Kapitel spends over 1.3 million euros to clean its seaside property from contaminated soil
The real estate company Kapitel cleans up the soil at 10 Kalasadama St, the seaside property located next to Linnahall, as the electricity and heat production that occurred there for decades caused the soil to be contaminated. The removal and disposal of more than 10,000 cubic meters of contaminated soil carried out by EcoPro will cost more than 1.3 million euros.
ion and financing from Kapitel and with co-financing from the Environmental Investment Centre, the part of the contamination potentially threatening groundwater will be cleaned up, and more than 10,000 cubic metres of polluted soil will be excavated and disposed of. In addition, all the infrastructure related to the former pumping facilities, service buildings and fuel oil storage will be demolished. The works will be carried out by EcoPro AS, a company with an environmental permit for handling hazardous waste, and will be supervised by an archaeologist certified by the National Heritage Protection Board. The deadline for completion of the works is 10 June 2023.
Currently, the property at 10 Kalasadama St is partly covered with rubble and used as a parking lot and partly functions as a green space. “The goal this year is to eliminate the contaminated soil, as this is essential to ensure environmental safety in view of our property development plans. Simultaneously, we are applying for a permit to build an apartment hotel project with approximately 200 rooms,” says Kapitel’s Development Manager Martin Rebane. Kapitel is developing the project in line with the new urban space solution for the district – the city is working on a draft for Kalasadama Street that sees cars moved away from the seafront and the area reserved mainly for light traffic and greenery, opening the city of Tallinn up to the sea.
Background information
At the beginning of the 20th century, the land beneath the property was under the sea, with the shoreline of Tallinn Bay lying approximately 70–100 metres to the south. In 1913, electricity production started here, and from 1959 to 1979, it was where the city produced its heat (the most recent name for the complex was the Tallinn Heat and Power Plant). In the early years of electricity production, the plant was fired by peat, wood and coal, and from 1924 to 1961, it ran on oil shale. The oil shale ash generated in the production process was used to fill the adjacent beach area and shift the coastline to the north. At the beginning of the 1980s, the ash plateau that was thus formed became the site for Linnahall.
In 1961, the territory, which was covered with shale ash and construction debris, was fitted with an oil product storage facility consisting of four reinforced concrete tanks with a volume of 2,000 cubic metres and coated with a layer of soil, an underground oil product pumping facility and an unloading unit with two railway sidings. Oil shale and coal were transported to the boiler house via a coal trestle. After the storage facility for oil products was completed, the heat and electricity plant shifted to using fuel oil, which was brought to the storage facility by railway tankers and emptied at the unloading platform using the bottom loading method. From the unloading unit, fuel oil was directed to the receiving tank, from where it was drawn to the storage tanks through an underground fuel oil pumping facility.
After the heating plant ceased operations in the early 1990s, the oil product storage facility fell out of use and was demolished along with the rest of the building in 2008 and 2009. The demolition works did not set out to clean the property of contaminated soil, and that task was left to the future owners. In the early 2000s, the idea was born to turn the old power station into a cultural centre, and in 2015, it became the Tallinn Creative Hub.