"I know it's been a long time coming but now we're here and this is a very fateful day," Gibbons said during a ceremony at the site before he and state environmental chief Leo Drozdoff, Henderson Mayor Jim Gibson and Basic Management Inc. Chairman Rick Kellogg sounded the whistle to begin the cleanup work.

When asked what guarantees there'll be that the master-planned community won't become another Love Canal like the Niagara Falls, N.Y., neighborhood where buried toxic waste made residents ill in the late 1970s, Gibbons cited environmental compliance he expects from the public-private partnership.

"First of all, when you look back at the regulatory process, the fact that the state of Nevada has been a willing, positive proactive partner in making sure that the environmental regulations have been complied with, (then) when you do that you get better cooperation, you get better work out of people and you get a better result," he said.

In addition, on-site oversight from the Nevada Department of Environmental Protection "means there's a better working relationship, a more positive approach to make sure we're doing the right thing," he said.

The right thing will be to remove all contaminated soil from about 400 acres of the site where about 70 evaporation ponds have gone dry. Over the next two years, the tainted soil will be dug up and hauled to a sealed landfill, consisting of a 35-foot-deep, 40-foot-tall lined pit about two miles west of the site.

Ron Sahu, project manager for Basic Remediation Co., said there will be multiple layers of composite liners to hold the soil. The pit will be capped with three or four layers of synthetic plastics and clean soil.

The waste will be contained from both above and below the surface and will be surrounded by groundwater monitoring wells, he said.

The contaminants include arsenic and other metals and magnesium chloride from Basic Magnesium Inc. production facilities that were used from 1941 through the 1970s.

In addition, there are remnants of pesticides and chlorinated benzenes from when DDT was produced by Montrose and Stauffer chemical companies from the mid-1950s to the 1960s, Sahu said.

A steering committee of six former and current companies at the BMI complex entered a voluntary agreement in 1991 with the Nevada Environmental Protection Division to assess and remediate the land contaminated by historic waste disposal practices.

Contact reporter Keith Rogers at krogers@ reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0308.