MADAWASKA – Men and machinery were digging Monday through an old dump site on town-owned property, looking to excavate barrels buried on the property nearly 25 years ago.

As many as a dozen barrels filled with chemicals may be involved in the operation. The excavation, retrieval and environmental reclamation project is being paid for by Fraser Papers Nexfor, according to an official of the Maine Department of Environmental Protection.

Several workers at the site working behind a line of yellow ribbons tagged “hot zone” wore silver hazardous materials gear, including masks and headgear. Several other people were behind the yellow line. A huge excavator also was at the site, along with several pickup trucks and trailers loaded with barrels and other gear.

The Cote Farm site was used by the town for several years as a sludge disposal area, with sludge from the Madawaska Wastewater Department spread on fields. The site was licensed by the DEP for sludge disposal.

The 60-acre site also has an old farm dump on it. Two years ago, the DEP installed monitoring wells around the dump site, but no ground pollution has been found.

“We don’t know what’s buried here,” Brian A. Beneski, an oil and hazardous materials specialist with the DEP’s Division of Site Investigation and Remediation, said Tuesday. “We have had complaints [at the DEP] about drums buried here for years.

“We won’t know what’s in there until it’s removed and tested,” Beneski said. “We do know it’s a hot zone.

“We did some geomagnetic surveys a year ago and found three areas where drums may be buried here,” the DEP specialist said. “We are digging up two of the sites now.”

Earlier Tuesday, the 11-person crew working at the site dug up three 55-gallon barrels of chemicals. Beneski said they can’t be certain what was in the barrels until tests are done, but it looked like some kind of dye.

The two sites they are digging up are within 200 feet of each other. The Cote site is about three-quarters of a mile from the east shore of Long Lake, and about 500 yards from a seasonal brook near the Lake Shore Road. The site is almost directly along the eastern boundary of the Birch Point Golf Club.

The cleanup work is being done by Clean Harbor Environmental Services of Portland, with the assistance of Soderberg Contractors of Caribou.

Beneski said that Fraser is paying for the cleanup of the site, but the company has not admitted that the barrels come from its operation at Madawaska.

“We have no proof that Fraser put this stuff here,” Beneski said. “The word is that the barrels come from Fraser.”

“While we have no evidence that the drums found at the site were placed there by Fraser Papers, we have decided that cleaning up this part of the site is the right thing to do,” Dick Arnold, vice president and general manager of the Fraser Madawaska operations, wrote Tuesday in a press release. “We are committed to the safety and health of the community and want this area cleaned up.”

The Fraser-funded cleanup came about after the company reached an agreement with the DEP regarding the disposition of the site.

Fraser Papers will bear “no legal responsibility for the waste material associated with the drums, but the company will cover the cost of recovering and disposing of the drums by an authorized hazardous waste contractor,” Dick Marston, manager of human resources, said in the press release.

Fraser officials said they wouldn’t know the cost of the cleanup operation until the work is completed.

Yves Lizotte, foreman of the Madawaska Public Works Department, remembers digging the holes to put the barrels in the ground.

“It was around 1977 or 1978 when I was given orders to dig the holes with a town backhoe,” he said Tuesday. “There must have been 10 or 12 barrels that were put in the holes I dug.

“They came from Fraser,” he remembered. “I didn’t know what was in the barrels. I just had orders to dig, and I did.”

Louis A. Cyr was town manager of Madawaska during the 1970s. He remembers barrels being buried on the site, but he would not say they belonged to Fraser.

He was surprised the site was being excavated after all these years.

Town Manager Arthur Faucher said the site was identified by the DEP several years ago.

“I have been told there are drums there, and I was told they contained dye,” he said. “The site was on the federal Superfund program for several years.”

“The DEP has known about this site for years,” Joe Bourgoin, Madawaska wastewater superintendent, said Tuesday. “This effort has gotten serious over the last several years.

“The location of the barrels was identified a year ago,” he said. “There seems to be no contamination, and that may be because the soils in the area are clay.”

Bourgoin said two of the barrels at the site were snagged during some testing at the site last year. He thought one barrel contained dye and the other contained some kind of polymer.

The town official said monitoring wells around the old farm dump have shown no soil or water contamination in the area.