After years of public outcry and decades of lawsuits, remediation is officially set to begin in Parks Township, Armstrong County, at one of the largest nuclear waste dumps in the country.

A public meeting was held on Wednesday night between the community and the Army Corps of Engineers to discuss the process and what residents can expect once clean up begins sometime early to mid-winter.

Project manager Steven Vriesen said residents may also hear an alarm sound this week, which is being tested for worker safety.

"We have different alarm systems on site for worker safety. The ones that we'll be testing today have to do with radiation safety, again, very similar to like a fire drill that we all did back in school," Vriesen said. "This one, it's solely related to worker safety. It doesn't mean that there's any danger to the community, but it's just to alert the workers that there could be a potential incident."

Vriesen said the Army Corps of Engineers has nine air quality monitors set up around the 44-acre site that will stay in place throughout remediation.

"They're monitoring the air at the boundary of the site. So there's filters in there, they pull the air through, they sample it for radionuclides, beryllium. We also have real-time dust monitors at all of those locations also monitoring to ensure that there's no dust escaping the site," Vriesen said. "In addition to our nine air monitors, Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection has four of their own air monitors, co-located with ours. So they're collecting their own data which should match ours. Essentially, it's kind of an independent confirmation of our data."

The air monitors are one of many steps being taken to protect the community and those hired to remove 55-gallon drums full of radioactive waste that was buried at the site back in the 1960s.

"The materials in the trenches, it's random mixtures of radioactive and chemically contaminated debris," Vriesen said. "It resembles common trash. It's old lab equipment. It's old personal protective equipment. It's building materials."

Once remediation begins, the waste will be loaded into shipping containers on semi-trucks and hauled to New Beaver Borough before it's transferred onto rail cars and taken to a disposal facility in Clyde, Utah.

"The facilities that these wastes are going to are specifically designed and constructed to safely contain these types of materials," Vriesen said.

The $500 million project is expected to take at least six years.

"But something we emphasized in the meeting last night, safety is our top priority. We're going to work at the speed of safety," Vriesen said.

The remediation is something those who live in Parks Township have been waiting for for years. Vriesen said they've held public meetings on the topic every six months for years to answer the community's questions or concerns about safety.

"The waste here, they're very low active, you can literally hold them in your hand. You won't have any negative exposure from radiation," Vriesen said. "The reason that the wastes are being removed is because the risk comes from a long-term exposure and the inability to state that those wastes will remain intact and not be released in the environment."

He said workers will follow strict protocol when working at the site every day in order to protect themselves.

"They'll enter their work zones with personal protective equipment on. We'll be doing the actual remediation, the removal of the waste, the characterization, the packaging," Vriesen said. "We have a decontamination facility where those workers will safely remove that protective equipment. Eat lunch, return, put their equipment back on, go back, finish their day. At the end of the day, everybody comes back out, basically goes through that same procedure. They remove their personal protective equipment, they'll shower, they'll change into their street clothes, they'll have an end of day meeting to talk about what was accomplished, what they'll what work they'll be doing the next day. And then head safely home."