Last of three parts

NAVASSA – What will happen once the creosote contamination is cleaned up at the former wood-treatment site here? The town will have a say in answering that question.

The future uses of the site also depend on the results of an ongoing “massive investigation” of the contamination, explained Erik Spalvins, the Environmental Protection Agency’s remedial project manager for the Navassa site. Everyone’s goal, he said, is to begin some kind of redevelopment as quickly as reasonably possible.

“We don’t want to leave a cleaned-up site with a fence around it. We want to leave something more,” Spalvins said.

The wetlands at the site, about 92 acres, became property of state in the 1990s. Most of the property – Kerr-McGee owned about 251 acres total – now belongs to an entity known as the Multistate Environmental Response Trust. The trust was created in 2011 as part of a bankruptcy settlement involving more than 400 polluted Kerr-McGee sites in 24 states. Money given to the trust from the settlement can only be used to clean up those sites.

Spalvins said the upland areas, parts of the site never used for wood treatment, will eventually be removed from the Superfund designation. Uses of these areas may not be restricted at all. Other parts of the site, while they may never be appropriate for single-family homes – “That may not be an efficient use of funds,” Spalvins said – could see some kind of residential use.

“Based on what the community is interested in seeing, some type of residential use could be possible as long as we don’t have that direct exposure,” Spalvins said.

It is likely businesses could operate there, possibly public facilities.

“We’re really trying to focus on what the community’s vision is to guide that future land use and how we accommodate that future land use with the engineering and construction we have to do,” Spalvins said.

The site is an unusual property, he noted, in that it’s a time capsule where nothing has happened since the late 1970s. Otherwise, the property would have likely been developed.

EPA officials, when they meet again with the community later this year, hope to build a relationship that allows an exchange of ideas. Spalvin said he expects frequent meetings with local government officials or a community group, in addition to meetings with contractors, state officials and representatives from the trust, but there’s no definite timeframe for redevelopment.

“We’re trying to have a regular presence in the community as we do this cleanup to give them a voice in what happens in their backyard,” Spalvins said. “I hope in the next year the community can articulate a vision of what they’d like to see.”

The Investigation

Multistate Trust contractors have, during the past 18 months or so, taken about 500 samples at the Kerr-McGee site. Some of the unknowns at the site include how deep or widespread contamination is in the soil and groundwater and whether contaminants are migrating from drainage swales on the site into tidal marshes. It’s also been unclear whether people can be exposed to contamination and whether that exposure poses an unacceptable risk. Also, it hasn’t been established whether vapors from groundwater contamination might migrate through soils into future buildings at the site.

“We had a pretty massive investigation in the swamp where we put some mats out and we were able to drive out over the swamp and take samples so we could understand what was happening under the swamp and pin down exactly where contamination is, how bad it is and how far it went,” Spalvins said.

The results will determine which parts of the site need action and where it might do more harm than good if action is taken.

“We don’t want to take an action in the swamp if it’s going to harm the swamp and if the contamination isn’t causing any problems with the ecosystem,” Spalvins said.

Later, possibly this winter, contractors will start to look closer at areas they have not been able to access previously. By next spring, the team will begin to summarize where contamination exists and what can be done.

The work takes time, Spalvins said. “Every time we collect samples we find more questions,” he said.

The goal is to meet at least twice yearly. Officials with the state Department of Environmental Quality are also involved.

What Are the Risks?

Worker safety, the health of nearby residents and the danger of further damage to the environment are major considerations with a project like this, Spalvins said.

“The whole point of the cleanup is to protect human health and the environment,” he said.

In terms of the environment, decisions must be made as to whether to excavate or immobilize the contamination. There are tradeoffs in both.

“Do we destroy the swamp to save it?” Spalvins said. “At what level is contamination causing issues with wildlife or unacceptable exposure up the food chain, or people? Where do we draw the line?”

The marsh itself offers some advantages, mainly because of the large amount of organic materials that absorb contamination like a carbon filter.

“One of main features of the groundwater at this site is the tidal nature of this ecosystem. It complicates it but it also lets mother nature do a better job of dealing with the contamination on her own,” Spalvins said. “Twice daily, the change in tide means groundwater is not moving in the same direction or at the same speed all day. That’s done a lot to help reduce the overall impacts.”

Restoring the Ecology

Because the contamination damaged natural resources, including fish, wildlife, water and wetlands, the Navassa Trustee Council was formed as part of the 2014 court settlement that spawned the cleanup. The council includes representatives from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and NCDEQ to oversee restoration or offsetting of natural resources that were damaged.

In addition to the money and effort focused on cleaning up contamination at the site, about $23 million from the settlement is dedicated to restoring and correcting natural resources lost to contamination. NOAA is the lead trustee dealing with the natural resource damage assessment.

Habitat restoration will take place away from the Kerr-McGee site, said Howard Schnabolk of the NOAA Restoration Center in Charleston, South Carolina. NOAA is seeking help from the public in how to best spend that $23 million.

“We are charged with addressing the ecological injury,” Schnabolk said Tuesday. “The community has a lot of other issues, human health issues, damage to their property. We’ve made an effort to explain where our trustee group can help and where we can’t. The EPA effort has a lot more focus on social support – jobs, economic development, social issues.”

NOAA reached out to the public about a year ago for ideas on how to proceed.

“We put word out to the public explaining what we’re doing and that we’re looking for habitat-restoration projects to compensate for that ecological loss,” Schnabolk said.

The public responded with various ideas, he said. NOAA is now in the process of evaluating proposals.

“We intend to start spending some of the funds on projects soon, but before we spend, we need to put a restoration plan together and get it out for a 30-day review,” Schnabolk said, adding that the goal is to release the plan to the public early in 2017. “We’re still willing to entertain project ideas from the public. We haven’t officially allotted one dollar yet.”

The North Carolina Coastal Federation has applied for about $1.8 million in grants to do restoration of marsh and estuarine habitats in the lower Cape Fear River, an affected area about 15 miles downriver from the Kerr-McGee site. The federation’s proposal includes building fish and oyster reefs at Carolina Beach State Park.

Some in Navassa have expressed frustration about how the money may be spent. Schnabolk acknowledged the process may be difficult for the community to understand.

“We struggled a little bit to explain,” he said.

Environmental justice advocate Veronica Carter said many in town were upset when the trust settlement representatives held a meeting last fall to discuss restoration.

“They were like, ‘Wait a minute, what about us? Our people have been dying off for years,’” Carter said. “You’re more concerned about the critters than the people.”

Carter said it’s imperative to clean up the entire river basin, not just the Kerr-McGee site. “They drilled 78 feet down (in Sturgeon Creek) and found creosote,” she said.

Schnabolk said the mayor has helped bridge the communication gap with townsfolk.

Power Struggle

Navassa has been without a town administrator for several years. The town council had assigned certain administrative duties to Mayor Eulis Willis, but in January, the board voted 3-2 to strip the mayor of those duties. Willis said the decision related to “town business in general” and had nothing to do with his involvement with the Kerr-McGee cleanup. But that could change.

“The major impact that could happen is if, administratively, they decide ‘Well, mayor, we don’t want you to have nothing to do with none of this.’ And they could put some checks in place,” Willis said.

Councilman Athelston Bethel began a four-year term on the town board in 2015. Bethel said he’d like to see the council more involved in decisions related to the Kerr-McGee site.

“We’re asked to vote without having all the information,” Bethel said. “I’m his biggest opposition. I like the mayor, he’s good for the town, but we always felt the mayor ran the town and not the council.”

Bethel said he and other board members were briefed on the cleanup and restoration.

“We walked through the property and discussed what we would like to see done with the property and that’s as far as it went,” Bethel said.

Still, Bethel said he feels comfortable with what he knows, but he wants to be in on the discussions and not being invited to meetings about the site bothers him. This includes a locally appointed restoration group.

Louis “Bobby” Brown is a member of that group, which he said met Friday. Brown told CRO he couldn’t discuss what happened at the meeting because he’s bound by a confidentiality agreement.

Bethel said it’s possible the mayor doesn’t want the town council’s input.

“Perhaps it would destroy what he’s trying to do,” Bethel said. “He goes to Atlanta to EPA meetings. He comes back and doesn’t say anything to the council. He talks to the committee. His thing is that the committee is responsible.”

Willis defended his role in the process. “I’m the one who understands what’s going on,” he said.

Schnabolk agreed, adding that he stays in close contact with the mayor.

“We’ve worked through the mayor to understand what the community’s needs are,” Schnabolk said. “The mayor’s done a good job at working with local landowners to identify projects and put us in contact with them. He’s like a broker. He’s the go-to person for me.”

Willis has long been the most familiar face of Navassa, appearing as town spokesman on numerous issues during his tenure. He’s also led several fights when it appeared the town had been slighted. His advocacy on behalf of the town, where his family goes back at least nine generations, includes fighting for highway and bridge funding, economic-development attention and revitalization grants. The highway into town bears Willis’ name. Willis said he’s a direct descendant of the first black man to purchase land in Navassa back in 1875.

Bethel said other voices in town deserve to be heard. Increased media coverage of town business could help open the discussion, he said.

“I’d like to see more press at meetings. It’s vitally important at this juncture when we’re fighting for what is right for this town,” Bethel said. “Navassa is sort of a close-knit town and people don’t like the fact that the mayor has all the say with the media. They feel like they don’t get a true picture.”

Bethel praised the mayor and his fellow council members for working for change, but he said much is needed in town, especially a library and a cultural center. The town, along with the North Carolina Land Trust, received earlier this year a $25,000 grant from the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation to create plans for a heritage center focused on the community’s Gullah-Geechee culture and to protect land in the vicinity with Gullah-Geechee significance. Much more is needed, Bethel said.

“We don’t have anything in Navassa,” Bethel said. “We don’t have a service station. There’s not a coffee shop for the guys to hang out in the morning.”

Looking Ahead

Mike Hargett, Brunswick County’s director of economic development and planning, says town officials appear to be on the right track.

“It’s a forward-thinking community and they embrace progressive ideas,” Hargett said. “We’ve seen brownfields developed into usable sites. I think they’re to be commended for those efforts.”

Hargett said the Kerr-McGee site would be attractive for commercial or residential because of its waterfront.

“The water frontage on the river gives quick access to the port and Navassa will soon have very convenient access to I-140 with an interchange that will provide access to the interstate. Water and sewer are available and rail. Those are pretty key components to serving an industrial site,” Hargett said.

The only way to make the Kerr-McGee site marketable is to clean up the contamination, Hargett said. “Lenders are not willing to finance a project where there are environmental issues,” he said. A clean site, however, could work for a mixture of industrial and residential uses.

“Mixed use is a great idea,” Hargett said. “The waterfront location is ideal for residential and with advanced manufacturing that we have these days, they certainly could co-exist with an intelligent site design. There are some sites like that in the county. Navassa has approved a site that includes a mixture of commercial and residential called River Bend. It’s undeveloped as yet but I thought it was a very intelligent design for that site.”

Willis has pursued economic development projects on his own. He led efforts to lure a boat manufacturer to town. He also fought to attract an auto and appliance recycling company that wanted to build a landfill in Brunswick County. The boat manufacturer, closed in 2008. The recycling company, Hugo Neu, never broke ground. The project met widespread resistance because of its potential environmental effects. Critics said the company eyed Navassa because of its low-income, predominantly black population, but the company said the site was recommended by state and county officials. Willis is still upset the project didn’t happen.

To Learn More

• Multistate Environmental Response Trust
• NOAA’s Damage Assessment, Remediation and Restoration Program
• Brunswick County Economic Development

Read Part I: “A century of contamination”

Read Part II: “From guano to creosote”

Second of three parts

NAVASSA – Creosote was one of numerous toxic materials handled at the various industries that have operated here over the decades. Industry brought needed jobs, but in many cases contamination remained after the factories closed.

Veronica Carter serves on the North Carolina Coastal Federation’s board of directors and as the federation’s representative on the Southeastern North Carolina Environmental Justice Coalition. She said the number of contamination sites in and around Navassa is “mind boggling” considering the size of the community, which covers 14 square miles and includes about 1,500 residents.

“If you’re talking environmental justice, these guys are like the poster child because the demographics of the county are probably like 85 percent white and the rest minorities. Navassa is the flipside of that,” Carter said.

Navassa is quiet and rural, seemingly much farther removed from the urban bustle of nearby Wilmington, but a new highway under construction could soon bring big changes. There is a steady flow of big trucks in and out of town because of the highway construction and local industry that remains. A major rail yard here provides a vital connection for the state port in Wilmington and the state’s interior, but the town sees little economic benefit from it.

Neither does the town benefit much from the wealth and recent growth of the surrounding area. There are no golf courses here, although there are about 30 elsewhere in Brunswick County. There is no neighborhood of waterfront “McMansions,” as may be found along the Intracoastal Waterway and at the Brunswick Island beaches just a few miles south. What might have been prime real estate with scenic river views has remained undeveloped for more than 40 years because of the creosote contamination at the 251-acre Kerr-McGee Chemical Corp. site. Contamination has already been addressed and some commercial redevelopment has occurred at other sites around Navassa, but the Great Recession hit hard here and efforts to lure new investment since then have yielded little benefits.

Railroads and Fertilizer

Because of its prime location with rail and river access and proximity to downtown Wilmington, five miles east, the village was home to various chemical, meat-packing and petroleum operations. As many as four now-defunct fertilizer companies employed more than 4,000 workers at one time.

“Here I am growing up in the ’60s and we’ve got all these fertilizer plants, and even though we’re small and everything, I still grew up in an industrial economy,” said Mayor Eulis Willis. “It’s so much different from the agricultural, agrarian background that most of Brunswick County has had.”

The town was incorporated in 1977 and includes CSX Transportation’s Davis Yard, the regional base for the railroad’s switching operations. Three miles long with a railcar capacity of 2,250, Davis Yard has 55 separate tracks, loading and unloading facilities and warehouses. It connects the Port of Wilmington by rail to points to the west and southwest.

The U.S. Postal Service named the village much earlier, in 1885, after the Navassa Guano Co., a fertilizer factory that opened here in 1869. The factory was built on a site known as Meares’ Bluff, near where the railroad bridge across the Brunswick River had been built two years earlier.

Navassa Guano Fertilizer Co. was formed after large guano deposits were discovered in 1856 on Navassa Island, a small, uninhabited island about 15 miles off the coast of Jamaica. A group of Wilmington investors arranged to have ships that delivered North Carolina turpentine products to the West Indies return with guano from Navassa Island. The fertilizer manufactured here, including phosphate-based product beginning in 1884, was then transported by rail to the state’s interior.

More fertilizer companies followed. Armour Fertilizer Works built a plant here in 1919. Royster Fertilizer came in 1927 and finally Smith-Douglas Fertilizer in 1946.  Newspapers across the region, including the Raeford News-Journal and the Lumberton Robesonian, reported the Smith-Douglas plant opening at the time.

“The Smith-Douglass plant at Navassa will add materially to an industry that has long been famous at that location,” according to the reports.

The Cleanup Begins

Navassa Guano Co. sold its property to Virginia Chemical Co. in 1927 and the operation was eventually taken over by Estech General Chemical Co. Mobil Oil Corp. eventually took over the plant assets. Another merger in 1999 created ExxonMobil, which negotiated with EPA officials in 2005 to clean up the site where the agency had found elevated levels of arsenic and lead in soil, groundwater and marsh sediment. ExxonMobil spent $10 million on the project in 2006 and continues to monitor groundwater there.

The EPA began in 2013 cleaning up a former waste oil-recycling plant that operated here from 1993 until 2013. High concentrations of polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, and heavy metals were found at the P&W Waste Oil Services Inc. site. Company owner Benjamin Franklin Pass of Leland was sentenced in 2014 to 42 months in prison and ordered to pay $21.4 million in restitution for clean-up costs associated with the “widespread” environmental contamination that resulted from mishandling of used oil contaminated with PCBs, according to the U.S. Justice Department.

“Right now, we’ve got three Superfunds and two of them have been cleaned up,” Willis said. “P&W Oil has been cleaned up, the Navassa plant was cleaned up and now we’re working on Kerr-McGee. Now, we haven’t even talked about the little brownfield sites that are involved.”

There’s also the former site of another creosote operation, Carolina Creosoting Corp. on Navassa Road. Other sites of concern include the Royster Fertilizer site off Royster Road and the Smith-Douglas site on Cedar Hill Road.

Also, about 600 workers from Brunswick and surrounding counties lost their jobs in 2013 when the DAK Americas, formerly Dupont, plant near Navassa closed. The plant made polymer resin, polyester fiber and raw materials for resins and fibers. Willis said the shuttered plant could pose additional environmental threats to the community.

Not in Navassa but also nearby are the coal-ash ponds at the Duke Energy Sutton Steam Plant just across the river.

A Company Town

Back in the 1920s and ’30s, much of the land in Navassa was subdivided into small lots for homes, similar to those seen in mill towns.

“That’s all it was, just a little industrial, company town. That was the kind of environment I grew up in,” Willis said.

Louis “Bobby” Brown, 85, of Navassa, worked at the creosote operation for a few years in the early 1950s. He said the work was hot and nasty but job opportunities in Navassa at that time were limited. There were basically only two employers in Navassa and the creosote job paid better, about 75 cents an hour, Brown recalled.

“There wasn’t nothing else out here. You could go to the creosote plant or the sawmill and the sawmill didn’t pay as well,” Brown said.

Johnnie Willis, 88, another surviving worker at the creosote operation, said the wages were lower, about 25-35 cents an hour. Brown didn’t disagree. “Seventy-five or 25 or 35 cents an hour, it wasn’t near a dollar, I know that,” Brown said.

Other workers, including those who unloaded crossties from boxcars, were paid piecemeal, about 5 cents per tie, which often worked out well for hard workers.

“They used to make more money than I did,” Brown said.

The two sides of the creosote production line were delineated by color. Logs peeled of their bark and yet to be treated with the tarry preservative were stored on what was considered the “white side” of the production, while the treatment process and the subsequent handling of treated logs were on the “black side.”

“I worked on the white side,” Brown said.

The differences in black and white also applied to the wages paid. Supervisors at the creosote plant, nearly always white men, were paid more, Brown said. Racial inequality was part of life here.

“A black man couldn’t even buy a Coke,” Brown said. “The only store in town would only sell Pepsi or Nehi to blacks, Cokes were only for whites. I used to say all the time if I had the power of the Lord, I’d make all white people be black for 24 hours and make all black people be white for 24 hours, just so they could see how it felt.”

Few Resources

Mayor Willis said the efforts to get contaminated sites around town cleaned up have been successful only through perseverance.

Willis appealed for years to get the EPA to clean up the Estech site and also contamination found at the Cape Fear Meat Packing Co. site, near where the I-140 bypass is under construction north of town.

“For us living with the environmental issues that we’ve got, there’s not a hell of a lot of resources to address them. And when I start reaching out and asking for help, there ain’t a whole lot of help coming,” Willis said.

Part of the problem is the state’s tier system of scoring for economic assistance, which is based on per capita income, and the relative affluence in communities nearby.

The N.C. Department of Commerce annually ranks the state’s 100 counties based on economic well-being and assigns each a tier designation. Tiers are calculated according to counties’ average unemployment rate, median household income, percentage growth in population and adjusted property tax base per capita.

The 40 most distressed counties are designated as Tier 1, the next 40 as Tier 2 and the 20 least distressed as Tier 3. This system is used by various state programs to encourage economic activity in the less prosperous areas of the state, but Willis is among those who say the method is flawed.

“The two (most economically sound counties) in the whole area are Brunswick and New Hanover, but we rank with Bladen and Columbus (counties) at the bottom, if you look at the per capita income in Navassa,” Willis said. “Every time I go to try and get some help or some assistance, I hear, ‘No, you’re from a rich area.’”

The median income for a family in Navassa in 2010 was $35,179. For Brunswick County, the median income for a family was $42,037. For New Hanover County, the median income for a family was $50,861.

According to the 2010 census, the town’s racial makeup was about 27 percent white and nearly 64 percent African-American. More than 27 percent of Navassa’s population live below the poverty line, with a Navassa’s population was about 1,500 at the time of the 2010 census. That’s compared to 479 in 2000. The huge growth was mainly because residential areas surrounding the town, communities called Old Mill, Phoenix and Cedar Hill, were annexed during the decade.

“Immediately after that, we were tagged in North Carolina as one of the fastest-growing communities, but it wasn’t really the case because of annexation,” Willis said.

It also took a fight to get the state Department of Transportation to add interchanges linking Navassa to the I-140 bypass under construction. Interchanges weren’t included in the original plan, but Willis, a member of the transportation-planning group for the area, protested the decision, citing a case where the DOT put a road through a black community without consideration for the community. It was an environmental justice precedent for highway construction, Willis said.

“The federal government says that if you spend any of our money, from now on, you will make sure that the minority community, if its adversely impacted, that they’ll have a way to get out,” Willis said. “I started emailing everyone that would listen and the next thing you know we got two interchanges in Navassa.”

The ongoing highway project has displaced some of the town’s few white residents.

“We had a nice little enclave of people, 35 or 40 whites, right along where the interchange is going,” Willis said. “Well, DOT came in and bought them all out.”

A few of the displaced families stayed in town but most moved away, Willis said.

‘A good position for growth’

The bypass, and its interchanges are expected to ease access. Willis and other town officials say the new highway will bring needed economic opportunity. Officials began planning years ago for the changes.

“The town is in a good position for growth due, in large part, to the availability of relatively inexpensive land that is undeveloped,” according to Navassa’s 20-year future land-use plan adopted in 2012.

The town’s “gateway plan” includes two, already approved planned-unit developments in the vicinity of the interchanges that are permitted to add a combined 5,500 residential units over the next 20 years, as long as there is adequate water and sewer capacity.

The plan also calls for preserving Navassa’s Gullah-Geechee heritage. This heritage is reflected in the current population of Navassa who are descendants of slaves who worked the rice plantations of the Cape Fear River area.

Trustees of the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation earlier this year awarded the town and the North Carolina Coastal Land Trust a $25,000 grant to develop plans to conserve Gullah-Geechee heritage. The money is to go to produce concept plans for a state Gullah-Geechee cultural heritage center and to protect lands related to Gullah-Geechee history near the town.

While some residents of Navassa have a direct link to the culture, Willis said the concept is a relatively new understanding among townsfolk. It’s important, he said, to help the town establish its own identity.

This identity is also part of the reason for the annual Navassa Homecoming Parade, which was held Saturday. The celebration has been a tradition since 1982.

Despite these efforts, the mayor says his town’s identity is threatened. There’s been talk in recent years of a consolidation of the town governments of Navassa, Leland and Bellville. This would destroy Navassa’s identity, Willis said.

Another issue, Willis said, is that 60 percent of Navassa residents have a Leland mailing address because of the way the U.S. Postal Service routes mail.

“There’s the identity thing there,” Willis said.

To Learn More

• Navassa Island
• Navassa Guano Co.
• Environmental justice in America
• Gullah-Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor

Thursday: The clean-up plan

Part I: “A century of contamination.”

First of three parts

NAVASSA – Recently collected soil samples from the site of a former wood-treatment operation here show more of the worst contaminants from creosote are in the tidal marsh at the site than environmental officials had anticipated.

Federal environmental officials say they are almost ready to present to town representatives draft reports from an ongoing investigation into how to clean up and redevelop the 251-acre, former Kerr-McGee Chemical Corp. site. One conclusion from tests done so far is that there is more of “the primary contaminant of concern,” polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, or PAHs, in the marsh sediment at the site than first expected, Jamie Kritzer, a spokesman for the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality, said Friday.

“We’re confident we will be able to clean up the site sufficiently to protect public health and the environment in the future,” Kritzer said.

Investigative work got started a year and a half ago at the site, beginning the latest decontamination project in a predominantly black community that has for a century endured a series of environmental calamities resulting from local industries.

In this three-part special report that continues through Thursday, CRO will explore Navassa’s industrial history, how it has affected town residents and what the future may hold as the contamination is addressed and prospects for redeveloping the site become clearer.

The contaminated property is a short distance across the Cape Fear and Brunswick rivers from downtown Wilmington. It was home to an operation that, under three different owners between 1936 and 1974, dried and pressure treated lumber for railroad ties, utility poles and pilings using a creosote solution as a preservative. The land, which is now fenced off and marked with “Danger – Keep Out” signs, hasn’t been occupied since 1980. That’s when the factory was dismantled. The creosote residues in unlined wastewater ponds and creosote sludge from the bottom of storage tanks were mixed with clean soil and buried on site. The coal-tar-based substance fouled  groundwater, soils, the creek bottom and riverbeds. The EPA placed the site on its Superfund National Priorities List in 2010.

Money to clean up the site comes from the largest settlement the U.S. Justice Department has won to clean up pollution, here and at other locations. The more than $5 billion settlement against the Kerr-McGee Corp. and other related subsidiaries of Anadarko Petroleum Corp. took effect in January 2015. More than $4.4 billion goes to federal and state governments and several environmental response trusts to clean up contaminated properties. The awards are in addition to more than $270 million in recoveries from a 2011 bankruptcy settlement with Tronox Inc., the result of a fraud case in which Kerr-McGee was found to have spun off assets to a shell corporation to avoid paying billions of dollars in liabilities.

About $89.5 million of the Anadarko proceeds were designated for the investigation and cleanup of the Kerr-McGee site here, according to a May 2014 EPA document. The multistate environmental response trust received more than $4.2 million in 2011 for additional site investigations and studies in Navassa. An additional nearly $23 million, including about $900,000 received in 2011, was committed to restoring natural resources here.

The EPA is leading the investigation, which also involves the DEQ and other state and federal agencies and a court-appointed trust. Town government representatives and a local community group meet periodically to discuss the project and have been kept apprised of the work, although not everyone in Navassa is happy with the flow of information.

A public meeting, open to the entire community, to discuss the findings could happen by late summer or early fall. “I hope we can do something in August,” said Erik Spalvins, the EPA’s remedial project manager for the Superfund site.

The most recent meeting was last fall. Spalvins said more meetings are planned. The idea, he said, is stay in touch with the community.

“We have a lot of draft information and we’re trying to figure out at what point are we ready to start presenting some of the draft information. We don’t want to wait until it’s a thousand-page report. We’re trying to make sure we have a complete picture when we go to the community,” he said.

Kritzer said the fieldwork part of the investigation is “close to concluding,” but no date is certain.

The contamination is largely in the wetlands areas of the site, 30 to 40 acres. Contractors used mats to move heavy equipment out onto the marsh where they drilled into soils and sediments to take samples. Samples were also taken in upland areas at the site. Materials collected were subjected to an optical screening tool, a laser, in the field to detect PAHs.

Samples were also collected for lab assessment as a backup. Reports are being written based on the data collected but more environmental collection and sampling may be necessary. Eventually, a feasibility study will be done on the best ways to remove the creosote contamination.

‘Cre-sote’

“In the neighborhood, everybody calls it ‘cre-sote,’ without the ‘o’ in it,” Mayor Eulis Willis said recently.

In Navassa, creosote provided jobs, but Willis said the tradeoff was premature death for many here, including nearly entire families. Officials know the contamination has leached into groundwater but proving a health link, however, may not be possible.

Creosote has been widely used as a wood preservative for more than a century. It’s nasty stuff that’s also been used as a pesticide. It can make people sick, depending on the level, duration and frequency of exposure, and the EPA says it’s a probable human carcinogen. Long-term exposure, especially thorough direct contact with skin during wood treatment, has resulted in skin cancer and cancer of the scrotum.

Creosote from coal tar is the most common form of creosote in the workplace and is the type that was used at the Navassa site. Coal tar creosote is a thick, oily liquid that is typically amber to black in color. It burns easily and does not easily dissolve in water.

The EPA has classified 56 wood-treatment sites as Superfund sites since 1980. Cleanup of contaminated soil, sludge, sediments and water has been completed at about 40 of the sites.

The creosote operation in Navassa took place on about 60 acres in the western portion of the property, which officials now refer to as the production area. Much of this area is wetlands along Sturgeon Creek, a tributary of the Brunswick River. Creosote contamination was first identified in soil and water in the 1980s. State officials turned to the EPA for help when the North Carolina Department of Transportation found creosote in the marsh when it began work more than 10 years ago to replace a bridge over Sturgeon Creek on the main road into town.

“The thing that got this site into the Superfund program is that it was on the water and there was a lot of contamination found in the swamp and in the sediments,” Splavins said. “Also, the state was not getting the type of response it needed from the property owner. The states generally have a lot of control over these regulatory programs but when a state is not getting a response, they ask EPA to come in.”

The program is a safety net, Splavins explained, for contaminated sites that are too big, too complicated and too expensive for states to manage, or when the responsible party is not cooperative.

“Those are the sites Superfund is meant to catch,” Splavins said.

At one time, creosote operations could be found all around the Southeast because of the typically wet conditions here and the need for treated wood. Treating operations proliferated soon after World War II, but they started closing down in the late 1970s as environmental and workplace-safety regulations came into play.

“The way they operated, they could not do it and do it safely,” Splavins said.

Surviving Workers

Few in Navassa can remember when wood was treated with creosote here.

Louis “Bobby” Brown, 85, of Navassa, worked at the Kerr-McGee site for about three years as a young man. That’s when the operation was owned by the Gulf State Creosoting Co.

“That was one of my first jobs,” Brown said, adding that he still resides near the site. “I worked out there before I went into the army in 1951.”

Brown was Navassa’s first mayor, serving 1977-99. He’s now a member of the local committee on the Kerr-McGee site.

Brown also stays busy working for a nonprofit organization in town. Brown’s coworkers at the Countywide Community Development Corp. say he keeps a hectic schedule, but Brown calls it a “part-time” job.

Back when he held the creosote job, Brown said he worked where the bark was stripped from logs prior to being treated. That usually kept him at a distance from the boiler plant, where conditions could be much harsher.

“It was a little skin irritation if you worked around the boiler plant. Get some of that heat coming off there and you’d get some irritation,” Brown said. “About three or four of us are the only ones living that used to work out there. The rest are dead. A lot of people who used to work out there died young.”

Johnnie Willis isn’t one of them. Now 88, he can usually be found working in the garden behind his house in town. That’s where he was Friday. Rake in hand, Willis appeared undeterred by the nearly 90-degree afternoon heat. Sweltering conditions are what he remembers most about the creosote job.

“It was hard, hot work,” Willis said, adding that the Gulf States company physician doled out salt pills to workers to replace sodium in the body lost to sweat.

“I worked there all my life, off and on, and a lot of my friends did.”

Willis said he also recalled teams of a half-dozen horses pulling logs at the site, that’s how heavy the work was. A few times, Willis looked for other opportunities, including taking work at one of the local fertilizer factories. Navassa was unusual in the area in terms of employment options. Willis kept going back to the creosote plant. His father also worked a creosote job, as did his father.

“My daddy was a World War I veteran and it was enough to make a small living and get a pension,” Willis said.

Willis said the creosote never appeared to affect his health. “I had a doctor tell me I was in good shape,” he said of a recent check-up.

It was working at a fertilizer factory in town, however, that caused him health problems. “The creosote job, the heat was the worst part,” Willis said.

An Industrial Town

Fertilizer was the other major industry in Navassa’s history. The town is the namesake of the first fertilizer company to open here. Production involved reacting phosphate with sulfuric acid, which also left a toxic mess.

Mayor Willis, a Navassa native with deep family roots here, has served as an elected town official for more than 36 years. Beginning as a town councilman, his tenure includes the past 14 years as mayor. He also wrote a book on the history of the community.

“No other community in Brunswick County comes close, in terms of environmental issues,” Willis said.

Navassa and the surrounding area were home to numerous rice plantations during the Antebellum period, including one owned by Thomas Meares that produced in 1859 a record rice crop among plantations along the Cape Fear River. Slaves from West Africa, where rice was also a staple crop, were brought in to work the farms, bringing with them their native Gullah Geechee culture. Rice plantations along the river began to disappear during and after the Civil War. Former slaves and their descendants built the community here and African-Americans today comprise nearly 64 percent of the population.

One of those rice plantations was on the property now known as the Kerr-McGee site.

“The plantation house burned in 1911,” Willis said. “When the house burned, the plantation owner gave two acres in and around the plantation site to his trustees and those two families stayed there. That two acres is right in the middle of that (Kerr-McGee) tract. Everything else he sold to a lumber concern called Waccamaw Lumber.”

Waccamaw sold the property to Carolina Creosote in 1935. “That’s when they started the creosote operation,” Willis said.

EPA maps of the Kerr-McGee site show the two-acre parcel as separate, but surrounded on all sides, except for a dirt road, by Kerr-McGee property.

“The descendants of those families are still there,” Willis said, adding that one of the families had borne 19 children, 18 of which were boys, between 1935 and 1954. Only one of the 19 is still living, Willis said.

When the town incorporated in 1977, it soon qualified for a state grant to install a public water system. Navassa became the first town in the area to get public water, eliminating the need for private wells in use at the time. Willis said state environmental officials had apparently discovered by then there was a problem with the groundwater.

“The first (water) pipe that was laid was on this little dirt road that goes back to these two acres because it was realized that the water coming up under here was contaminated,” Willis said. “The woman who was living here with the 19 children, all of them were dead now, all of them died of blood-borne diseases.”

Connecting the deaths to the contamination, however, could be difficult, said Veronica Carter, a retired Army officer who serves on the North Carolina Coastal Federation’s board of directors and as the federation’s representative on the Southeastern North Carolina Environmental Justice Coalition.

“It’s going to be hard to prove,” Carter said. “There’s no medical facility in Navassa, there’s no doctor in Navassa. So there’s no health records to go back and draw that line. Yes, it makes sense to us that all these people having life expectancies in their 50s and 60s and all these various cancers and all that, that (contamination) is what caused it, but we can’t draw that causation line.”

The state Department of Health and Human Services reached a similar conclusion in 2012 when it prepared a public health assessment of the Kerr-McGee site. According to the report, it’s inconclusive whether people living near the site during the years when wood was treated could have been harmed. Although some information was gathered in 1988, 14 years after wood treatment ceased, significant environmental data was not collected until 1995. More data was collected in 2004-05.

“This data may not represent contaminant concentrations and exposure conditions during wood treating operations and the years immediately afterward,” according to the document.

As for current conditions, EPA’s report, when presented, will include the latest assessment of risks posed at the site to human health and the environment, Kritzer said.

Earlier this year, officials at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington announced its nursing students would offer health screenings for Navassa residents as part of a community partnership.

To Learn More

• Town of Navassa
• Multistate Trust
• State’s public health assessment
• EPA Navassa settlement document

Wednesday: “Poster child for environmental justice”