering firm DTC, had to work around a number of challenges. Among them was the fact that the ash soils wouldn't support the construction of a building, a situation that was resolved through the use of a pile-supported foundation. The soil required special handling. In all, contractors removed 8,280 tons of hazardous and contaminated dirt. The building and its parking lot now act as the former landfill's permanent cap. MAT and its team also had to secure permission from the Department of Energy and Environmental Pro- tection to reopen the landfill and from the local zoning commission to build on the site, which is located in a Connecticut River floodplain. The garage is designed to withstand 100-year flood levels from the nearby river, with outlets and the main- tenance bay built at higher elevation. Besides finding a productive use for a brownfield, MTA also had green building systems installed in its new facility, which is heated and cooled by a geothermal well, and has ultra-low flow fixtures and efficient LED lighting. In addition, a mechanized system recycles 95 per- cent of the water used to wash MAT's fleet of 20-plus buses. And the facility receives supplemental heat from a furnace that uses recycled waste oil. Besides winning plaudits from DEEP's GreenCircle awards, the MAT project team also won an award of merit from the Connecticut Green Building Council in 2015. Middletown Transit Authority PROJECT ELEMENTS: Facility-wide; energy & climate change; water; material management; civic im- provements; innovation START DATE: Jan. 2013 COMPLETION DATE: Jan. 2015 Challenges the MTA faced in building its bus facility included that it was sited on an orphaned ash landfill in a floodplain. PHOTO | CONTRIBUTED CATEGORY: Government GreenCircle Sustainability Awards 2016