Updates of ongoing work, future cleanup plans, and studies of a former wood treatment plant site in Navassa will be included among topics discussed at an upcoming community meeting.

During the meeting scheduled for 5:30-6:30 p.m. Thursday, March 12, federal and state officials will discuss the recently completed cleanup of contaminated soil and debris in operable unit 2 of the Kerr-McGee Chemical Corp – Navassa Superfund Site.

An in-person only drop-in session will be held from 6:30 – 7:30 p.m.

Officials will also highlight the cleanup plan for operable unit 4 and an ongoing pilot study of that unit evaluating whether injecting oxygen into the aquifer would effectively remediate contamination in subsurface soils and groundwater.

Other topics are to include the feasibility study for operable unit 3, also known as the southern marsh, and an update on the Moze Center land donation and draft conservation easement under review by the Navassa Town Council and mayor.

The meeting, which is being hosted by the Multistate Environmental Response Trust in coordination with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality, will be held in-person at the Navassa Community Center, 338 Main St., on Zoom, or by telephone at 301-715-8592, meeting ID 946 584 8922, passcode 664564.

Those who wish to join online may also enter  tinyurl.com/Navassameetings into a browser.

A Navassa-based chemical processing company has pleaded guilty to discharging pollutants into the Cape Fear River.

American Distillation Inc., or ADI, owner Andrew J. Simmons Jr., also pleaded guilty to failing to pay federal taxes, according to to the Office of the United States Attorney for the Eastern District of North Carolina.

ADI is guilty of knowingly discharging tert-Butyl alcohol, a highly flammable, colorless, oily liquid, and other pollutants into the Cape Fear River, according to a release published Monday.

The company, which was incorporated in 1992 to make and sell industrial-grade ethyl alcohol, regularly accepts large quantities of tert-Butyl, or TBOH, from its customers, according to information presented in court.

“During distillation, ADI created and stored byproducts in an approximately 250,000-gallon storage tank (known as Tank 14), which regularly stored liquid wastewater that included TBOH, isopropyl alcohol, and acetone mixed with water,” the release states.

From late 2019 through 2024, the company began accepting more TBOH and other chemicals from its customers than it could legally and properly dispose of under the terms of its federally issued permit.

In January, Barry Darnell White, ADI’s former production manager, pleaded guilty to purposely releasing approximately 2,500 gallons of liquid wastewater from Tank 14 five to six times per year between 2020 and 2024.

White discharged the pollutants “by connecting a hose that drained into a nearby pipe” that ran directly to the river, according to a release.

“ADI released TBOH byproduct from Tank 14 into the Cape Fear River to ensure maximum profits without ceasing operations,” the release states. “ADI management had informed some employees that if operations came to a halt, the company would suffer serious financial harm, potentially including dissolution.”

“This was not an accident, and it was not a paperwork violation,” U.S. Attorney Ellis Boyle stated in the release. “ADI deliberately decided to dump harmful chemicals into a North Carolina river to increase profits. When corporations choose pollution over safety, we will hold them criminally accountable and enforce the law without hesitation.”

ADI’s “multi-year illegal discharges of industrial waste poses a serious threat to the River’s water quality and is harmful to ecosystems,” Chuck Carfagno, special agent in charge of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s criminal enforcement program in North Carolina, said in the release. “Today’s guilty plea demonstrates that the EPA and its partner agencies are committed to protecting the environment and pursuing those who threaten our natural resources.”

Donald “Trey” Eakins, special agent in charge at the Charlotte Field Office, IRS Criminal Investigations, stated that Simmons “willfully engaged in a long pattern of violations of the internal revenue laws.”

“Tax evasion is not a victimless crime, it affects every American by stealing resources vital to fund schools, maintain public infrastructure, and enhance social welfare,” he said in a release.

Additional cleanup of contaminated soil and debris began earlier this month at part of the Kerr-McGee Chemical Corp. site in Navassa, a federal Superfund site.

The work, which began Nov. 3 in what officials call Operable Unit 2, or OU2, and is expected to take four to six weeks to finish, is one of the topics for discussion when the Multistate Environmental Response Trust, the Environmental Protection Agency and the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality host a community meeting Tuesday, Nov. 18.

The meeting is set for 5:30 p.m.-6:30 p.m., in-person at the Navassa Community Center, 338 Main St., and on Zoom. During the meeting, project representatives will share updates and provide an opportunity for questions, comments and discussion. To join the meeting by phone, dial 301-715-8592. Use meeting ID 946 584 8922 and passcode 664564.

A drop-in session is planned for 6:30 p.m.-7:30 p.m., in-person only. During the drop-in session, people can speak directly with project representatives, ask questions, and provide feedback.

Officials said the additional OU2 cleanup involves excavating contaminated soil and debris found beyond planned excavation areas during the 2024 OU2 cleanup. That work, which took place in December 2024, found extensive, unexpected debris, including a 40-gallon tank, oily bricks, treated wood and visibly contaminated asphalt material.

The work this fall will include clearing vegetation and placing sediment and erosion controls around the work area. Then, debris and contaminated soil will be removed from excavation areas and disposed off-site. Excavated soils will be managed in the existing staging piles in OU4 and are expected to be reused or consolidated into the future OU4 cleanup. Excavated areas will be backfilled with clean soil.

Officials expect to share updates on the OU3 feasibility study and its evaluation of remedial technologies to mitigate unacceptable contamination risks to ecological receptors. OU3 is the tidally influenced marsh along Sturgeon Creek.

The EPA in September hosted a meeting in Navassa to explain the proposed plan for cleanup of the 12-acre OU4 North portion of the 35-acre OU4, the former pond and process area.

The proposed cleanup would involve removing contaminated surface soil and developing appropriate controls to manage risk associated with remaining subsurface soil. The public comment period for the OU4 North proposed plan runs through Nov. 24.

A pilot study to evaluate whether injecting oxygen into the aquifer would effectively remediate contamination in subsurface soils and groundwater has begun.

Kerr-McGee and its predecessors operated at the site from 1936 to 1974 and used creosote and other chemicals to treat wood for railroad ties, utility poles, and pilings. Kerr-McGee decommissioned and dismantled the operation in 1980.

In 2010, groundwater, soil, and sediment contamination by creosote-related chemicals led EPA to add the former Kerr-McGee property to the National Priorities List. Officials have said site contamination does not currently threaten people living or working nearby.

More information

• Multistate Trust website.
• EPA’s Navassa website.
• NCDEQ website.

Acres of wetland habitat undergoing restoration need a few days to dry out after a rain-soaked weekend before volunteers can get to work planting at Carolina Beach State Park.

The North Carolina Coastal Federation has rescheduled a volunteer planting originally planned for Monday to 10 a.m. to noon Thursday.

Volunteers may register to help plant native vegetation within the 10-acre project area, which was selected by federal and state agencies to address environmental damages caused by decades of creosote contamination that occurred during operations at a former wood treatment plant in Navassa.

The former Kerr-McGee Chemical Corp. site in the Brunswick County town, which is a little more than 30 miles upstream of Carolina Beach, was listed on the federal Superfund’s National Priorities List in 2010.

The Coastal Federation, which publishes Coastal Review, and project contractor designed the native tidal wetland restoration project to include removing invasive species, creating a slough through the removal of fill material and grading, planting native vegetation, and monitoring the project once it is complete.

Rainfall from a system that began over the weekend and continues to sweep up the East Coast have flooded the trail and wetland area.

“That said, this flooding is actually a great reminder that the wetland is doing exactly what it was designed to do – absorbing, filtering, and holding stormwater to reduce flooding elsewhere and improve water quality,” according to the Coastal Federation. “Wetlands act like nature’s sponges, capturing runoff and allowing sediment and nutrients to settle before the water slowly filters back into our coastal systems.”

Volunteers are recommended to bring tall boots or waders and gloves. These items will also be provided on site to volunteers who may not have them. It is recommended that volunteers dress in layers they do not mind getting dirty.

Brunswick County Public Utilities has lifted a water conservation alert it enacted earlier this summer.

Recent rainfalls and residents’ efforts to conserve water, “have contributed to a drop to sustainable levels for the County’s water system,” leading the utility to rescind the stage 1 alert in put in place June 26, according to a release.

The alert affected customers in the unincorporated areas of the county, as well as Boiling Spring Lakes, Bolivia, Calabash, Carolina Shores, Caswell Beach, Navassa, Northwest, Sandy Creek, Shallotte, Southport, St. James, Sunset Beach, and Varnamtown.

The recension also applies to customers of Bald Head Island Utilities, Holden Beach Utilities, Oak Island Utilities and Ocean Isle Beach Utilities.

It does not apply to Brunswick Regional – H2GO customers.

“Water conservation notices are not uncommon for this time of year,” the release states. “Water systems typically see higher demands in late spring and throughout summer due to the heat, increased irrigation demands, and the peak tourism season.”

The utility could issue additional notices if drier weather conditions return and customers are encouraged to “use water wisely” and maintain the water irrigation schedule the utility recommends.

The schedule is as follows:

• Odd address numbers: Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday.
• Even address numbers: Wednesday, Friday, Sunday.
• No irrigation on Mondays.

Customers are also encouraged to irrigate lawns outside of peak demand hours of 5 a.m.-11 a.m. to spread out demands on the system. Irrigation is recommended after nightfall.

Customers with questions may contact Brunswick County Public Utilities at 910.253.2657 or utilityadmin@brunswickcountync.gov.

When contractors began cleaning up debris from the grounds of a former wood treatment plant in Navassa last year, they expected they’d be removing old railroad ties, pieces of treated wood and tires.

“We didn’t expect to see a tank there,” Ngozi Ibe said of the underground storage vessel at the property.

The same goes for other unexpected debris contractors found in a section of the former Kerr-McGee federal Superfund site designated as Operable Unit 2, Ibe, senior project manager and environmental justice specialist who manages the Multistate Trust site in Navassa, said in a Thursday night community meeting.

“We just found an extensive amount of material out there,” she said. “It was so much more than we had expected to encounter when we originally planned the work.”

As contractors unearthed the tank, which contained an unknown fluid, bricks coated in an oily sheen, and additional treated timber they did not anticipate finding in the area, it became clear more time would be needed to clean Operable Unit 2, or OU2.

The next round of cleanup is not expected to begin until sometime this fall, with work anticipated to go on for anywhere from six to eight weeks, Ibe said.

OU2 is a 16-acre section of the original 200-acre site where wood was treated for more than 40 years before operations permanently closed in the mid-1970s.

Operations on the land left a legacy of contamination of creosote, a gummy, tar-like substance used to treat wood used for railroad ties and utility poles.

The land was added to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s National Priorities List of federal Superfund sites in 2010.

In order to evaluate the land and get an understanding of the extent of contamination on it to help determine how it may be used in the future, the EPA divided the property into operable units.

The site is comprised of five units, including a 20-acre tract where untreated wood was stored. That unit, or OU1, was removed from the EPA’s National Priorities list in 2021. There are no restrictions on future development of this parcel.

In April 2024, contractors began cleaning up OU2, where both treated and untreated wood were stored, by excavating a little more than 1.5 acres of surface soils contaminated with levels of dioxin and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons considered to pose an unacceptable risk to people and the environment.

Contractors also removed old tires, treated timber, slabs of concrete and other debris discovered through an initial investigation of the unit.

Workers dug down anywhere from one to two feet, in general, to remove contaminated soil. The excavated soil has been placed on temporary storage sites, lined and covered, in Operable Unit 4.

Contaminated soils removed from OU2 and stockpiled in OU4 are being managed and inspected no less frequently than monthly, as well as after every rainfall.

Backfill suitable for residential use has been injected into the trenches dug to remove the contaminated soil from OU2 and vegetation planted on those areas to prevent erosion and runoff.

Wells have been dug in the unit so officials can monitor groundwater.

OU4, the pond and process area of the former wood-treatment plant site, spans about 32 acres.

The EPA has divided OU4 into two sections: north and south.

Erik Spalvins, EPA remedial project manager, said Thursday night that the northern section of OU4 does not have groundwater contamination or creosote and that officials will decide how to address the two stockpiles from OU2.

There is groundwater contamination in the southern section of OU4. And, creosote contamination has been found as deep as 70 feet below the ground’s surface.

Spalvins said he hopes the EPA is ready to issue a proposed plan to address remediation in OU4 in August. The plan, which will be discussed at a public meeting, will go out for public comment on how residents in the area would like to see than land used.

“What we’re trying to do is provide as much flexibility in our decision-making process so that we don’t tie our hands in the future,” Spalvins said. “So, specifically in the feasibility study, we looked at a residential option and industrial commercial option and we are going to put it out for public comment.”

A feasibility study is currently underway for Operable Unit 3, or the marsh area of the site. Spalvins said the hope is that a draft proposed plan for that unit will be released sometime early next year.

The Multistate Trust plans to donate about 30 acres that was not contaminated for the proposed Moze Heritage Center and Nature Park, dedicated to preserving the stories of enslaved Africans who worked the rice plantations along river banks in southeastern North Carolina.

Claire Morgan, director of community partnerships and redevelopment and senior attorney with the Greenfield Environmental Trust Group, explained Thursday night that the 30 acres donated to the town will be included in a conservation easement to ensure it is used for the public good.

The trust has been working with the North Carolina Coastal land Trust to serve as the easement holder, but the town will own the land.

Federal and state representatives will be updating ongoing cleanup work at the former Kerr-McGee Chemical Corp. – Navassa Superfund Site at a community meeting scheduled for this Thursday.

Multistate Environmental Response Trust, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality officials are hosting the meeting to discuss the additional cleanup of contaminated soil and debris expected to occur this fall in a section of the site known as operable unit 2, or OU2.

Other topics to be covered at the meeting include the upcoming issuance of the proposed cleanup plan for the northern part of operable unit 4, ongoing investigations of contamination in units 3-5, and the donation of about 30 acres from the Multistate Trust to Navassa for the proposed Moze Heritage Center and tidal restoration project.

The meeting will be held 6-7 p.m. in person at the Navassa Community Center, 338 Main St., and via Zoom at tinyurl.com/NavassaMeetings.

To join the meeting by phone, call 301-715-8592 and use ID 946 584 8922 and passcode 664564.

The meeting will kick off with a presentation followed by a question-and-answer session.

An in-person only drop-in session, where the public can speak one-on-one to project representatives, will be held from 7-8 p.m.

Representatives overseeing the ongoing clean up and remediation of the former Kerr-McGee Chemical Corp site in Navassa will be providing an update about the project next week.

Discussions during the meeting set for March 4 will include new work within a portion of the site referred to as operable unit 2, where roughly 1.5 acres of contaminated surface soil is being excavated and removed.

The meeting, which will also be live streamed, is scheduled for 6-7 p.m. in the Navassa Community Center, 338 Main St. To join the meeting by Zoom use the link or enter tinyurl.com/NavassaMeetings in a browser. To join by phone call 301-715-8592. Use meeting ID 946 584 8922 and passcode 66456.

An in-person only drop-in session will follow from 7-8 p.m.

Operable unit 2, or OU2, spans about 16 acres and is an area where treated and untreated wood were stored during operations at the former wood treatment plant site.

The plant was closed in the 1970s, but during the decades in which it operated creosote leached into the ground and marsh in different areas within the 250-acre site.

Officials next week will also preview the proposed plan remediating part of OU4, where at least some of the excavated soil from OU2 is being stockpiled for a period of time.

Natural Resource Trustees will provide an update on restorations projects on the property, redevelopment plans and the future Moze Heritage Center.

For help joining the meeting online or by phone, contact the Multistate Trust at 267-799-3842.

A former production manager at a chemical processing company in Navassa pleaded guilty earlier this week to knowingly discharging pollutants into the Cape Fear River.

Barry Darnell White, 63, purposely discharged tens of thousands of gallons of tert-butyl alcohol, or BTOH, and other pollutants directly into the river when he was employed by American Distillation Inc., according to a U.S. Attorney’s Office release.

“Rather than dispose of hazardous pollutants legally, this Navassa industrial site hooked a hose to a quarter-million-gallon waste tank, brazenly discharging over 50,000 gallons of pollutants into the Cape Fear River over a four-year period,” U.S. Attorney Michael F. Easley, Jr. said in a release. “We won’t let corporate polluters cut corners for cash while the rest of us bear the costs. Not in North Carolina, not on the Cape Fear River, and certainly not in Navassa, where descendants of the Gullah-Geeche people have faced more than their share of environmental calamities. We’ll fight to protect our resources and our communities – until justice rolls on like a river.”

American Distillation Inc. has not been charged or admitted wrongdoing, according to the release.

The chemical processing company has been operating off the bank of the Cape Fear River in Navassa since the early 1990s. Operations include blending and marketing industrial grade ethyl alcohol and providing services such as distillation, dehydration, reaction, carbon treating, and blending various chemicals and products from partners across the country.

ADI accepts large quantities of tert-butyl alcohol, a highly flammable, colorless oily liquid with a sharp alcohol odor, from its customer base then distills the alcohol into a usable product for its customers.

As production manager, White oversaw the movement of chemicals from tank to tank and tanker trucks in and out of ADI’s facilities. He supervised a number of employees and reported directly to ADI’s corporate management, according to the release.

Under its federally issued permit, ADI was required to properly dispose of the alcohol byproduct. But beginning in late 2019 through to early 2024, the company accepted more of that and other chemicals from its customers “than it could legally and safely process and remove,” according to the release.

“To ensure operations did not come to a halt and realize maximum profit, ADI released TBOH byproduct from Tank 14 causing it to flow into the Cape Fear River,” the release states. “ADI management had informed some of its employees that if operations came to a halt, the company would suffer serious financial harm, potentially including dissolution.”

Between 2020 and 2024, White connected a hose to a Tank 14 and released about 2,500 gallons of liquid wastewater that flowed into a pipe and drained to an outfall directly to the Cape Fear anywhere from five to six times each, according to the release.

“Our natural resources must be protected from those who blatantly disregard environmental laws by illegally discharging industrial waste into US waters,” Leslie Carroll, Assistant Special Agent in Charge of the Environmental Protection Agency’s criminal enforcement program in North Carolina stated in the release. “The defendant in this case discharged wastewater containing Tert-Butyl Alcohol and other chemicals into the Cape Fear River on multiple occasions since at least 2020. Today’s guilty plea demonstrates that EPA and its partners are committed to protecting our natural resources and the communities that rely upon them.”

The only viable offer last year to buy land formerly tied to the Kerr-McGee Chemical Corp Navassa Superfund Site came with a proposal to use the property for warehousing.

That is not what residents of the Brunswick County town wanted then. By all accounts, it’s not what they want now.

The question “what now” lingers nearly a year after the bidding invitation closed to prospective buyers for 87 acres once part of the 200-acre former wood treatment site.

Right now, there’s no hurry to sell, Claire Woods, Greenfield Environmental Trust Group director of environmental justice policies and programs, assured residents during a meeting Tuesday night.

“We haven’t heard anyone support the warehousing proposal,” Woods said. “We really want to listen to the community here and we’re not in a rush to sell the property.”

Residents overwhelmingly support a mixed-use type of planned development, one that would include a town center-like commercial area where townsfolk could shop for groceries, gas up their vehicles, and gather with family and friends for meals in restaurants.

After the bidding period closed last November, Woods said the group spent time trying to understand the reasons why the property received so little response.

“It’s such a beautiful property,” she said. “There’s a lot of opportunity and we thought that there would be more viable bids coming in than we had.”

A broker they hired to give them some understanding of what the path forward might be told them the current market only supports light industrial uses for the property.

That leaves the town with two options.

The property could be subdivided into tracts where buyers could put light industrial uses such as warehousing on it, which might allow for some tax base, maybe even jobs. But residents have said that existing warehousing in the town doesn’t really provide much of a tax base or jobs, according to Woods.

“Or, we can wait until the market potentially supports a different use in the future and a use that’s more consistent and compatible with what we understand community members here want,” she said.

Navassa anticipates growing exponentially as new, large housing developments crop up in the town, which sits across the Cape Fear River from downtown Wilmington.

The town is set to receive about a 30-acre donation for land that will include a heritage center, walking trails and other ecotourism-related amenities.

Navassa Councilwoman Ida Dixon said Tuesday night that she can’t imagine a warehouse sitting near the heritage center.

“For me, and the citizens I’ve spoken with, they don’t want to see warehouses popping up in that area. Like we say, we waited this long. I grew up playing in that area as a child. My father worked in that area. For me, I’d rather wait until the citizens can get what they want. Speaking for the citizens that I’ve spoken to they want to see some type of businesses going in there,” she said.

Woods said that Dixon’s remarks “are very similar to almost everyone we’ve talked to.”

“We have had comments that state that they want us to move forward with the development of it now, but not warehousing,” Woods said.

The former Kerr-McGee site was added to the National Priorities List of federal Superfund sites in 2010 after creosote contamination was discovered in the groundwater, soil and sediment within portions of the property. Creosote is a gummy, tar-like substance used to treat wood, including railroad ties and electric utility poles.

The U.S. Environmental protection Agency divided the site into operable unit to distinguish geographic areas within the property, the level of contamination within those areas, and to determine the best course of action in remediating and cleaning those areas.

In an update on work being conducted in operable unit 2, EPA Remedial Project Manager Erik Spalvins said Tuesday night that creosote-contaminated soil from about 4 of the 16 acres within that unit is being excavated and moved to another unit, where it will be stockpiled.

Officials originally expected to excavate roughly 2 acres from OU2, an area used to store treated and untreated wood, and move the material to OU4.

“What is stockpiled as of today is about 4,000 cubic yards,” Spalvins said.

A majority of the material that is being stockpiled will be sealed off and remain in OU4. Excavated soil that contains higher levels of contamination will be removed from the site.

The EPA removed OU1 from the National Priorities List after that more-than-20-acre unit was deemed free from contamination and suitable for residential use.

Operable units 3, 4 and 5 are under various stages of investigation.

Progress on the cleanup of an area within the former Kerr-McGee Chemical Corp Superfund Site in Navassa will be discussed Tuesday during a community meeting.

Cleanup of contaminated surface soil in the operable unit 2, or OU2, area of the site and the proposed plan for cleaning up parts of operable unit 4 will be shared with attendees of the meeting hosted by the Multistate Environmental Response Trust, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality.

The in-person and virtual meeting is scheduled for 6-7 p.m. Tuesday in Navassa Community Center, 338 Main St. Join the virtual meeting through Zoom or type into a browser tinyurl.com/NavassaMeetings. To listen by phone call 301-715-8592 and use meeting ID 946 584 8922 and passcode 664564.

A drop-in information session being offered in-person only will follow from 7-8 p.m. at the community center. Attendees of the drop-in session will have the opportunity to speak one-on-one with project team members, ask questions and share concerns.

OU2 includes 16 acres where treated and untreated wood was stored during the plant’s nearly 40-year operation. Soil within the unit contaminated with higher levels of creosote, a tar-like substance used to treat wood, is being excavated and stored on the adjacent OU4 area. Material that cannot be stored on-site will be recycled or sent to an off-site, government-approved location.

Once OU2 is cleaned, the EPA expects to propose deleting it from the National Priorities List of federal Superfund sites.

Representatives of the Multistate Trust, EPA and DEQ also will discuss during the meeting Tuesday investigations of other areas of the site, the proposed sale of the Multistate Trust-owned 87 acres, and the Moze Center land donation.

The Multistate Trust along with federal and state agencies are hosting a meeting later this month to update Navassa residents and stakeholders on cleanup operations within former Kerr-McGee Superfund site.

A community meeting will be held June 27 by the Multistate Trust, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the N.C. Department of Environmental Quality, during which officials will share information about ongoing cleanup of operable unit 2, redevelopment planning, and other site updates.

A drop-in session will also be held in which members of the community will have the opportunity speak one-on-one with representatives about the site.

The meeting will be held in-person and virtually from 6 – 7 p.m. in the Navassa Community Center, 338 Main St.

The drop-in session will follow from 7-8 p.m. and will be in-person only.

To join the meeting online, use this Zoom link or enter tinyurl.com/NavassaMettings into your browser.

To join the meeting by phone call (301) 715-8592 and use meeting ID 946 584 8922# and passcode 664564# 

For more information visit this link.

Additional information may be found at the Multistate Trust’s website  and the EPA’s website.

The March 2024 community meeting presentation is available here.

Work to clean up an area within a federal Superfund Site in Navassa began earlier this week.

The cleanup of contaminated surface soil in an area referred to as operable unit 2 of the former Kerr-McGee Chemical Corp site may take up to four months to complete, according to a release.

Officials with the Multistate Environmental Response Trust, Environmental Protection Agency and North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality are hosting a community meeting on Tuesday to update Navassa residents about the cleanup, which entails excavating contaminated soils.

Soils that are removed from the land will be temporarily stored and regularly monitored on a different area within the site that will eventually be cleaned as well. Soils that are not suitable to be stored within that neighboring operable unit will be recycled or disposed off-site.

Land within unit 2 is expected to be suitable for any future use once it is cleaned, according to officials.

Government officials will also discuss donated land that will be the site of the proposed Moze heritage center and the sale of nearly 90 acres of Multistate Trust-owned property that was once part of the former wood treatment operation.

Representatives with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration will also join the meeting to update residents about ongoing restoration projects in the area.

Tuesday’s meeting will be held 6-7 p.m. in-person at the Navassa Community Center, 33 Main Street. The meeting will be livestreamed. An in-person only, drop-in session will be held following the meeting between 7-8 p.m.

To join the meeting by Zoom or phone, go to this Zoom link or enter tinyurl.com/NavassaMeetings into a browser, or call 301-715-8592. Use meeting ID 946 584 8922 and passcode 66456.

Federal and state officials will discuss the upcoming cleanup of an area of the Navassa Superfund site during a community meeting Thursday night.

Work that is set to begin soon on removing contaminated soil within about a 16-acre area known as operable unit 2, or OU2, and hiring and training opportunities for residents and businesses will be among the topics to be discussed at the meeting.

Officials will also share information about the upcoming sale of about 87 acres of the property owned by the Multistate Trust, which, along with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality, is hosting the meeting.

OU2 is part of a former wood-treatment site where, after closing operations in the mid-1970s, left a legacy of contamination of creosote on the land. Creosote is a gummy, tar-like substance used to treat wood utilized for railroad ties and utility poles.

The land was added to the EPA’s National Priorities List of federal Superfund sites in 2010.

Treated and untreated wood was stored in areas of OU2. Nearly 3,000 cubic yards of soils contaminated with creosote in that unit will be dug up, removed from the site and temporarily stored within another unit of the site.

The work is expected to take three to four months to complete and, when finished, the land will be available for unrestricted use.

Stockpiled soils will either be reused or consolidated into the cleanup of OU4, according to a release.

The meeting will be held 6-7 p.m. in person and virtually. An in-person, drop-in session will be held immediately following the meeting at the Navassa Community Center, 338 Main St.

To join online use this Zoom link or enter tinyurl.com/NavassaMeetings. To join by phone call 301-715-8592. Use meeting ID 946 584 8922 and passcode 664564.

For additional information visit the Multistate Trust website, the EPA website or DEQ.

Interested in working a job to restore land that was once part of a wood-treatment facility in Navassa?

Local contractors Carl & Sons Construction Co. Inc. and SR&R Environmental Inc. are seeking area companies and Navassa residents to work as either employees or subcontractors on a portion of the Kerr-McGee Chemical Corp. Superfund Site.

Those companies are hosting a hiring outreach event Tuesday from 4-6 p.m. at the Navassa Community Center, 338 Main St.

Individuals with experience as truck drivers, flaggers, heavy equipment operators, and field technicians are of particular interest to the contractors. Training opportunities for those who wish to work but do not have experience will be made available on an as-needed basis.

Work will take place in an area of the site the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency refers to as operable unit 2, or OU2.

A little more than 1.5 acres of surface soils within the 16-acre area are contaminated with levels of dioxin and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons considered to pose an unacceptable risk to people and the environment.

Nearly 3,000 cubic yards of contaminated soil will be dug up from the area and moved to another portion of the Superfund Site and temporarily stored.

The land was added to the EPA’s National Priorities List of federal Superfund sites in 2010 after creosote contamination was discovered in the soil, marsh and groundwater in various portions of the site.

More than 40 years of wood-treatment operations occurred on the site before the plant was shut down for good in the mid-1970s.

A portion of land that once was the site of a wood treatment plant in Navassa is up for sale.

Claire Woods, Greenfield Environmental Trust Group director of environmental justice policies and programs, announced during a community meeting Tuesday night in Navassa that the bidding process is now open, kicking off a long-awaited move to get some of the land on the market.

“The invitation to bid includes 87 acres,” she said to those attending a quarterly meeting hosted by agencies overseeing the remediation and cleanup of the former Kerr-McGee property.

The areas for sale include about half of a 100-acre chunk known as the Eastern Upland, which is contamination-free, and operable units 1 and 2.

Bidders have until Nov. 9 to submit comprehensive development plans explaining in detail how they would use the land.

The property was added to the National Priorities List of federal Superfund sites in 2010 after creosote contamination was discovered in the groundwater, soil and sediment within portions of the 200-acre site. Creosote is a gummy, tar-like substance used to treat wood, including railroad ties and electric utility poles.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency divided the site into operable units to distinguish geographic areas within the property, the level of contamination within those areas, and to determine the best course of action in remediating and cleaning those areas.

The EPA removed operable unit 1, or OU1, from the National Priorities List more than a year ago after the more-than-20-acre site was deemed contamination-free and suitable for residential use.

Cleanup efforts will start in the coming weeks within an area of OU2, a unit of about 16 acres where treated and untreated wood were stored during plant operations. The wood treatment plant was closed in the 1970s.

EPA Remedial Project Manager Erik Spalvins said Tuesday that contaminated soil from about 1.6 acres will be excavated from OU2 and moved to OU4, where the soil will be stockpiled for an undetermined amount of time.

He said that removing the contaminated soil will clear the land within OU2 for unrestricted use.

Ngozi Ibe, senior project manager for the Multistate Trust site in Navassa, further detailed the cleanup efforts, saying the work to remove about 2,900 cubic yards of soil from OU2 will likely begin in December.

Trucks will bring in clean soil to backfill the areas excavated in the unit.

Contaminated soil taken to OU4 will be placed in two stockpiles – one that will hold a majority of the excavated soil secured in a geotextile membrane. A separate stockpile of soils containing a higher a concentration of contamination will also be lined and covered, Ibe said. The stockpiles will be regularly monitored.

The Multistate Trust has selected two local contractors to do the work in OU2. Those contractors will, in turn, conduct a community outreach event seeking locals to assist with the work.

Work on OU2 is expected to wrap in March.

The EPA, in consultation with the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality, oversees the trust, which was court-appointed to own the Superfund site and is responsible for managing the remediation of the property.

As work is done within OU2, officials will be conducting site investigations of operable units 3 and 4.

OU3 includes about 30 acres and consists of marshland. Officials will continue to gather information to assess the condition of the marsh, which will help them determine a remedy for OU3.

“It’s a slow process, but it’s thorough so, when we finally get the information we’re really going to be able to move on that remedy,” Ibe said.

OU4 is the pond and process area where chemicals were stored during plant operations. Ibe said additional soil samples will be collected and more monitoring wells will be installed on that site to determine how best to remedy that portion of the site.

About $94.8 million, the result of a court settlement with the prior owners of the site, has been set aside to cover the costs associated with cleaning the land for reuse.

To date, about $23.3 million has been spent on everything from environmental investigations, risk assessments, project planning, operations and maintenance, legal and other accounting costs, beneficiary oversight and community engagement efforts, according to Woods.

Navassa will receive a donation of about 27 acres under a conservation easement. The town plans to build a heritage center on that property and including walking trails and other ecotourism-related amenities.

Cleanup of contaminated surface soil within an area of a Superfund site in Navassa is expected to begin this fall.

That cleaning process will be discussed during a meeting 6-7 p.m. Tuesday at the Navassa Community Center, 338 Main St. An in-person only drop-in session will immediately follow the meeting.

To join the meeting online use this Zoom link or tinyurl.com/NavassaMeetings. To join by telephone call 301-715-8592. Use meeting ID 946 584 8922 and passcode 664564.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality, and the Multistate Environmental Response Trust, which is responsible for managing the remediation of the former wood treatment plant site, are hosting the meeting.

Officials will discuss safety measures, including traffic control, air monitoring and other precautions to minimize impacts to the small Brunswick County town during cleanup of operable unit 2, or OU2, according to a news release.

Two local firms that will administer the cleanup and related employment and training opportunities also will be covered at the meeting.

Cleanup plans include excavating surface soil and temporarily storing the soil in operable unit 4 where it will be covered and managed. The stockpiled soils will then either be reused or consolidated when OU4 is cleaned.

Soils that cannot be stored on-site will be recycled or disposed of in accordance with state and federal laws, according to a news release.

The work is expected to take three to four months.

Once the cleanup is complete, the land within OU2 will not require long-term monitoring and be available for unrestricted use.

OU2 includes about 16 acres of land where treated and untreated wood was stored when the plant was operated by various companies, including Kerr-McGee, between 1936 and 1974.

Wood was treated and preserved with creosote, a gummy, tar-like substance later found in the groundwater, soil and sediment on portions of the more than 200-acre site. The Multistate Trust owns a little more than 150 acres of the property.

Investigations of operable units 3 and 4 and the future sale of nearly 90 acres of Multistate Trust-owned property on the site will be discussed at Tuesday’s meeting, as well.

Nearly 3,000 cubic yards of creosote-contaminated soil will be dug up from the former Kerr-McGee Superfund Site in Navassa beginning this summer.

Once excavated, contaminated soil found in select spots within what the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency refers to as operable unit 2, or OU2, will be moved to another on-site area in and temporarily stored.

The surface soils will eventually be reused as part of the cleanup of OU4, about a 32-acre spread that includes the former wood treatment plant’s pond and processing areas.

Stockpiled soils will be covered, managed and regularly inspected and reviewed every five years until a final remedy is selected and carried out for OU4, according to the EPA. Soils deemed unsuitable for reuse will be moved off-site at an EPA-approved landfill.

Based on test results, soils to be excavated are not anticipated to be hazardous, according to the agency’s record of decision released last year.

During a meeting with Navassa residents and stakeholders Thursday, EPA and Multistate Trust officials explained the upcoming work that will be done within OU2.

A little more than 1.5 acres of surface soils within the 16-acre area are contaminated with levels of dioxin and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons considered to pose an unacceptable risk to people and the environment.

EPA Remedial Project Manager Erik Spalvins told people who attended the meeting that the agency hopes to delete OU2 from the National Priorities List in 2024.

A 20-acre tract referred to as OU1 where untreated wood was stored was deleted from that list in 2021.

There are no use restrictions for future development for that portion of the original 200-acre site.

For more than 40 years, the site was home to a wood-treatment facility until it closed for good in the mid-1970s. Operations on the land left a legacy of contamination of creosote, a gummy, tar-like substance used to treat wood utilized for railroad ties and utility poles.

The land was added to the EPA’s National Priorities List of federal Superfund sites in 2010.

Ngozi Ibe, senior project manager and environmental justice specialist who manages the Multistate Trust site in Navassa, said backfill suitable for future residential use will replace the contaminated soils removed from OU2. Newly-filled areas will be vegetated to prevent erosion and runoff.

Contractors will dig anywhere from 1 to 2 feet down to excavate the soil, which will be moved by trucks to OU4.

Work by local contractors is expected to begin in June. Contracts are expected be finalized by month’s end.

Spalvins said contaminated soil that poses a leaching risk will be placed on a thick liner and covered in OU4. Most of the soil being removed from OU2 does not pose a leaching risk, he said.

Some in the audience at last week’s meeting expressed frustration that a 4-acre tract with waterfront access on land known as the eastern uplands area may be sold rather than donated to the town.

Navassa is expected to receive a donation of about 27 acres of the eastern uplands area, land that was not contaminated, as the future site of the Moze Heritage Center and Nature Park. The proposed center would be the first in the state dedicated to preserving the stories of enslaved Africans who worked the rice plantations along river banks in southeastern North Carolina.

The name “Moze” is a combination of the names of the Moore family and Mosley family, the latter of which in recognition of the descendants of the slave who was given a portion of the land after abolition.

The town will have to secure funding to build the center.

About 51 acres of the eastern uplands area will be sold.

Whether or not the town receives the 4-acre area with waterfront access is contingent upon what bidders on the property propose for future land use.

NAVASSA – The cleanup of contaminated surface soil in an area of the former Kerr-McGee Chemical Corp. site is set to begin early this summer.

The work is to be discussed next week during a virtual and in-person community meeting and an in-person information session.

The community meeting is 6-7 p.m. Thursday followed by the in-person-only drop-in session 7-8 p.m. at the Navassa Community Center, 338 Main St. 

To join the meeting online, use this Zoom link or enter tinyurl.com/NavassaMeetings into a browser. To join by phone, call 301-715-8592, use meeting ID 946 584 8922 and passcode 664564.

Other meeting topics include site investigations, redevelopment planning and the eventual sale of the Multistate Trust-owned property, the future donation of land for the planned Moze Heritage Center and Nature Park, and an update on natural resource restoration projects.

The Multistate Trust, the court-appointed trustee that is working with the Environmental Protection Agency and the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality to investigate, remediate and plan the reuse of the roughly 100-acre Superfund Site, said its contractors would excavate the contaminated surface soil in Operable Unit 2.

Officials said that, following completion of the cleanup estimated to take two to three months, Operable Unit 2 will be suitable for any future land use, and the EPA will propose deleting Operable Unit 2 from the Superfund National Priorities List.

In 2021, EPA issued a Record of Decision explaining that the selected remedy for the roughly 20-acre Operable Unit 1 is no action. Operable Unit 1’s subsequent deletion from EPA’s National Priorities List cleared the way for Operable Unit 1’s future return to productive reuse, officials said.

In September 2022, EPA signed the Operable Unit 2 Record of Decision selecting removal, on-site reuse/consolidation and off-site disposal as the Operable Unit 2 remedy.

The Multistate Trust contracted two area firms to perform the Operable Unit 2 work. Together, the companies will be responsible for grubbing and clearing, logging, excavation, hauling, and site security, among other tasks.

The site was used by Kerr-McGee and its predecessors to treat wood with creosote. Treated and untreated wood was stored in areas that included the roughly 16 acres that are now Operable Unit 2. 

The Multistate Trust is preparing to excavate contaminated surface soil from Operable Unit 2 and store the soils in the Operable Unit 4 area of the site in temporary stockpiles that will be covered and managed. The soils are expected to be reused or consolidated into the future cleanup of Operable Unit 4. Material that cannot be stored on-site will be recycled or disposed at a landfill in accordance with state and federal laws, officials said.

Learn more

• Presentation from Oct. 18, 2022, community meeting
• EPA website www.epa.gov/superfund/kerr-mcgee-chemical-corp

NAVASSA — The Environmental Protection Agency, the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality and the Multistate Trust are holding a community meeting and drop-in information session Tuesday to discuss the record of decision and final cleanup plan that EPA recently issued for Operable Unit 2 at the Kerr-McGee Chemical Corp. – Navassa Superfund site.

The OU2 decision that EPA signed Sept. 28 covers the 15.6-acre area south of Operable Unit 1 and north of the historical wood treating operations process area. OU2 was used for treated and untreated wood storage by Kerr-McGee and its predecessors. EPA selected Alternative 3, which includes removal, onsite reuse and consolidation, and off-site disposal as the final remedy for OU2 based in part on community input, including environmental justice considerations.

The decision presents a reevaluation of Alternative 2, or removal and off-site disposal and Alternative 3 against the nine criteria per the National Oil and Hazardous Substances Pollution Contingency Plan. The selection of Alternative 3 over Alternative 2 was based on the former’s short-term effectiveness and how it was implementable and cost-effective. In addition, both the state and community stakeholders expressed a preference for Alternative 3.

Other meeting topics will include the upcoming sampling in the marsh, site marketing and future use, and the Moze Heritage Center land donation.

Both the community meeting and drop-in information session will be held at the Navassa Community Center at 338 Main St. The meeting can also be joined by Zoom or phone.

The community meeting is set for 6-7 p.m. for both in-person and virtual attendees. The drop-in information session is 7-8 p.m. for in-person attendees only.

Join the meeting online via this Zoom link or enter tinyurl.com/NavassaMeetings into your browser.

Join the meeting by phone by calling 301-715-8592. Use meeting ID 946 584 8922# and passcode 664564#.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is proposing to excavate contaminated soil from portions of a more than 15-acre tract where chemically treated wood was once stored on the Navassa Superfund site.

During a meeting Tuesday evening, officials discussed the agency’s preference to have about 2,800 cubic yards of surface and subsurface soils dug up and removed from an area referred to as operable unit 2. The contaminated soils would then be disposed of at an EPA-approved landfill.

About 1.6 acres of operable unit 2, or OU-2, contains soil that pose unacceptable risk to human health, according to the EPA’s findings, which are based on numerous soil samples. About 14 acres of the 15.6-acre site do not pose unacceptable risk to human health.

The EPA is proposing to have a little more than 2,500 cubic yards of surface soil at a depth of up to 1 foot excavated and taken off the site. About 295 cubic yards of subsurface soils 1 to 2 feet below the ground’s surface would be removed.

This is one of four site remediation alternatives the EPA has considered for the site. Other alternatives include the following:

• Taking no action.
• Excavating contaminated soil and possibly stockpiling the soil on a different operable unit to eventually use as backfill. If it is determined that the soil cannot be reused it would be taken to an EPA-approved landfill.
• Covering contaminated soil with 1 foot of clean fill material and planting clean dirt with ground cover such as local grasses to prevent erosion. The vegetated soil would have to be monitored every five years.

Charles King, EPA interim remedial project manager, explained Tuesday that, though the agency’s preferred alternative is the most expensive – $1,578,000 – it would not require long-term maintenance.

Removing contaminated soil from the site would allow for unlimited use and unrestricted exposure to the land, making it suitable for residential development.

Navassa residents have expressed a particular interest in having at least some of the Superfund site used for housing.

The former Kerr-McGee Chemical Corp. site includes more than 254 acres where a wood-treating facility was operated for nearly 40 years.

The land was added to the National Priorities List of federal Superfund sites in 2010 because creosote, a tar-like substance made of hundreds of chemicals and used as a wood preservative, has been found in the groundwater, soil and sediment on portions of the site.

Since 2016, the EPA, North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality and the Multistate Environmental Response Trust have hosted more than 20 community meetings in Navassa to update residents on the process and receive their feedback.

The EPA, in consultation with DEQ, oversees the Multistate Environmental Response Trust, which is court appointed to own the Superfund site and take responsibility for managing the remediation of the property.

The site has been broken down into five operable units.

OU-1, which includes the northernmost 20.2 acres of the property, was deleted from the National Priorities List last September. The land is also being eyed for residential use.

Operable units 3-5 will be addressed in future proposed plans.

OU-3 includes about 30 acres of marsh.

The 36 acres within OU-4 include a pond, process area and storage area for treated wood.

OU-5 includes groundwater affected by wood-treatment operations.

OU-1 is adjacent to 82 acres known as the eastern upland area, which is free of contamination and not part of the Superfund site.

Town officials hope that area will become the site for the proposed Moze Heritage Center and Nature Park. This would be the first cultural heritage center in the state dedicated to preserving the stories of enslaved Africans who worked the rice plantations along river banks in southeastern North Carolina.

After King’s presentation Tuesday at the meeting, which was held in person and virtually, a handful of attendees asked questions about the proposed remediation plans for OU-2. No one spoke in favor of or against the EPA’s preferred alternative to get the land ready for residential use.

The EPA’s public comment period on the proposed remediation of OU-2 ends June 30.

King said all comments will be reviewed after the deadline and, if those comments are generally acceptable of the EPA’s preferred alternative, that would shorten the time it takes the agency to release its record of decision.

If the preferred alternative is selected, officials anticipate work would begin on the site in early to mid-September and take two to three months to complete.

Comments may be submitted by telephone or email to EPA Remedial Project Manager Erik Spalvins, 404-562-8938, Spalvins.erik@epa.gov; or EPA Community Involvement Coordinator L’Tonya Spencer-Harvey, 404-562-8463, Spencer.latonya@epa.gov; or by mail to U.S. EPA Region 4, 61 Forsyth Street, S.W., 11^th Floor, Atlanta, GA  30303-8960.

Representatives from the state Department of Environmental Quality, Multistate Environmental Response Trust and Environmental Protection Agency will be in Navassa June 13 and June 14 to discuss plans with the community for the Kerr-McGee Chemical Corp. – Navassa Superfund site.

Two meetings are set for Monday to discuss plans for the site and land donation for the proposed Moze Heritage Center and Nature Park. The in-person information session is scheduled for 4-5 p.m. Monday at the Navassa Community Center, 338 Main St., followed at 6 p.m. by the community meeting being offered in person, virtually and by phone. To listen by phone, call 1-301-715-8592. Use meeting ID 946 584 8922# and passcode 664564# or join via Zoom.

The Environmental Protection Agency will hold a separate meeting about its proposed plan for Operable Unit 2, which is the nearly 16-acre-area where treated and untreated wood was stored during historic operations, at 6 p.m. Tuesday in the Navassa Community Center. To listen by phone, call 1-301-715-8592, use meeting ID 946 584 8922# and passcode 664564#, or watch via Zoom.

The proposed plan on EPA’s website as well as the fact sheet provide further details about the proposed soil removal and public comment options.

From 1936 to 1974, Kerr-McGee and other companies used 70 acres of what is known as the 246-acre former Kerr-McGee property by the Brunswick River and Sturgeon Creek for creosote-based wood treating. The soil, sediment and groundwater are contaminated by creosote-related chemicals. The EPA added the property to the National Priorities List of federal Superfund sites. In 2005, the site was conveyed to Tronox, a Kerr-McGee spinoff that filed for bankruptcy protection in 2009.

In 2011, the Multistate Environmental Response Trust acquired and purchased around 154 acres of the former Kerr-McGee Property as a court-appointed trustee as part of the Tronox bankruptcy settlement. The Multistate Trust is a court-appointed environmental response trust created to own, investigate, clean up, and facilitate reuse of the site.

In 2021, the EPA deleted the 20-acre Operable Unit 1 from the National Priorities List, allowing for its reuse.

Environmental officials will discuss, among other topics, plans for the impending removal of contaminated soil from a former wood treatment storage area on the Superfund site in Navassa.

U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, N.C. Department of Environmental Quality, and Multistate Environmental Response Trust officials are hosting two community meetings and a drop-in information session Tuesday at the Navassa Community Center.

Officials will update residents and stakeholders about the proposed plan for Operable Unit 2, or OU2, which includes about 80 acres free of contamination and is not part of the Superfund site; ongoing environmental investigations and activities on the site; natural resource restoration projects; and redevelopment planning efforts.

The community meetings will include the same presentation, following by a question-and-answer session. Those meetings are set for 1:30 p.m. to 3 p.m. and again from 6:30 p.m. to  8 p.m. and aired live online at this Zoom link, by entering tinyurl.com/NavassaMeetings into your browser, or by calling 301-715-8592. Use meeting ID 946 584 8922 and passcode 664564.

The drop-in session from 4:30 p.m. to 5:30 p.m. is in-person only and will provide the public an opportunity to talk with officials one on one.

From 1936 to 1874, Kerr-McGee and other companies used 70 acres of the 246-acre former Kerr-McGee property for creosote-based wood treating. The site was added to the National Priorities List of federal Superfund sites in 2010 after contamination by creosote-related chemicals were confirmed in the soil, sediment and groundwater in areas of the site.

Last year, the EPA deleted OU1, which consists of a little more than 20 acres, from its National Priorities List, clearing the way for the unit to be reused.

NAVASSA – There have been times when Al Beatty has been afraid to look at Reaves Chapel as he’s driven by.

Jesica Blake felt a swift wave of nausea when she watched the chapel, built in the mid-1800s, visibly shake as its steeple was lifted off the roof a couple of years ago.

More than one conversation between the two have started with the question, “Is it still standing?”

Remarkably, Reaves Chapel, one of the oldest African American buildings in southeastern North Carolina is, indeed, still standing after falling into dilapidation since a congregation last met within its walls more than 15 years ago.

Since then, the small chapel built by people formerly enslaved at Cedar Hill Plantation has weathered tropical storms and hurricanes. Termites have feasted on its wooden bones.

The weight of the steeple, which holds a small, but impressively heavy bell, began to cause the chapel to tilt to one side.

The race against time to restore the chapel before it toppled to the ground weighed heavy on Beatty, president of the Cedar Hill/West Bank Heritage Foundation, and Blake, North Carolina Coastal Land Trust associate director.

“It would have never survived another tropical storm,” Beatty said, surveying the chapel’s new flooring on a recent, cold February morning.

It was the first time he walked inside the chapel, its floor too rotted to safely hold a person, in more than a year.

“This is fantastic,” Beatty said, a smile beaming across his face. “It’s past great. It’s fantastic.”

Roughly half of the $1 million it will cost to restore the building, landscape the chapel’s grounds, build a separate building for restrooms and a parking lot, has been collected through fundraising efforts headed by the land trust, foundation and Historic Wilmington Foundation.

The Coastal Land Trust purchased the little more than half an acre on which the chapel now sits just off Cedar Hill Road in Navassa, the Brunswick County town nestled at the confluence of the Cape Fear and Brunswick rivers.

Ed Reaves, a former Cedar Hill Plantation slave, donated the land in 1911, which was around the time the chapel was relocated by its congregation, the members of which used logs and a team of oxen, to move it inland from the bluffs of the Cape Fear River.

The church eventually became affiliated with the African Methodist Episcopal denomination and remained an AME church until its doors closed permanently in the mid-2000s.

As a child, Beatty attended the church with his family. He recalls the Easter Sunday programs when he and the other children, dressed in their Sunday best, had to recite short speeches intertwined with scripture, from the pulpit.

“Everybody had a speech,” Beatty said. “Everyone.”

Beatty helped form the Cedar Hill/West Bank Foundation in 2011 in an effort to save the chapel. The foundation officially gained nonprofit status two years later.

Early attempts to buy the chapel were unsuccessful. The land trust, which had been working with Navassa as the town began going through a process with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to remediate the former Kerr-McGee Superfund Site, eventually stepped in and offered to help pick up the cause to save the chapel, purchasing the land with a grant from the Orton Foundation.

“It’s a piece of American history that we are honored to help protect,” Blake said.

The church is being restored to how it was in 1911, when a cubby-like addition was built at the front of the church to hold a choir.

Today, the chapel’s white paint is grayed and chipped. Evidence of water damage marks parts of the ceiling and walls.

Portions of exposed, wooden frame of the building are peppered with holes gnawed by termites. “Real, old-fashioned nails,” as Beatty refers to them, still hold the frame together.

But the bones are good, a testament to the craftsmen who built the chapel more than a century ago.

Beatty said he’s yet to bring first-time visitors to the chapel who were not immediately drawn to its allure.

“The church becomes a part of them,” he said.

Balding Brothers, a Wilmington-based company that specializes in historic building restoration, is overseeing the project.

Since restoration work began late last year, the church’s foundation has been stabilized by some of the original concrete blocks that have held up the church for years. New, brick pilings have been added along the foundation’s sides.

Three stain glass windows, including a triangular-shaped window over the double-door entrance, have been removed and sent off for cleaning and restoration at a hefty price tag of $50,000.

A shipping container next to the chapel, which is enclosed temporarily by a tall, chain link fence, is used as storage for items taken out of the chapel, such as pews and the steeple bell.

Out of site of the chapel grounds, back in the woods that lead to the Cape Fear River bluffs, is the chapel cemetery.

About 10 or so headstones are in that area. More than 70 depressions in the ground signal more graves.

“We are in the process of restoring that and getting a catalog,” of those graves, Beatty said.

The organizations are working with the North Carolina State Historic Preservation Office to have the chapel and its cemetery designated a state historic site, one that would eventually be tied in with nationally-recognized places of historic significance related to the Gullah Geechee.

Gullah Geechee are descendants of West Africans taken from their country and enslaved on rice, indigo and Sea Island cotton plantations of the lower Atlantic coast.

Reaves Chapel would be the northern anchor of the Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor, which encompasses 12,000 square miles of coastal area that runs up the southern Atlantic Coast from St. John’s County, Florida, to Onslow County.

Efforts are underway to connect the corridor with the East Coast Greenway in Brunswick County. The greenway is a 3,000-mile walking and biking route that runs through 15 states from Maine to Florida.

The Gullah Geechee Greenway/Blueway Heritage Trail project will be designed to intertwine outdoor activities, including walking, bicycling and paddling, with the history and culture of the Gullah Geechee.

There is also a proposal in the works to build in Navassa a cultural heritage center, a place that will further educate visitors about the history and culture of the Gullah Geechee.

Blake said the goal is to get the state to take ownership of the chapel. Ultimately, Beatty said, the plan is to get the site on the National Park Service’s National Register Historic of Historic Places.

Blake said, though lofty, she hopes the chapel restoration will be complete by year’s end.

NAVASSA – Excavation, investigations and reuse planning associated with the site formerly home to the Kerr-McGee Chemical Corp.’s creosote-based wood-treatment facility are to be discussed Tuesday during online meetings.

Representatives of the Environmental Protection Agency, the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality and the Multistate Environmental Response Trust are holding two virtual community meetings about the Superfund site and adjacent property, 4 p.m.-5:30 p.m. and 6 p.m.-7:30 p.m. Meeting topics will include the upcoming Operable Unit 2 excavation and related work, ongoing investigations and reuse planning and property transfer.

Operable Unit 2 includes about 80 acres free of contamination and not part of the Superfund site.

In September, officials deleted the 20.2-acre Operable Unit 1 area of the site from the National Priorities List.

The meetings are online only, and the two times are offered to allow greater participation. Both meetings will begin with the same presentation, and a question-and-answer period will follow, officials said.

To join the meetings by phone, call 301-715-8592, and use meeting ID 946 584 8922# and passcode 664564#.

To join online, visit this Zoom link or enter tinyurl.com/NavassaMeetings into your browser.

Key members of the project team include:

• Multistate Trust Director of Environmental Justice Policies and Programs Claire Woods.
• Multistate Trust Senior Project Manager Ngozi Ibe.
• Multistate Trust Director of Construction Services Richard Elliott.
• EPA Region 4 Remedial Project Manager Erik Spalvins.
• EPA Region 4 Community Involvement Coordinator L’Tonya Spencer-Harvey.
• North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality Superfund Section Environmental Engineer Dave Mattison.

The Multistate Trust is to post presentation materials at https://navassa.greenfieldenvironmental.com following the meetings.

Wood treating operations took place from 1936 to 1974 on about 70 acres of the 246-acre former Kerr-McGee Property on the Brunswick River at Sturgeon Creek. The company had dismantled the wood-treatment buildings and facilities by 1980.

In 2010, groundwater, soil, and sediment contamination by creosote-related chemicals led EPA to add the former Kerr-McGee Property to the National Priorities List of federal Superfund sites. Officials said site contamination does not currently threaten people living or working near the Superfund site.

In 2005, the former Kerr-McGee Property was conveyed to Tronox, a Kerr-McGee spinoff that filed for bankruptcy protection in 2009. In 2011, the Multistate Trust acquired about 152 acres of the former Kerr-McGee Property as a court-appointed trustee as part of the Tronox bankruptcy settlement. In 2016, the Multistate Trust purchased an additional 2 acres.

The Multistate Trust is working with the EPA and NCDEQ on site investigation, remediation and facilitating safe, beneficial future reuse.

Learn more

• Presentation from Sept. 21 community meeting
• Presentation from Sept. 22 contractor information session.
• The Multistate Trust website: Navassa.GreenfieldEnvironmental.com
• The EPA website: www.epa.gov/superfund/kerr-mcgee-chemical-corp

Virtual updates are set for next week to update the public on remediation work at the Navassa Superfund site, where from 1936 to 1980 a wood-treating plant was operated that led to contamination at the property bordered by the Brunswick River, Sturgeon Creek, and now a residential area and a light industrial area.

During the virtual meetings set for noon and 6 p.m. Tuesday, the Environmental Protection Agency, state Department of Environmental Quality and the Multistate Environmental Response Trust will cover the ongoing site investigations, upcoming remediation work and related contracting opportunities and redevelopment planning.

Both sessions will include the same presentation, followed by a question-and-answer period. For more information, see the flyer. 

From noon to 1:30 p.m. Wednesday, the Multistate Trust will hold a contractor information session to discuss potential contracting needs for upcoming excavation work at the Kerr-McGee site. Information on the anticipated scope of the project, expertise needed for the work, qualifications, potential training opportunities and timing of the work will be reviewed. For more information, see the flyer. 

Call 301-715-8592 to join by phone. Use meeting ID 946 584 8922# and passcode 664564#. Follow the Zoom link or enter tinyurl.com/NavassaMeetings into your browser window.

The Multistate Trust materials will be available in advance of the virtual meetings at https://navassa.greenfieldenvironmental.com. The final presentation materials and video of the presentations will be on the website following the event.  

From 1936 to 1974, Kerr-McGee and other companies operated a creosote-based wood treating facility on about 70 acres of the 246-acre property. By 1980, Kerr-McGee dismantled the wood-treatment buildings and facilities. In 2005, the property was conveyed to Tronox, a Kerr-McGee spinoff that filed for bankruptcy protection in 2009. In 2010, groundwater, soil, and sediment contaminated by creosote-related chemicals led the EPA to add the former Kerr-McGee Property to the National Priorities List of federal Superfund sites, according to the Multistate Trust.

In 2011, the Multistate Trust bought 152 acres of the property, a court-appointed trustee as part of the Tronox bankruptcy settlement. In 2016, the Multistate Trust purchased an additional 2 acres. 

The Multistate Trust is working with its beneficiaries, EPA and NCDEQ, on site investigation, remediation and facilitating safe, beneficial future reuse.

NAVASSA — The Coastal Land Trust has purchased more than 1,000 acres along 3.5 miles of the Cape Fear River and 1.5 miles of Indian Creek in Brunswick County.

The property will be protected forever by the Coastal Land Trust and managed as a natural area.

The 1,048 acres is the heart of Dollison’s Swamp, a site identified as “very ecologically significant” by the North Carolina Natural Heritage Program, according to the trust. The designation is because of its age and near-pristine bottomland hardwood and cypress-gum forest.

“The area is a vast floodplain forest rich with wildlife,” Coastal Land Trust Executive Director Walker Golder said in a statement. “Protecting this forest will help reduce the risk and severity of flooding to downstream communities, protect habitat for wildlife, and enhance water quality.”

The site also was identified as a high-priority site for protection by the town of Navassa and the Coastal Land Trust as culturally and ecologically significant.

“This forest connects to a 1,337-acre property held under conservation easement by the Coastal Land Trust and adds to more than 14,000 acres the Coastal Land Trust has already protected along the Lower Cape Fear River,” said Golder. “Protecting this watershed remains one of our highest priorities.”

The area’s floodplain forest, creeks, and freshwater marsh provide important nursery areas for anadromous fish such as striped bass, American and hickory shad, and possibly Atlantic sturgeon, which is a federally listed threatened species.

The land also provides habitat for the rare Rafinesque’s big-eared bat, a threatened species, the southeastern bat, a species of special concern, and  for bottomland forest-dependent wading birds, waterfowl, raptors and songbirds, like the prothonotary warbler.

“This is a special place,” Janice Allen, Coastal Land Trust’s director of land protection. “The wild and wonderful Dollison’s Swamp of Brunswick County hosts countless buttressed cypress and swamp tupelo trees, many of them ancient. Fishermen, kayakers, and boaters regularly enjoy this scenic and secluded spot. Downstream, greater Wilmington area residents reap its myriad benefits because the swamp moderates floodwaters, filters water, and provides critical habitat for fish and wildlife.”

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Damage Assessment, Remediation and Restoration Program and an Enviva Forest Conservation Fund grant provided funding for the purchase. Enviva created its fund, which is administered by the U.S. Endowment for Forestry and Communities, to help protect sensitive bottomland forests in North Carolina and Virginia. 

The acquisition is part of the Kerr-McGee Natural Resource Damage Assessment and Restoration program, with funding administered through the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation. The Kerr-McGee Natural Resource Damage Assessment and Restoration process aims to restore and preserve unique and vulnerable habitats in the Lower Cape Fear River watershed to compensate the public for natural resource injuries stemming from the Kerr-McGee Chemical Corp. Superfund site.

“This project was selected for funding because of its proximity to the Kerr-McGee site and because of the tract’s conservation significance,” said Krista McCraken of NOAA, one of the federal agencies involved in directing use of the Kerr-McGee settlement funds. “Being able to protect these unique habitats from future development benefits communities throughout the watershed.”

The Kerr-McGee Chemical Corporation Corp. site is a former creosote wood-treating facility on a 250-acre parcel of land adjacent to the Cape Fear River, Brunswick River and Sturgeon Creek in Navassa. The facility was established in 1936, quit operating in 1974 and was dismantled 1979-1980.  Creosote and sludge remain on the site from the wood treatment process, which led to the release of semi-volatile organic compounds into the surrounding environment. In 2010, EPA designated the property a Superfund site.

The North Carolina Coastal Land Trust enriches coastal communities of North Carolina through conservation of natural areas and working lands, education, and the promotion of good land stewardship. Founded in 1992, the Coastal Land Trust has saved more than 80,000 acres of land with scenic, recreational, historic and/or ecological value, and has offices in Wilmington, New Bern and Elizabeth City. www.CoastalLandTrust.org.

A portion of a federal Superfund site in Navassa officially cleared for future residential use earlier this year will likely be removed from the Environmental Protection Agency’s National Priorities List this fall.

A little more than 20 acres referred to as operable unit 1 is expected to be deleted from the list in September. A site is deleted from the list when all cleanup has been completed and all cleanup goals have been achieved, according to the EPA.

“The deletion means that it is through the Superfund process,” Erik Spalvins, the EPA’s remedial project manager for the former Kerr-McGee Chemical Corp. site, said during a Tuesday night meeting updating the public on the latest progress at the site.

The agency’s Record of Decision of the unit, released in early April, marks a major milestone in the ongoing, years-long process of determining how much contamination is on the overall site and how to remediate the land for future use.

Operable unit 1, or OU1, was originally excluded from potentially being set aside for residential use, a plan Navassa officials and residents rejected and ultimately requested the EPA change the anticipated use of the land to include housing.

Chris Graham, a Navassa resident and member of the Navassa Community Environmental and Economic Redevelopment Corp, or NCEERC, recalled Tuesday how he was “outraged” when he heard OU1 was initially excluded from the possibility of being used for housing.

The EPA’s decision to change the plan to include residential use indicated the agency is listening to residents, he said.

“I would like to see more collaboration and move together moving forward,” Graham said. “We have people who feel like we’re moving too fast. We have people who feel like we’re moving too slow.”

He asked that everyone meet in the middle to find common ground.

Land has been set aside to be the site of the Moze Heritage Center and Nature Park, which would be the first cultural heritage center in the state dedicated to preserving the stories of slaves who worked the rice plantations along river banks in southeastern North Carolina.

The proposed center and nature park would include walking trails, a pier and kayak launch, and restored marsh and riverfront.

A year ago, the first round of restoration and conservation projects designed to offset environmental damage at the site were selected.

Habitat restoration specialist Howard Schnabolk with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, said that about half of the $23 million awarded in a 2014 settlement to compensate for environmental damage has been allocated for those projects. Five of those projects are within Navassa.

The Kerr McGee Natural Resource Trustees began looking at restoration possibilities in 2009 with the directive to focus on creating, restoring and enhancing riverine habitat, coastal wetlands and underwater, intertidal, or shoreline habitat, and migratory fish passage.

Moving into next year, the remainder of the funds will be used as more projects are selected, Schnabolk said.

The more than 200-acre site where a wood-treatment plant was operated between 1936 and 1974 was added to the National Priorities List of federal Superfund sites in 2010.

Creosote, a tar-like substance made of hundreds of chemicals and used a wood preservative, has been found in the groundwater, soil and sediment on portions of the site.

The site is broken into five operable units.

Other operable units include an area known as the southern marsh, where contamination has been detected, the former pond and processing area where a majority of the creosote processing took place, and an area where a contaminated groundwater plume is being monitored.

Multistate Trust project manager Todd Martin, who works for Integral Engineering,
explained that work is being done concurrently within each unit.

He said he anticipates the EPA will issue a proposed plan, record of decision and complete remedial action for OU2 sometime next year.

This article has been updated with correct information on Operable unit 2

In-person meetings on the Navassa superfund site are set to resume this month at the Navassa Community Center, with COVID-19 precautions and virtual meeting options.

Opportunities for the public to ask officials questions regarding the Kerr-McGee Corp. Superfund Site in Navassa and a community meeting are set for June 22, and a contractor information session is slated for June 23.

A virtual-only availability is set for noon to 1:30 p.m. June 22, and an in-person-only public availability is set for 4 to 5:30 p.m. June 22. The community meeting, which the public can attend in-person or virtually, is set to begin at 6 p.m. June 22.

Times set aside for public availability are for community members to talk with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Region 4, North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality and Multistate Environmental Response Trust representatives about plans for the site and have questions answered.

From 1936 to 1974, Kerr-McGee and other companies operated a creosote-based wood treating facility on about 70 acres of the 246-acre former Kerr-McGee property from 1936 to 1974. By 1980, Kerr-McGee had dismantled the wood-treatment buildings and facilities but contamination remained. The property is bounded by the Brunswick River, Sturgeon Creek, a residential area and a light industrial area.

The Multistate Trust is working with its beneficiaries for the Navassa Site, the EPA and NCDEQ on site investigation and reuse.

During the community meeting, EPA, NCDEQ and Multistate Trust representatives are expected to provide information on the partial deletion of Operable Unit 1, a risk assessment update for Operable Unit 2, a milestone timeline for 2021 and beyond and recent and upcoming sampling.

Comments are being accepted until June 14 on the proposed partial deletion of Operable Unit 1 from the National Priorities List. This part of the former wood-treatment site where treated and untreated logs were stored has been deemed free from contamination and proposed for unrestricted residential land use.

Operable unit 2 is just south of OU1 and includes about 15 acres.

The contractor information session set for noon to 1:30 p.m. June 23, both in person and virtual, is when the Multistate Trust is expected to discuss potential contracting needs for upcoming excavation work at the site.

To join by phone, Call 301-715-8592. If prompted for a participant ID, press #, enter meeting ID 946 584 8922# and enter passcode 664564#.

To join online, use Zoom link or enter tinyurl.com/NavassaMeetings.

In 2010, groundwater, soil, and sediment contamination by creosote-related chemicals led the EPA to add the former Kerr-McGee property to the National Priorities List of federal Superfund sites. Officials say site contamination does not threaten people living or working near the Superfund Site.

Navassa residents and stakeholders can hear on March 23 progress and plans for this year during two community update meetings about the Kerr-McGee Chemical Corp. – Navassa Superfund site.

State and federal officials and Multistate Trust representatives will give the same 30-minute presentation at the start of the two online meetings. In addition to hearing work progress, other topics will include Operable Unit 1 update, recent and upcoming sampling activities,  utility line construction, and property conveyance process.

The first meeting will be from noon to 1:30 p.m. March 23. Call 1-301-715-8592. Enter meeting ID no. 946 584 8922# and passcode 664564#. To join the meeting online use this link or type https://tinyurl.com/NavassaMeeting into your browser.

The second meeting will be 6:30- 8 p.m. March 23. Call 1-301-715-8592 and enter meeting ID# 946 584 8922# and passcode 664564#. To join online  Click to join the meeting or use https://tinyurl.com/NavassaMeeting.

EPA released a proposed plan for the 21.6 acres called Operable Unit 1. In 2020, after receiving additional input from Navassa, EPA and NCDEQ decided to evaluate Operable Unit 1 for unrestricted residential land use. Additional sampling was conducted in August 2020 to evaluate risks based on unrestricted residential land use, according to the 2020 fourth quarter update. EPA plans to issue a new OU1 Proposed Plan this year to replace the 2019 Proposed Plan and address a smaller, 20.2-acre OU1 area.

From 1936 to 1974, Kerr-McGee and other companies used 70 acres of the 246-acre former Kerr-McGee property for creosote-based wood treating. The property is bordered by the Brunswick River, Sturgeon Creek, a residential area and a light industrial area. The soil, sediment and groundwater are contaminated by creosote-related chemicals, according to the state.

The site was conveyed to Tronox in 2005, a Kerr-McGee spinoff that filed for bankruptcy protection in 2009. In 2011, the acquired about 152 acres, two more acres were purchased later, of the former Kerr-McGee Property as a court-appointed trustee as part of the Tronox bankruptcy settlement. The Multistate Trust is working with its beneficiaries, NCDEQ and EPA, on the site investigation, remediation and redevelopment planning.

For more information, visit the EPA website at:www.epa.gov/superfund/kerr-mcgee-chemical-corp or the Multistate Trust website at http://multi-trust.org/navassa-north-carolina.

The Environmental Protection Agency will roll out a new plan next month that allows homes to be built on a portion of land within a federal Superfund site in Navassa.

An update of the proposed plan for “operable unit 1,” or OU1, will include nearly two dozen acres of unrestricted residential land use on the former wood-treatment site.

In the first of two virtual meetings the EPA hosted Tuesday, Erik Spalvins, the EPA’s remedial project manager for the former Kerr-McGee Chemical Corp. site, said during a presentation the updated unit will include 20.2 acres.

That’s a slightly smaller footprint than what was identified in the EPA’s initial proposed plan, which was released in October 2019.

Navassa officials as well as town residents rejected that plan because it excluded the property from potentially being set aside for residential use.

Last March, the town sent a letter to the EPA officially requesting that the agency change the anticipated use of operable unit 1 to include housing, kicking off what was to be a new round of soil sampling in the unit.

This was around the same time the coronavirus pandemic emerged, forcing national shutdowns of everything from federal and state agencies to schools and private businesses.

“We were in the process of developing a sampling plan when COVID-19 restrictions were put in place and we were not able to do that sampling until August 2020,” Spalvins said.

Federal as well as state officials with the state Department of Environmental Quality sampled a quarter of each acre for contamination of creosote, a gummy, tar-like substance used to treat and preserve logs.

Creosote has been found in the groundwater, soil and sediment on portions of the more than 200-acre site, where a wood-treatment plant was operated under various companies between 1936 and 1974.

The property was added to the National Priorities List of federal Superfund sites in 2010.

Operable unit 1 is where treated and untreated logs were stored.

The first proposed plan for the unit included 21.6 acres to be used for commercial industrial use.

The 20.2 acres identified under the new proposed plan is free from contamination and will therefore not require any institutional controls.

It is unclear what types of housing, whether single-family homes, condominiums, apartments, or a combination of those, may be built on the land.

The overall site has been broken into five operable units.

Operable unit 2, just south of OU1, includes a little more than 80 acres of land free of contamination and is not part of the Superfund site.

The Multistate Environmental Response Trust, which is court appointed to own the Superfund site and take responsibility for managing the remediation of the property, is working with Navassa to designate some of the land within operable unit 2 as the new site of a proposed cultural heritage center. The EPA, in consultation with DEQ, oversees the Multistate Trust.

The proposed Moze Heritage Center and Nature Park would be the first cultural heritage center in the state dedicated to preserving the stories of slaves who worked the rice plantations along river banks in southeastern North Carolina.

Richard Elliott, project manager for the Multistate Trust, said Tuesday he hopes a proposed plan for operable unit 2 will be released sometime next year.

Other operable units include an area known as the southern marsh, where contamination has been detected, the former pond and processing area where a majority of the creosote processing took place, and an area where a contaminated groundwater plume is being monitored.

Elliott added that additional monitoring wells will be drilled on the property to determine how deep the contaminated plume, which is moving predominately south and southeast, runs.

Officials are monitoring the site through more than 50 wells.

Spalvins said he hopes to issue the updated proposed plan for operable unit 1 this month with a 30-day public comment period on the plan opening in January.

The EPA intends to hold a public meeting during that time. Officials are hashing out plans on how to best hold that meeting to comply with current pandemic mandates.

The next quarterly meeting is tentatively scheduled for March 23.

NAVASSA — The state Department of Environmental Quality, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Region 4 and the Multistate Environmental Response Trust are set to host two online meetings Tuesday about the Kerr-McGee Chemical Corp. Superfund site.

The meetings set for noon and 6:30 p.m. will include a review of remediation progress and plans at each of the site’s operable units as well as information on the amended proposed plan for a portion of the site.

To call in for the noon meeting, dial  1-339-666-3080 and enter meeting ID number 144 169 03#, or join the meeting online.                 

For the 6:30 p.m. meeting, call 1-339-666-3080 and enter meeting ID number 729 697 221#, or join the meeting online.

The former Kerr-McGee Chemical Corp. and other companies used the 245-acre site on the Brunswick River and Sturgeon Creek from 1936 to 1974 for treating wood with creosote. The soil, sediment and groundwater are contaminated by creosote-related chemicals.

The site was conveyed in 2005 to Tronox, a Kerr-McGee spinoff that filed for bankruptcy protection in 2009. In 2011, the Multistate Trust acquired the site as a court-appointed trustee as part of the Tronox bankruptcy settlement. The Multistate Trust is working with its beneficiaries, DEQ and EPA on the site investigation, remediation and redevelopment planning.

For more information, visit the EPA website at www.epa.gov/superfund/kerr-mcgee-chemical-corp or the Multistate Trust website at http://multi-trust.org/navassa-north-carolina.

Two virtual community update meeting sessions about the Kerr-McGee Chemical Corp. Navassa Superfund Site are scheduled for Dec. 15.

The Environmental Protection Agency, state Department of Environmental Quality and the Multistate Environmental Response Trust are hosting the virtual meeting sessions to update the public on the progress of remediation plans and field activities at the site.

Sessions will be from noon to 1:30 p.m. and 6:30 to 8 p.m. Dec. 15. Each session will begin with a 30-minute presentation followed by a question-and-answer period.

The public can join by phone or online.

To listen to the noon session, call 1-339-666-3080 and enter meeting ID number 144 169 03# or join the meeting online.

Learn more

Updated to include statewide awards

The Dare County Board of Commissioners approved during its regular meeting last week a $1 million grant from the state to help assuage the financial strain caused by last year’s Hurricane Dorian.

Like many counties and local and tribal governments, Dare County has been facing budget impacts caused by hurricane damage and applied for the  state-funded grant through the North Carolina Office of Recovery and Resiliency, or NCORR, program, State Grants for Financially Distressed Local and Tribal Governments.

Governments can apply for grants of up to $1 million as short-term assistance to pay for everyday operating expenses or provide additional support for disaster recovery. Information on the grant application process is on NCORR’s ReBuild.NC.gov website.

“Our communities are committed to rebuilding smarter and stronger and these funds will help foster new partnerships and make North Carolina more resilient against future storms,” said Gov. Roy Cooper in a release.

Communities are also able to apply for zero-interest loans through NCORR, though the 2020 loan application period has closed. Another application period will be announced in the coming months for the revolving loans of up to $2 million. These loans are to help with disaster-related expenses while local governments wait for reimbursement from federal disaster response, recovery and resiliency programs such as those from the Federal Emergency Management Agency. If approved, the loan principal must be repaid upon receiving federal reimbursements.

Clawson said that he identified what items the county needed that met the criteria outlined in the application.

“One of them was a vehicle for emergency management, and another one was if you had Hurricane Dorian costs that had not been reimbursed by FEMA or the state, and we have both of those. And then the rest, the grant application allowed you to use non-hurricane related — just straight up operating expenditures — you can use debt service, you can do payroll, I picked payroll,” he said.

The county, which applied for the grant Sept. 9, will use $55,000 for an emergency management vehicle that has been requested but not included in the FY2021 budget, $166,456 for debris costs from Hurricane Dorian that was ineligible for reimbursement, per FEMA, and $778,544 for economic relief to general fund, to be used for general payroll obligations, according to the county.

County commissioners approved a budget amendment for the grant and the memorandum of agreement during the meeting.

More than 40 local and tribal governments have been awarded about $50 million in grants and loans to help with operating costs and recovery expenses since the NCORR program was launched last year.

“Hurricanes damage not only individual homes, but also buildings and infrastructure that are critical for community stability and welfare,” said NCORR Chief Operating Officer Laura Hogshead in a statement. “Our office is committed to building local government partnerships that will support long-term disaster recovery throughout the state.”

Carteret County also received $1 million in grant money earlier this month from NCORR because of the impact recent major storms had on the budget.

“As a result of the hurricanes’ negative economic impact on the County’s operating budget, the award is a pivotal resource for our County. FEMA reimburses local government for direct cost incurred from disasters. It does not reimburse local governments for lost revenues, and these revenues pay operating expenses and debt service obligations.” said Dee Meshaw, Carteret County assistant manager, in a statement from the county. “By alleviating the need to use general fund money to pay for these debts, it will allow the County to be more resilient against future storms and continue to financially support future projects and improvements for our community.”

Pollocksville is using the $500,000 grant awarded in 2019 funds to reduce debt service, retain the services of a full-time employee to help with disaster mitigation and resiliency, and to cover additional accounting expenses and financial services, according to NCORR.

“The grant has been a financial lifesaver for our town,” said Mayor James V. Bender Jr.

In late 2018, Cooper established NCORR in the Department of Public Safety after the state experienced two devastating hurricanes in as many years.

The North Carolina General Assembly established the state recovery grants for county governments, incorporated municipalities and tribal governments to provide assistance under the Hurricane Florence and Hurricane Dorian Presidential Disaster declarations, according to the state.

NCORR announced in January that more funding was available through the grant and loan program established in 2019.

Cooper signed legislation Nov. 18, 2019, directing $10 million for NCORR to disperse as zero-interest loans that governments can use for recovery-related expenses while waiting for reimbursement from various federal programs. Additionally, $5 million was set aside for local government grants to help communities impacted by Hurricane Dorian. Those funds supplement $9 million in grant and loan funds for local governments that Cooper signed into law on September 2019.

The agency during the first round of funding in 2019 awarded more than $22.4 million in grants and loans to 22 local governments struggling financially because of costs related to Hurricane Florence.

The grants can be used to cover operating budget expenses not related to a disaster, such as payroll and payments to vendors for goods and services not related to disaster response and recovery, where nonpayment would result in a negative financial outcome. The grants can also be used for disaster response and recovery expenses denied for federal reimbursement, disaster-related repairs to facilities and infrastructure denied for federal reimbursement and debt service payments.

The following are the NCORR grants and loans to date for Coastal Area Management Act, or CAMA, counties and towns and reason for funding:

Grants 2019

• Cape Carteret: $500,000 for administrative expenditures such as payroll and debt service payments due to disaster recovery.
• River Bend: $300,000 for inspection specialist and a public works technician, vehicle used for the inspections and enforcement of building ordinances.
• Atlantic Beach: $500,000 for debt service payments, part-time building inspector.
• Emerald Isle: $370,000 for debt service payments.
• Navassa: $375,000 for stabilization of water and sewer fund.
• North Topsail Beach: $250,000 for debt service payment to USDA.

Loans 2019

• River Bend: $1 million for FEMA projects for debris removal, repairs to building, emergency response.
• Beaufort: $1 million for FEMA projects for debris removal, emergency response, cemetery clean up, additional payroll.
• Boiling Spring Lakes: $2 million for FEMA infrastructure projects.
• Jones County $2 million for FEMA Projects for debris removal, emergency response, utilities repair, inmate housing.
• Pamlico County: $2 million for FEMA projects for debris removal.
• Emerald Isle: $2 million for FEMA projects for debris removal.

Hurricane Florence Grants

• Belhaven: $97,500 for part-time building inspector.
• Oriental: $86,593 for Public Works position for three years, vehicle for disaster recovery support.
• Vandemere: $80,167 for bobcat excavator.
• Navassa: $500,000 for payroll obligation, debt services obligations, vendor payments.
• New Bern: $328,500 for resiliency consultant, truck.
• Morehead City Fire-EMS: $174,000 for equipment for water search rescue team.
• River Bend: $363,000 for debt services, payroll obligations.

Hurricane Dorian Grants 2020

• Hyde County: $500,000 for administrative functions to assist with disaster recovery, affordable housing study and $2,214,000 for budget shortfalls, individual assistance costs, housing recovering contractors.
• Dare County: $1 million for disaster expenses denied by FEMA, general payroll obligations, emergency operations vehicle.
• Carteret County $1 million for debt service obligations.

Loans 2020

• Topsail Beach: $2 million for FEMA beach nourishment fund project.
• Hyde County: $2 million for FEMA debris removal from Hurricane Dorian.
• Pollocksville: $1.66 million for FEMA project for elevation of main sewer pumping station and also a project to relocate town hall/train station.

The following are the loans and grants awarded statewide as part of the program:

Grants 2019

• Fair Bluff: $500,000 for administrative positions to assist with disaster recovery for three years.
• Pollocksville: $500,000 for debt service payments, engineering support .
• Robbins: $500,000 for debt service payments, computer equipment, equipment for waste water treatment plant.
• Boardman: $200,000 for administrative expenses such as payroll, utilities, construction expenses for town hall.
• Jones County: $1 million for debt service payments, emergency management position to assist with disaster recovery.
• Maysville: $450,000 for debt service payments, general payroll , radio read meters.
• Lumberton: $500,000 for debt service payment for water and sewer fund.
• Bladenboro: $500,000 for administrative expenses such as payroll and debt service payments.
• Trenton: $405,000 for sewer construction, repairs to city buildings.
• Elizabethtown: $500,000 for debt service payments, code enforcement officer, economic development manager, consultant.
• Chadbourn: $375,000 for general payroll obligations, water sewer repairs, assistant town manager, backhoe.
• Tabor City: $25,000 for position to Support Disaster Recovery Coordination.

Loans 2019

• Fair Bluff: $700,000 Debt Services and FEMA HMGP obligations for the town.
• Boardman: $130,000 FEMA HMGP Project obligations.
• Jones County: $2 million for FEMA projects for debris removal, emergency response, utilities repair, inmate housing expenses.
• Lumberton: $2 million for FEMA projects for debris removal.
• Robbins: 1,600,000 for various FEMA projects to include wastewater treatment repair, emergency response, and pump station repair.

Grants Florence 2020

• Marion: $245,773 for funds for administrative functions to assist with disaster recovery, affordable housing study.
• Tabor City: $ 475,000 for position to support disaster recovery coordination.
• Cerro Gordo: $358,085 for administrative expenses such as payroll, bonds, utilities water and sewer fund expenses.
• Jones County: $1 million for repairs to the water pump station that was denied by FEMA.
• Town of Fair Bluff: $500,000 for drainage equipment.
• Hoke County: $235,215 for equipment for water search rescue team.
• Rose Hill: $188,000.00 for debt services, payroll obligations.
• Wallace: $500,000 for debris removal, debris management consultant, and community development officer.
• Wilson County: $406,000 for debt services.
• Red Springs: $500,000 for consulting services, debt service obligations, payroll obligation.
• Pembroke: $280,050 for disaster recovery coordinator.
• Clarkton $96,000 for excavator.
• Maysville: $500,000 for payroll obligation, debt services obligation.
• White Lake: $155,000 for position to support disaster recovery coordination.

Loans 2020

• Princeville: $2 million for various FEMA projects to include town hall repairs, senior center construction and repair costs.
• Lumbee Tribe of NC: $2 million for construction and engineering costs for FEMA projects.
• Marion: $450,120 for FEMA project for Lincoln Avenue bridge reconstruction.
• Elizabethtown: $2 Million For FEMA Project for repair of local cemetery.
• Red Springs: $1,024,608 for FEMA projects for debris removal, emergency protective measure, repairs to buildings.
• Jones County: $2 million for FEMA project for buyout.

NAVASSA — The first round of restoration and conservation projects designed to offset environmental damage at the former Kerr-McGee Chemical Corp. site have been selected, with work to begin on some of the alternatives as early as this fall.

In all, 10 restoration alternatives are included in Phase 1 of the Kerr-McGee Natural Resource Trustees’ final restoration plan and environmental assessment.

The alternatives total more than $12 million worth of land purchases and work, including habitat restoration and enhancement. That figure is about half of the $23 million in restoration funds the trustees received in a 2014 settlement.

Five of those projects are within Navassa where, for nearly four decades, a wood-treatment plant was operated under various companies. Wood at the plant was treated with creosote, a gummy, tar-like substance.

Habitat restoration specialist Howard Schnabolk with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, said projects could have been found way up and down the Cape Fear River from the site, but the goal was to keep the focus closer to the Brunswick County town.

“In this case we were able to identify several projects right in the community in Navassa and then we have a few on the outlining edges, but it is a goal to get close to where the injury was,” he said. “We slowed down considerably to try to do projects in the town.”

The more than 254-acre property was added to the National Priorities List of federal Superfund sites in 2010 because creosote contamination was discovered in the groundwater, soil and sediment.

The Kerr McGee Natural Resource Trustees began looking at restoration possibilities in 2009 with the directive to focus on creating, restoring and enhancing riverine habitat, coastal wetlands and underwater, intertidal, or shoreline habitat, and migratory fish passage.

In their environmental assessment, the trustees, which include NOAA, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the state Department of Environmental Quality, determined that concentrations of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, or PAHs, in the site sediments were enough to cause harm to organisms living in, on or close to the contaminated sediment.

PAHs are a class of chemicals that occur naturally in coal, crude oil and gasoline, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.

The trustees accepted a number of suggested alternatives from everyone from town officials and residents to environmental and conservation groups.

Land Management Group, an environmental and land-use consulting firm in Wilmington, aided the town in conceptualizing some of the alternatives that were selected in the final plan of phase one.

“We’ve been working on these for a long time,” Land Management Group President Christian Preziosi said. “We’ve done a lot of work with the town of Navassa and know the folks over at the town pretty well. I’m very excited about this kind of move into that next stage and seeing these properties get into conservation.”

This is a particularly crucial time for the town to be able to preserve natural habitat and historically significant heritage areas.

Navassa is anticipating a development boom, including two major subdivisions.

“The timing of it, I think, is just great for the town to be able to capture these sites and get them into conservation at this moment because there’s definitely high development pressure in that area,” Preziosi said.

Barnes Sutton, the town’s planning director, agreed.

“We know that by any investment in our community it’s going to attract interest and it’s going to likely promote growth,” he said. “What we wanted to make sure we did with these projects is that we were securing public lands in our community. We were happy to see that the majority of the ones that we selected and submitted were chosen.”

Phase 1 projects

The 10 alternatives selected for Phase 1 of the final plan include the following:

• Alligator Creek Restoration and Conservation. The focus of this project is to restore about a 3,900-foot reach along the creek and adjacent tidal wetlands to increase tidal amplitude and reestablish subtidal and intertidal bottom habitat and primary nursery area. This project will also control and restrict the growth of phragmites, an invasive species. Estimated cost: $2.6 million.
• Battleship North Carolina “Living With Water.” In this alternative, 800 linear feet of estuarine intertidal shoreline will be restored and 2 acres of tidal marsh will be created followed by long-term monitoring. The project will be designed to provide habitat for juvenile fish species, restore or expand the benthic invertebrate community within tidal marsh habitats at the Kerr-McGee site, and deter flooding. Estimated cost: $1.3 million. That figure includes $683,931 from the trustees and $645,000 in matching funds.
• Carolina Beach State Park Restoration. This project will include the restoration of benthic and estuarine habitat and 13.5 acres of tidal marsh by building a living shoreline of offshore and intertidal and subtidal oyster reef habitat. The living shoreline will include about 5 acres to stabilize erosion. Estimated cost: $1.9 million, which includes $105,000 in matching funds.
• Indian Creek Natural Resource Restoration and Conservation Project. Located on about 310 acres a little more than 3 miles from the Kerr-McGee site, this alternative includes restoring, enhancing and preserving habitats endemic to the Lower Cape Fear region. Work will be done along a 1.75-mile stretch of the creek. More than 140 acres of tidal freshwater marsh and tidal cypress-gum swamp and about 40 acres of 100-foot buffers along the creek and Molls Branch will be protected. The project will also include refurbishing the Halls Landing boat ramp and installing a kayak and fishing ramp. Estimated cost: $2.4 million, including $110,000 in matching funds.
• Lower Black River Conservation. This project is designed to conserve about 500 acres of property that will be managed as part of the Black River Preserve, which includes more than 5,200 acres. Estimated cost: $100,000, an amount that would be added toward the total purchase price.
• Lower Cape Fear Bottomlands Conservation. Under this alternative, more than 1,000 acres of relatively pristine riverine habitat along 3.5 miles of the Cape Fear River and nearly a mile along Indian Creek will be purchased for conservation. Estimated cost: $1.5 million.
• Merrick Creek Conservation. About 250 acres of swamp forest and 2.5 miles of buffer along Merrick Creek will be purchased for conservation under this alternative. The land is 1 stream-mile upstream from the Northeast Cape fear River in Pender County. Estimated cost: $206,450.
• Moze Heritage Site Tidal Restoration. This alternative is within the Kerr-McGee site. The project will include enhancing riverine swamp forest, preserving and rehabilitating historic rice field dikes, and incorporating walking trails, a viewing dock and a pier with a kayak launch. Estimated cost: $241,500.
• Navassa Stormwater and Riparian Restoration. This project will include the development of a stormwater management plan for the town and conserving and restoring riparian wetlands and buffers. Estimated cost: $1.25 million.
• Navassa Waterfront Park. This project is immediately south of Navassa’s town hall and community center and will establish access to land water along Sturgeon and Mill creeks within walking distance of town facilities. The plan calls for securing about 50 acres of tidal wetland through a conservation easement and using an additional 21 acres for a community park with access to bordering waterways. Estimated cost: $1.5 million.

Schnabolk said the trustees are looking forward to receiving ideas for alternatives for Phase 2.

“We’re happy that we were able to get these projects approved and on the ground, but the clock’s ticking,” he said. “I think around the New Year we’re going to make an effort to look at another round of projects. Our approach from the start is we’re on a rolling mission. If somebody has a restoration idea in the community, reach out to the trustees so we can evaluate it.”

Restoration ideas may be submitted by email at howard.schnabolk@noaa.gov or mailed to:

Howard Schnabolk

℅ NOAA Restoration Center

2234 South Hobson Ave

Charleston, SC 29405

Learn more

• Read the restoration plan and environmental assessment

BOLIVIA – Brunswick County commissioners accepted ownership and responsibility to operate Navassa’s water and sewer systems, effective Wednesday.

The board’s unanimous decision to take over the town’s systems was reached June 15 and begins an important step toward improving Navassa’s utility infrastructure, officials said.

“We appreciate the effort and cooperation between the Town of Navassa and Brunswick County Public Utilities throughout this process,” Chairman Frank Williams said in a statement released Thursday. “Brunswick County is committed to providing safe, quality water and sewer service to the residents of Navassa and to all of Brunswick County, and look forward to working with the Town of Navassa to make this transition as seamless as possible.”

Town leaders and staff and the county’s public utilities teams finalized the agreement that was presented to commissioners for final review and approval.

Navassa Director of Planning and Development Barnes Sutton said the decision would help the town meet its goals of providing safe drinking water and sanitary sewer.

“The Town of Navassa ultimately made this decision with our citizens in mind but also, with the intent in rendering access to water and sewer service more affordable, for the greater Brunswick County region,” he said.

No action is required by Navassa water or sewer in response to the merger. Customer accounts are being transferred to the Brunswick County Utility Billing Services department.

Navassa has 325 water customers and 321 sewer customers. The agreement means the county will make improvements needed to integrate the town’s systems into the county water and sewer systems.

“We recognize the hard work our staff and partners at the Town of Navassa put in to bring this opportunity to fruition, and we thank them for their continuous service to their community,” County Manager Randell Woodruff said. “This partnership not only supports the residents of Navassa, but also the purpose and vision of the commissioners’ strategic goal to seek infrastructure development/expansion opportunities for the benefit of all our utility customers.”

Discussions began in October 2019 when town officials requested a proposal outlining a potential merger.

Second in a series

Navassa is 13 square miles of high ground flanked by rivers and creeks with a storied history of enslaved Africans who made a life for themselves after slave abolition, forging a unique legacy that remains relatively undocumented outside of a couple of local publications.

At a pivotal time for the town on the cusp of a development boom, Barnes Sutton wants Navassa to have tangible reminders of its history told throughout its streets.

“What I’ve been saying lately is Navassa has just missed history a million times over,” he said.

“Everyone who’s got a statue on that side of the river (Wilmington) did business on this side of the river, but that’s not documented anywhere. When you walk around downtown (Wilmington) you’ve got the historical tours, you’ve got the plaques on all the buildings, you’ve got the signs everywhere,” Sutton said.

“You’re constantly reminded whether you’re looking for it or not that you’re in a historical area and there’s significance to this place that you’re in. That’s cultural infrastructure. That’s what we’re trying to work on here in Navassa, is how do we implement and install this cultural infrastructure to where even when we’re gone, communities pass on, or move away, that the people there now are well aware that they’re in a place of history?”

Aside from Navassa Mayor Eulis Willis’ book, which delves into the town’s history, and a short film and small book the University of North Carolina Wilmington produced about the town, most of the history here is anecdotal, Sutton said.

And, to a degree, the town’s history is misunderstood, he said.

Navassa has made local headlines throughout the years for containing a highly disproportionate number of Brownfield Sites as well as the former Kerr-McGee Superfund Site, more than 200 acres of property where a creosote plant operated for decades.

Sutton knew about the Brownfields and Superfund Site when he took the job, but he said it’s taken him some time to understand that Navassa is not so much the victim of industry as it is the purveyor of industry.

With its access to the Cape Fear River, the railroad, and its high ground and proximity to Wilmington, Navassa has been an ideal spot for industry over the decades.

Abolished slaves once forced to work the plantations along the river banks saw the job opportunities these industries brought to the area.

“This was the place to do business,” Sutton said.

“Transitioning out of the plantation era to the industrial era, a lot of freed slaves at the time went and worked immediately at these industries and were able to buy their own way. This was kind of a refuge for that to happen. A lot of the plantations were on the west bank of the river, so Navassa was like a beacon,” he continued. “That’s kind of the part of Navassa’s history that a lot of people don’t see. It’s not necessarily that Navassa was taken advantage of, but Navassa took advantage of what was already there and they made their way into being landowners, being homeowners, having full-time employment and that only went away when technology shifted and those fertilizer companies went elsewhere. But, there was a time when there wasn’t enough state regulation to make sure these companies did what they needed to do before they left.”

Industry is what separated the Gullah in this area apart from other Gullah Geechee residing in the coastal areas and islands from the southeastern coastal areas of North Carolina to Florida.

Gullah isn’t spoken in Navassa like it is in African American communities on the South Carolina and Georgia seaboard. Residents here do not make the sweetgrass baskets popular in Charleston, South Carolina.

“That’s just because the Navassa Gullah descendants took a route that a lot of other people in that culture didn’t,” Sutton said. “A lot of other cultures stayed with agriculture or they were isolated on barrier islands to where their culture melded with one another and really became what people traditionally think of the Gullah Geechee. But, Navassa just didn’t have that isolation. We took a much more industrial route.”

Preserving the past in a future of growth

Like the former and current mayors of the town – there’s been only two since it incorporated in 1977 – Sutton has inherited the task of how to lure in businesses townsfolk here desire.

The town’s population is about 2,100, not enough to bring in a gas station, grocery store or retail shops.

“Even with I-140 they’re saying it’s just not enough numbers yet,” Sutton said.

But that’s about to change. Two large housing developments, the 800-acre River Bend that will include 2,100 homes and Indian Creek, where 3,600 homes are planned on 1,000 acres, are in the early planning stages.

Pacon Manufacturing, which produces medical wipes, pads, towels, drapes and liquids, is relocating from New Jersey to Navassa, where the company is expected to bring nearly 300 jobs.

Local jobs will boost tax revenues. New neighborhoods and the families that move into them will help draw businesses. It’s growth is in the right direction, but one that requires a balance.

“From the council’s perspective, it’s OK what can we do to better prepare our citizens for the change to come,” Sutton said.

“And, so if they can find the better employment, decrease expenses getting to and from work, then that limits the chances to be displaced. It’s not necessarily industries that they’re trying to attract, it’s that at one point in time the huge chunk of Navassa citizens remembers getting up in the morning and punching the clock. It was a sense of security. It was a sense of routine,” he said. “People remember getting up and walking to Navassa Guano, working, punching the clock, going home and having lunch, and going back. We used to have that here and I think that’s what people are trying to get back.”

It’s a delicate balance, one where Sutton aims to tie in the quality of life the town’s residents desire while simultaneously preserving its heritage.

“I care a lot. I want to try to bring people what they want. I want to try and figure out a way to improve whatever situation they’re in with the goal of making Navassa what it’s been trying to be since its inception, which is a place where people can thrive. It was well on its way and I think it can do it again,” he said. “We just have to figure it out. I’m trying to expose people more so to how to interact with your community. Do you understand the value of the waterways in your back yard? Do you understand the value of community engagement? I think that’s a lot to try and take on, but we don’t really have a choice. We have to be vigilant. Otherwise, we wake up and the town is different.”

First of two parts

Barnes Sutton was your typical military brat.

He made friends easily and enjoyed the different cultures to which he was exposed, all the while knowing not to get too attached as he hopscotched Army bases in the country and overseas with his parents and older brother.

That’s the life of a military kid. Make the most of where you’re at, but don’t expect to root yourself to one duty station, one town, one school.

Missouri. Germany. Texas. Fayetteville.

These are the places Sutton called home at one time or another by the time he was a young teenager.

Even when his father retired and moved the family in 2007 to La Grange, a small town in rural Lenoir County, Sutton’s time with his extended family and the new experience of living near grandparents, aunts, uncles and what seemed like a multitude of cousins lasted four short years.

He’s dropped anchor longest in Wilmington, where he moved in 2011 to attend the University of North Carolina Wilmington and is now, along with his girlfriend, raising the couple’s 3-year-old son.

But it’s in a much smaller town across the Cape Fear River, in what may seem the unlikeliest of places, Sutton wants to establish roots. A place where, for the first time in his life, the 27-year-old feels a deep connection with a community that gives him something special, something none of the other places he’s lived have afforded him.

He knew as much the day he interviewed for the job of Navassa’s planning and development director.

“When I first came in and interviewed, just seeing some of the art that was on the walls or some of the sayings that were on the walls, I was like, OK, I think this is where I’m supposed to be because I can now use what I’ve learned from being a kid moving all around, seeing different cultures, different communities, and be able to bring all of that here and help them accomplish what they want to accomplish and grow how they want to grow,” Sutton said.

Not for him

A little more than two years has passed since that job interview.

Sutton, tall and lean, sits in one of the cushy swivel chairs lining a long, modern conference table in his office in the Navassa Community Center.

His work desk is off to one side of the large, rectangular room. His framed academic degrees are propped neatly on the floor against the wall by his desk. There’s a white board on another wall and, opposite that wall, large, color-coded maps depicting the town’s various zoning districts and future projects.

The just-moved-in feel of the space is deceiving. Sutton was forced to move into this space after Hurricane Florence in September 2018 damaged town hall.

Neither this room nor this town was what he envisioned for his future when he stepped on UNCW’s campus as a freshman in 2011.

Sutton had applied to only one university with his sights firmly set on becoming a marine biologist, “like a lot of people at UNCW,” he said with a smile.

“I quickly realized that was not my thing,” he said. “I thought of it as dealing with animals and what I saw on TV.”

Class lectures that first semester were about ocean currents and temperatures, oscillation patterns and El Nino. These courses are designed to lay the foundation for understanding marine diversity. That simply did not interest a then 18-year-old Sutton.

There was, he came to accept during those first couple of months at the university, another issue.

“I got more and more scared of deep water as I got older,” he said. “I don’t know how that happened, but I was not scared of it at all at one point. But now, it just gives me the chills sometimes.”

By the time his second semester rolled around, Sutton went to his academic counselor to discuss his change of heart. Perhaps he should give entrepreneurship a shot, she suggested, seeing something in him he didn’t yet recognize. He signed up for an introduction to entrepreneurship course.

He was hooked.

“I really loved the way that they approached projects and how just their thinking was different,” Sutton said.

By his senior year, Sutton came to another realization. He wasn’t sure the private sector was for him. He liked working and interacting with people.

He took a public administration course his final semester of undergraduate school. That’s when he learned about UNCW’s Master of Public Administration Program, or MPA.

After graduating with two bachelor’s degrees, one in economics and one in political science, Sutton went on to graduate school.

Two years and a master’s degree later, he accepted in 2016 his first post-graduate job in Pender County’s planning department as a permit technician.

That following January, Sutton was promoted to full-time planner. He was one of five other planners, two of whom were fellow UNCW MPA alums, in the county office.

Sutton was working on a project involving a school when he first heard about a small town in Brunswick County looking for a planning director.

Despite living a short drive and a bridge from the town, he’d never heard of Navassa up to that point.

“I did some research on it and I kind of fell in love with the town,” he said. “I’d been moving around my whole life, so I never really got to know too much about anywhere I was. When I was reading about Navassa’s history and how far back it goes and how long these families have been here, I mean, going all the way back to the mid to late 1700s and you see some of the same last names carried through to now, that was very interesting to me.”

Being Barnes Sutton

What also lured him to the town was its demography.

Navassa is a largely African American community. A number of residents here can trace their ancestry back to enslaved West Africans forced to work on plantations in the area.

“This was kind of the opposite from a demographic standpoint of anything else really in the area,” Sutton said. “In the military, it was pretty well diverse because it was people from all over the world and then, even in La Grange, it was pretty well mixed.”

“When I was reading about Navassa’s history and how far back it goes and how long these families have been here, I mean, going all the way back to the mid to late 1700s and you see some of the same last names carried through to now, that was very interesting to me.”

Moving to Wilmington, he said, was a bit of a culture shock. At the time, UNCW’s student population was about 8% African American.

That was evident, he said, when classes began.

Consistently, he found he was the only black student in his classes. In the business school, political science courses, even general education classes, Sutton was the sole black student.

“That’s just how it was,” he said. “With 20,000 students and 8% being African American, if you bumped into another African American you made a point to go speak with one another because you didn’t see that all the time. In Wilmington, to a large degree, it’s kind of like that. You can go out any given night downtown or go to the beach and you just don’t see a lot of diversity. So, when I looked at Navassa and, I think at the time it was 72% African American from the 2010 Census data, that was just odd to me. I thought, I haven’t seen this anywhere, especially in this area.”

Navassa has, not to sound cliché, he said, been a place of liberation for him.

“Here, you are who you are,” Sutton said. “They just took me in. That’s when I was like, OK, this is an opportunity for me to kind of settle and put down roots that I haven’t had. I know at some point I’m going to move over here.”

Next: Navassa History Misunderstood

NAVASSA – Before industry brought the promise of jobs and hope of economic viability in this small town, enslaved West Africans worked in rice fields that peppered the landscape.

Cultivating rice was a demanding, tedious process — one that was a foreign concept to English colonists, but not to the men and women plucked from their tribes in the rice growing region of West Africa.

Today those slaves and their descendants, the Gullah Geechee, are nationally recognized through the establishment of the Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor, which runs up the southern Atlantic Coast from St. John’s County, Florida, to Pender County.

Their stories and rich culture are shared at some of the very plantations and one-time isolated barrier islands on which they were enslaved.

Navassa aims to become another voice of the Gullah Geechee by establishing what would be the first cultural heritage center in the state dedicated to preserving the stories of those slaves who worked the rice plantations along river banks in southeastern North Carolina.

The center would be a source of pride in a town that has suffered at the hands of the very thing it at one time counted on — industry — to spur an economic boost it still desires today.

“It would be a way for my folks to identify themselves to the world forever,” Eulis Willis, the town’s longtime mayor, said of a cultural center. “It would be a way to help us achieve some independence.”

An ideal spot for the proposed Moze Heritage Center and Nature Park is within an 82-acre plot identified as the eastern uplands portion of the former Kerr-McGee Chemical Corp. site.

It’s within this part of the property off the banks of the Brunswick River and Sturgeon Creek that some of the rice fields owned and managed by a member of the prominent and powerful South Carolina Moore family thrived.

In 2010, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency added the property to its National Priorities List of federal Superfund sites.

The EPA, state and various trusts have for years been investigating the extent of the contamination and discussing sufficient ways to remediate that contamination. Those agencies and trusts have been working with the townspeople to determine future uses for the property.

Years before this collaboration began, Willis was toying with the idea of creating some type of ecotourism in the town.

“Trying to reestablish the town itself, I realized that for us to live a decent life we had to try to develop in some way our own economy,” he said.

It wasn’t until 2006, when he was one of five North Carolinians selected to be on a committee to oversee the development of the Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor, Willis thought about tying in the Gullah Geechee’s history in southeastern North Carolina as a tourism draw for the town.

“I got on the commission and boy, did my education begin,” Willis said. “The thing that was amazing to me was that in North Carolina we didn’t have as much of the culture. The native North Carolinians (Gullah Geechee) didn’t have as much of the cultural traits.”

That’s because, Willis said, Gullah Geechee in this state were not as isolated as those on barrier islands and remote plantations in South Carolina and farther south.

“We didn’t ever get isolated like that,” he said.

The proposed center and nature park would include walking trails, a pier and kayak launch, and restored marsh and riverfront.

The town has partnered with the North Carolina Coastal Land Trust to acquire land for the project.

Last year, the Coastal Land Trust purchased and began work to restore Reaves Chapel, a church the trust describes on its website as “one of the Cape Fear region’s most culturally and historically significant African American structures.”

The little, wooden church in Navassa was built shortly after the Civil War near the Cape Fear River by those enslaved on the Cedar Hill Plantation.

Edward Reaves, a former slave, owned the parcel the church was moved to by its congregants in 1911.

The church will be restored and used as a gathering place for the townspeople, many of whom, like Willis, have historical ties to the Gullah Geechee.

Revelations of Willis’ heritage have come to light throughout his years of research. He has a great-great-grandmother whose name is listed in a rice-planting book dated 1861-62 from Hickory Hall Plantation.

Willis has traced his family tree to Charley Waddell, who is believed to be the first black man to buy land in Navassa in 1875.

“I’m still not an expert on the culture, but it doesn’t escape me,” Willis said, adding that he feels a kinship with the Gullah Geechee because of his ancestry.

“Here’s an opportunity for my folks to not only save the culture, but make a little money and get a little bit more independence,” he said. “It’s going to take maximum effort from some smart people. I want it to stay owned and operated in this community. I want it to be something that not only we can be proud of, but anybody who comes to visit it will have a good experience.”

NAVASSA – The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s “shocking decision” in its proposal to leave contaminated soil on a portion of the Navassa Superfund site violates a federal act and the community’s civil rights, according to the Southern Environmental Law Center.

The EPA should require a comprehensive cleanup of the former Kerr-McGee Chemical Corp. site, including 21.6 acres of which the agency has proposed a “no remedy” action, the SELC said in a letter it submitted to the agency earlier this month.

That portion of the site, identified as “operable unit 1,” would be used for commercial, industrial or recreational purposes, under the EPA’s proposed plan the agency released in October.

A move to take no action to clean contaminants within that unit, called OU1, and leaving out the possibility of using the land for future residential use violates the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act, or CERCLA, the National Contingency Plan and EPA guidance, according to the SELC.

The nearly 50-page letter the law center submitted on behalf of the Navassa Community Environmental and Economic Re-developmental Corp., or NCEERC, states in part that, “despite a clean-up budget of $93 million dollars, documented contamination at OU1, and an anticipated clean-up cost at OU1 of only $3 million, the agency recommended a decision to do absolutely nothing to remediate the documented contamination in OU1.”

That anticipated cost included what was originally 32 acres first identified as OU1, said SELC Senior Attorney Chandra Taylor. The size of the unit was scaled down after testing revealed that contaminants exceeding the national standard were on a portion of the property.

Soil samples show that a little more than 2½ acres within OU1 contain concentrated areas of contaminants that exceed the state threshold, according to the state Department of Environmental Quality, or DEQ.

For that reason, the state has asked that institutional controls be placed on the 2.6 acres, restricting housing, schools or daycares from being built on that part of the property.

“We argue that (the EPA) prematurely limited development options,” Taylor said. “To leave the contaminated soil there would be an environmental injustice. The NCEERC has been clear that they would like to see a full range of options to be available to the community.”

Erik Spalvins, the EPA’s remedial project manager for the site, defended the agency’s decision, saying that residents and town officials had in the months leading up to the release of the proposed plan expressed the desire to see OU1 developed for commercial or industrial use.

“The heart of the issue is what is the future land use going to be for that property,” Spalvins said. “Many years ago, the agency and the state, we were planning on doing a residential cleanup for part of this site because it’s fairly achievable. It was because of the feedback from the community and mayor and NCEERC that we adjusted our course and changed our land use determination from industrial, commercial and recreational.”

When town residents and officials saw the proposed plan upon its release Oct. 7 it may have prompted a change of heart, he said.

“Until the public meeting there was a pretty strong consensus with the community that they wanted to see commercial industrial,” Spalvins said.

The meeting he referenced was one of the quarterly meetings the EPA hosts in town to update residents on things like soil and groundwater test results and the overall progress of the Superfund process.

During that mid-October meeting, residents and community leaders argued they did not believe residential use was an option in OU1 because agency and state officials did not present it as one.

Spalvins told residents at that meeting that if they had changed their minds, “that is OK.”

“We don’t want to be part of the community losing control of what is happening in that community,” he said in a telephone interview Wednesday. “I don’t want the town to let the concern about the contaminated soil to control or dictate what the land use will be. I do not want the concern about the funding to limit the community’s desires and I don’t want the contamination to limit the community’s desires.”

There are only a few sample locations that would pose a risk for residential use within OU1, he said, adding that additional sampling would be needed to determine the best way to remediate those areas.

“Across the site we could achieve a cleanup that would be suitable for residential use,” he said.

The 250-acre former wood-treatment plant site was added to the National Priorities List of federal Superfund sites in 2010 because creosote contamination was discovered in the groundwater, soil and sediment.

Spalvins said the agency will reach out to Navassa officials to find out whether the town wants to change current zoning and land use plan to reflect residential development as a potential use for the land.

The property is currently zoned heavy industrial by the town.

Spalvins said the record of decision, which is a public document that explains the remediation plan for the cleanup of a Superfund site, will likely be delayed so federal and state officials can “have these conversations with the local government until we can understand what they would like to see in terms of land use.”

Covering 14 square miles, the Brunswick County town of Navassa has at least three “heavily” polluted sites: the former Kerr-McGee wood-treatment plant, the former Estech General Chemical Co. site and the former Cape Fear Meat Packing plant, according to the SELC.

The wood-treatment plant was operated under various companies between 1936 and 1974. Black employees, paid less than their white counterparts, were equally exposed to creosote, a gummy, tar-like substance used to treat and preserve logs.

Some town residents can trace their ancestors back to slaves forced to work in area rice fields before the Civil War.

Navassa’s population is fewer than 2,000 residents, about 70% of whom are black. More than 20% of the town’s population lives below the poverty line, according to the letter.

“If implemented as proposed, the EPA’s No Action alternative will likely have adverse and disproportionate impact on the local community on the basis of race, in violation of Title VI,” the letter states.

Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 states that no one in the U.S., “shall, on the ground of race, color or national origin, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.”

Therefore, the SELC argues, the state must act if the EPA does not.

There has been community support for mixed-use development on the site and the town has identified a possible location for a Gullah Geechee Cultural Center.

The town received a $25,000 grant in 2016 to develop a concept plan for a cultural center and for a program to protect lands significant to Gullah Geechee heritage.

Gullah Geechee are descendants of Africans enslaved on rice, indigo and Sea Island cotton plantations of the lower Atlantic Coast.

The Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor runs up the East Coast from Florida to just shy of Jacksonville and extends 30 miles from the coast inland. It is one of 55 designated National Heritage Areas throughout the country and one of two in North Carolina, according to the National Park Service.

“We urge the EPA to make a decision that recognized the history of environmental injustice, the burden borne by the Town of Navassa in hosting this and other contaminated sites, as well as federal, policy, and prior decision guidance,” the SELC letter states. “The EPA should reserve its recommendation for a No Action alternative, and support the most robust clean-up possible for OU1.”

Taylor said the SELC and NCEERC have not discussed their next move should the EPA move forward with its proposed plan.

“It would definitely be the wrong decision,” she said. “The EPA and the state have the opportunity to make sure this community is safe.”

NAVASSA – The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has determined that part of the former site of a wood-treatment facility here does not pose a risk to human health or the environment.

How that land will be used became a contentious discussion at a recent meeting, where Navassa residents questioned why the EPA’s proposed plan for the land excludes residential use.

The agency’s land use proposal for 21.6 acres of the former Kerr-McGee Chemical Corp. site identifies commercial, industrial or recreational uses as future possibilities for development.

Residents who participated in a series of community meetings to talk about potential uses for the chunk of land within the federal Superfund site did not indicate during those meetings that they wanted residential lots on the property, said Erik Spalvins, the EPA’s remedial project manager for the site.

“It was because of the feedback we got from the local government and the community that we should consider industrial/commercial and not residential,” he said at the Oct. 15 meeting. “I personally have had conversations with many people in this room and I was assured that residential use was not a priority and if that has changed, that’s OK. If that has changed, then we need to know that.”

But some residents said they believe the option to use the land for housing was never really on the table during a series of community charrettes held to discuss future possibilities for the land.

Brunswick Housing Opportunities President Resea Willis said she believed residential use was not a possible option for the land because, during discussions last year, government officials said some contaminated soil would have to be removed from that portion of the property.

“I never heard residential in that use,” she said. “When we did the charrettes, we knew we could not do residential in that unit until it was cleaned up.”

Spalvins explained that the EPA originally thought the land, identified as “operable unit 1,” would be about 30 acres. The size of the unit was scaled down after testing revealed that contaminants exceeding the national standard were on a portion of the property.

Chris Graham, a Navassa resident and member of the Navassa Community Environmental and Economic Redevelopment Corp., or NCEERC, said he attended the charrettes and did not recall being informed that residential use was an option up for discussion.

“Is there any documentation of where you got that information?” he asked Spalvins. “How did you get that impression? I believe people were steered in that direction to kind of ignore the residential side.”

EPA Community Involvement Coordinator L’Tonya Spencer said that during those meetings between members of the community and government officials poster boards displayed in the room did not include residential use.

“That’s why I made my comment about being steered toward industrial,” Graham said. “We were focused on the industrial part during those charrettes.”

Spalvins responded that if people’s minds have changed, “that is OK.”

“Let us know that,” he said. “Things have evolved. If people want to see a different type of use then we need to document that as clearly as we can. Up until about an hour ago I had not been aware there was interest in residential use as part of the site.”

The wood-treatment plant was operated under various companies between 1936 and 1974, where creosote, a gummy, tar-like substance, was used to treat and preserve logs.

The property was added to the National Priorities List of federal Superfund sites in 2010 because creosote contamination was discovered in the groundwater, soil and sediment.

Dozens of wells are being monitored on the property to test groundwater samples. A plume of creosote in the groundwater remains in the same area since the plant closed more than 40 years ago.

The EPA, in consultation with the state Department of Environmental Quality, oversees the Multistate Environmental Response Trust, which a court appointed to own the Superfund site and take responsibility for managing the remediation of the property.

Another trust, the Navassa Trustee Council, is responsible for restoring natural resources in the area around the site damaged by contamination. The trustee council includes DEQ and other stakeholders from two federal government agencies.

DEQ has asked the trust to put restrictions on 2.6 acres of operable unit 1.

Dave Mattison, a DEQ project manager, said an evaluation of soil samples within that portion of operable unit 1 show concentrated areas of contaminants that exceed the state threshold.

For that reason, he said, the state has asked that institutional controls be placed on the 2.6 acres, restricting housing, schools or daycares from being built on that part of the property.

Operable unit 1 is adjacent to 82 acres known as the eastern upland area, which is free of contamination and not part of the Superfund site.

The EPA will break down the remainder of the former facility and the southern marsh – about 80 acres – into additional operable units.

A 30-day public comment period, which was originally to end Nov. 8, on the EPA’s proposed plan for part of the site has been extended to Dec. 8. The extension had been requested in writing and was not a result of what transpired during the meeting.

Submit comments

• Direct comments or questions to: Remedial Project Manager Erik Spalvins at spalvins.erik@epa.gov, 404-562-8938; or to Community Involvement Coordinator L’Tonya Spencer at spencer.latonya@epa.gov, or at 800-435-9234.

RALEIGH – The North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality, along with National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service acting as natural resource trustees, have released the draft restoration plan and environmental assessment that identifies proposed projects to restore natural resources damaged from releases at the Kerr-McGee Chemical Corp. Superfund site in Navassa.

The soil, sediment and groundwater at the site are contaminated by creosote-related chemicals. In 2006, Kerr-McGee transferred the site to Tronox Inc., which declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2009. In 2014, court-appointed trustees recovered $23 million for natural resource restoration.

The trustees determined that the polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon levels present in the site sediments could cause harm to the organisms living in, on or near those sediments and negatively affect the ecological services the habitat provides.

The draft restoration plan identifies 10 projects estimated at $11.35 million in the Lower Cape Fear River watershed near Navassa. The following proposed projects address damage to natural resources through restoration or preservation of a similar habitat and provide ecological benefits near Navassa.

• Alligator Creek Restoration and Conservation
• Battleship North Carolina — Living Water Restoration
• Carolina Beach State Park Restoration
• Indian Creek Natural Resource Restoration and Conservation
• Lower Black River Conservation
• Lower Cape Fear Bottomlands Conservation
• Merrick Creek Conservation
• Moze Heritage Site Tidal Restoration
• Navassa Stormwater and Riparian Restoration
• Navassa Waterfront Park

Restoration is to be done in phases until all remaining restoration funds are exhausted.

Public comments on the initial draft restoration plan are being accepted through Dec. 2. An information session is set for 6:30 p.m. Nov. 6 at the Navassa Community Center, 338 Main St.

Public comments and requests for a hard copy of the plan can be sent to Howard Schnabolk, NOAA coastal marine specialist, via email at howard.schnabolk@noaa.gov with the subject line “Kerr McGee Draft Restoration Plan Comment,” or mailed to Howard Schnabolk, ℅ NOAA Restoration Center, 2234 South Hobson Ave., Charleston, S.C. 29405.

Navassa residents and other stakeholders are encouraged to attend a workshop Oct. 16 to discuss options for securing property for the proposed Navassa Cultural Center and Park.

The workshop is from 6:30-8 p.m. at Navassa Community Center, 338 Main St. A light dinner will be provided at 6 p.m.

The Multistate Environmental Response Trust, Navassa leaders, residents and other stakeholders will address the following topics:

• Discuss options for securing property for the proposed Navassa cultural center and park.
• Collaborate on the amount of land envisioned for the proposed project.
• Explore potential locations for the proposed center and park.
• Discuss possible organizations able to assume responsibility for and long-term stewardship of the proposed project.
• Review Multistate Trust property conveyance examples.
• Local government agencies.
• Environmental land trusts.
• Other private entities.
• Review the pros and cons of property conveyance approaches.

From 1936 to 1974, Kerr-McGee Corp. and other companies used the 246-acre site, which is bordered by Brunswick River, Sturgeon Creek, a residential area and a light industrial area, for creosote-based wood treating. Kerr-McGee dismantled the wood-treatment buildings and facilities by 1980. The soil, sediment and groundwater are contaminated by creosote-related chemicals but sampling results indicate the contamination does not currently threaten people living or working near the site.

In 2005, the site was conveyed to Tronox, a Kerr-McGee spinoff that filed for bankruptcy protection in 2009. In 2011, the Multistate Trust acquired the site as a court-appointed trustee as part of the Tronox bankruptcy settlement. The Multistate Trust is working with the Environmental Protection Agency and North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality on site investigation, remediation and redevelopment planning.

Learn More

• The Multistate Trust
• EPA Superfund Site: Kerr-McGee Chemical Corp. Navassa Site

NAVASSA — The next quarterly meeting later this month about the Kerr-McGee Chemical Corp. – Navassa Superfund Site will include discussion of the Environmental Protection Agency’s proposed restoration plan for the Brunswick County site.

The meeting hosted by EPA Region 4 staff, the state Department of Environmental Quality and the Multistate Environmental Response Trust is from 6-8 p.m. Tuesday, Sept. 24, in the Navassa Community Center, 338 Main St.

Also on the agenda are recently approved environmental investigation reports, including one on risks to human health, and updates on recent soil sampling, site marketing and the property transfer process.

Learn More

NAVASSA – What happens to the land where a former wood-treatment plant operated in this town for decades – who will own it and how it will be developed – weighs on the minds of residents here as government agencies prepare to roll out plans detailing proposed restoration of the property and how contaminated areas on the site will be cleaned.

Residents peppered government officials with questions about the future of the former Kerr-McGee Chemical Corp. Superfund site toward the tail-end of a two-hour quarterly meeting Tuesday night.

Can the land be deeded to the town? Who has expressed interest in the property? What is the time frame in which organizations or groups within the town have to petition for a portion of the land?

“It’s been five years,” Navassa Mayor Eulis Willis said, referring to the time when discussions began about remediating and reusing the site.

Anjie Ackerman, planning specialist with the North Carolina Division of Environmental Quality’s Division of Mitigation Service’s Watershed Planning & Property Protection section, said she understood residents’ frustration.

“I get it,” she said.

A draft restoration plan identifying the preferred proposed uses for the land will be released some time later this year, Ackerman said.

“I can’t guarantee you a timeline,” she said. “Our vision is to have this draft out this summer and then have a 45-day comment period.”

Officials with the state Department of Environmental Quality, U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have been reviewing more than 20 submitted proposals on how the land should be used.

“We have made a lot of progress on this restoration plan in the last four months,” Ackerman said. “It’s cumbersome.”

A public meeting will be held in addition to the comment period once the draft plan is released to the public.

The location and level of contamination will help determine what types of development and where such development may occur on the 250-acre site.

Last April, Erik Spalvins, the Environmental Protection Agency’s remedial project manager for the site, said officials will likely not ask for land use restrictions on 100 acres of the site that are free of contamination.

The EPA will, however, place land-use restrictions on areas contaminated by creosote, including 50 acres where the former processing area and unlined ponds collecting wastewater generated during wood-treating operations were located.

Creosote is a gummy, tar-like mix of hundreds of chemicals used as a wood preservative.

Various companies operated the facility from 1936 through 1974, coating logs in creosote then stacking and drying them before loading them onto trains and transporting them offsite.

The property was added to the National Priorities List of federal Superfund sites in 2010 because of the contamination in the groundwater, soil and sediment.

To date, 485 soil samples have been collected in 323 locations on the property. Another 225 sediment samples primarily in the marsh area of the property have been collected. Nearly 550 groundwater samples have been collected from 59 groundwater wells on and off the site in addition to 193 subsurface samples and 20 surface water samples.

Groundwater wells are being tested every six months.

Tests continue to indicate that a contamination plume on the site is stable.

Richard Elliott, the Multistate Environmental Response Trust Project manager of the Superfund site, showed two maps of the plume – one showing the area of contamination in March 2017 and the other in April of this year.

The results, he said, are “very, very similar.”

“It wiggles around a little bit, but it doesn’t look like it’s going anywhere,” Elliott said.

Tests indicate that about 3 ½ acres within a 35-acre marsh on the southern portion of the property are contaminated above toxic standards.

“What we’re trying to understand here is where’s the real threshold in our marsh,” Elliott said. “There are a lot of dynamics going on and certainly one thing about the marshes is if we don’t have to go in there and dig holes in the marsh that’s a good thing. We’re going to be doing some additional sampling to get more data.”

Once the boundaries of the Superfund site have been determined, that land will be divided into operable units. By breaking the land into these units, officials are able to identify specific problems and determine the best course of action for cleanup within each unit.

These units can be adjusted as needed, Spalvins said.

A record of decision, the document that sets the remediation method chosen for those operable units, is expected to be released to the public later this year.

“This community has had a piece of it that has been out of service for decades,” Spalvins said. “So, the ability for the local community to steer what happens to it … I think is very important.”

Navassa residents through a series of workshops have shared their ideas about how they want the land to be used.

“People want jobs. People want a tax base to help the town. People want some green space and some recreational area,” Elliott said.

If the town wants the property it will need to make that request, he said.

The next quarterly meeting is set for Sept. 24.

NAVASSA — The next quarterly meeting of the Kerr-McGee Chemical Corp. – Navassa Superfund Site is set for 6-8 p.m. Tuesday, June 25, in the town’s community center, 338 Main St.

Representatives from The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Region 4, state state Department of Environmental Quality and Multistate Environmental Response Trust will be on hand to present environmental investigation reports, 2019 updates and site marking on the property framed by Brunswick River, Sturgeon Creek, a residential area and a light industrial area.

Also, EPA Record of Decision activities are to be presented. The Record of Decision, or ROD, is a document available to the public explaining all the activities that took place before selection of a remediation method and describing how the remediation will protect human health and the environment.

Kerr-McGee and other companies used the 245-acre site for creosote-based wood treating from 1936 to 1974, but by 1980, Kerr-McGee dismantled the wood-treatment buildings and facilities. In 2005, the site was conveyed to Tronox, a Kerr-McGee spinoff that filed for bankruptcy protection in 2009. Multistate Trust in 2011 acquired the site as a court-appointed trustee as part of the Tronox bankruptcy settlement.

EPA, NCDEQ and Multistate Trust are working together on the site investigation, remediation and redevelopment planning of the contaminated site, according to a release from Multistate Trust. The site, which has soil, sediment and groundwater contamination by creosote-related chemicals, does not currently threaten those residing and working near the site.

Contact Richard Elliott of the Multistate Trust at 617-953-1154 or re@g-etg.com for more information.

Learn More

• The presentation from the March 26, 2019 public meeting
• The Multistate Trust website
• The EPA website

NAVASSA — This Brunswick County community across the Cape Fear River from downtown Wilmington has a long history with industrial polluters, but the president of a manufacturer that announced Friday its expansion here says the operation will bring no environmental risks.

New Jersey-based Pacon Manufacturing Corp. is expected to bring in 300 new jobs and $37 million in investments to Brunswick County, Gov. Roy Cooper announced during a county economic development event inside the former U.S. Marine boat manufacturing plant at 100 Quality Drive.

The corporation founded in 1949 develops and manufactures wipes, pads, towels and liquids for consumers, industrial and medical industries. Officials plan to have the building ready by the end of 2019.

Pacon President Mike Shannon told Coastal Review Online that operations here will create no discharge or emission. Materials are to be brought in, cut, folded, wrapped and shipped at the Navassa plant.

“Our footprint in New Jersey is zero. We don’t even have to report emissions, we have nothing. From an environmental standpoint, we are meaningless,” Shannon said.

The riverfront site in Navassa had been on the market for a decade after U.S. Marine mothballed the plant in 2008. According to the StarNews of Wilmington, the property had been listed at $8.5 million and includes a dock for access to the Cape Fear River, access to Interstate 140 and access to CSX rail service.

The existing building is next to an Environmental Protection Agency Superfund site, the former Kerr-McGee Chemical Corp. wood-treatment operation, which Shannon said wasn’t a concern. After researching and consulting with environmental agencies and organizations, corporate officials decided the contamination there wouldn’t have an effect.

The company received a performance-based grant of $300,000 from the One North Carolina Fund, a discretionary program the North Carolina Department of Commerce administers on behalf of the governor to help local governments attract economic investment and to create jobs.

“My mission for North Carolina is this: I want a North Carolina where people are better educated, where they’re healthier, where they have more money in their pockets and they have opportunities to live lives of abundance and purpose. Today’s announcement helps to further that mission for our state,” Cooper said Friday during the announcement. He added that Navassa was one of the communities hit hard by Florence and this investment was another step forward.

Salaries for the new jobs will vary, but will average $31,000.

“This is a great day for Brunswick County,” said Sen. Bill Rabon in a statement. “Advanced manufacturing is a strong industry sector in Southeastern North Carolina and Pacon Manufacturing will be a great addition to our state.”

“We are very excited about welcoming Pacon Manufacturing to our community,” said Rep. Deb Butler. “These new jobs will have a great impact on our citizens.”

This story was updated April 4 to clarify the roles of the two trusts involved and where restoration projects will take place.

NAVASSA – The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is not going to ask for land use restrictions on nearly half of a former wood-treatment plant Superfund site here.

Erik Spalvins, the EPA’s remedial project manager for the former Kerr-McGee Chemical Corp. site, said Tuesday it will be up to Navassa officials to restrict, if they choose, through zoning the types of development permissible on 100 acres of the former wood-treatment plant site.

Tests confirm that those 100 acres of the 250-acre site are free of contamination. The EPA will place land-use restrictions on other areas of the site, including 50 acres with the highest contamination of creosote – the former processing and pond area.

Another 50 acres where treated wood was stored before it was shipped via rail offsite is lightly contaminated.

Spalvins said the 100 acres contaminated with creosote will be restricted from residential use.

Tests are ongoing in a marsh that spans 30 to 40 acres on the southern portion of the property, Spalvins said.

“We’re trying to get as much of this back into use as quickly as we can,” he said.

A record of decision will be released “as soon as possible,” he said, possibly before the end of September.

“I thought we would have done it three or four years ago, frankly, and I’m sorry that we haven’t,” Spalvins said.

He, officials with the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality and those with the Multistate Trust hosted Tuesday what was originally supposed to be a quarterly meeting in the Brunswick County town. The meeting was initially scheduled for Feb. 26, but was pushed back as a result of delays caused by the 35-day government shutdown that ended Jan. 25.

Groundwater in nearly 60 monitoring wells drilled in and around the site will continued to be sampled every six months, said Richard Elliott, the Multistate Environmental Response Trust project manager of the Superfund site.

Tests continue to show that a plume of creosote in the groundwater remains in the same area since the plant closed more than 40 years ago.

“It’s not getting bigger,” Elliott said. “It’s not getting smaller. It’s not doing anything. It’s pretty much staying in place.”

Creosote has been found anywhere from 10 feet below the surface to as deep as 90 feet below the surface on the site, where the wood-treatment plant was operated under various companies from 1936 through 1974.

The property was added to the National Priorities List of federal Superfund sites in 2010 because of the contamination in the groundwater, soil and sediment.

Elliott explained that the creosote plume had not intersected with nearby Sturgeon Creek because the contamination is below the creek.

“The creosote goes down,” he said. “It’s heavier than water. It’s sinking and it’s not moving very fast.”

Samples taken within about 3½ acres of the 35-acre southern marsh area of the property indicate higher than allowable toxicity. Officials will continue to sample those areas of the marsh, Elliott said.

“The real question is, are those really a risk to the ecosystem?” he said. “The problem is that an ecosystem in a marsh is very, very sensitive. When you’re getting down to small areas you have to be real careful.”

Elliott said a finalized human health risk assessment, or HHRA, is nearly complete and likely to be submitted in April.

The results of the HHRA indicate the soils in the treated and untreated wood storage areas, the eastern upland area, and the southern marsh do not pose an unacceptable risk to human health.

The risk is, however, unacceptable for soils in the pond and process areas as well as where the groundwater contamination is located.

Elliott said that restrictions for land use will be included in property deeds as well as warnings about digging the land and what to do if creosote is discovered.

Plans this year include initiating a remedial design for the Superfund site, completing the feasibility study on the pond and process area, and conducting plume further studies of the plume.

“We’re going to start marketing the site,” Elliott said. “We’ve had a fair amount of interest. Right now, it’s zoned for industrial use. We need to work with the town to properly zone it.”

The EPA, in consultation with DEQ, oversees the Multistate Environmental Response Trust, which was court-appointed to own the Superfund site and is responsible for managing the remediation of the property.

Another trust, the Navassa Trustee Council, is responsible restoring natural resources in the area around the Superfund site damaged by contamination. This trustee council includes DEQ and other stakeholders from two federal government agencies.

Anjie Ackerman, planning specialist with DEQ’s Division of Mitigation Service’s Watershed Planning & Property Protection section, said that, so far, 26 proposals for how the land should be used had been submitted for consideration.

Not all 26 of the ideas will be recommended, she said.

These projects will most likely not take place on the actual Superfund site, but at least some are expected to impact the surrounding watershed.

“We can take project ideas now,” Ackerman said. “We can take projects this summer. Until the money is gone, we will take project ideas.”

Funding decisions will be made after the public has had the opportunity to comment.

Ackerman said a draft restoration plan will be released in the coming weeks. The release of the draft will be followed by a 45-day public comment period.

Ackerman said the targeted timeframe for the public comment is June or July.

The next EPA-hosted meeting on the Superfund site is set for June 25.

NAVASSA – The effort to save Reaves Chapel African Methodist Episcopal Church, which is considered a culturally and historically significant structure, has reached an important milestone with the recent purchase of the property for conservation.

The Coastal Land Trust and the Cedar Hill/West Bank Heritage Foundation announced Monday the trust’s purchase of Reaves Chapel using a grant from the Orton Foundation.

The chapel was built along the Cape Fear riverfront shortly after the Civil War by formerly enslaved people of Cedar Hill Plantation. The original congregation had farmed the former plantation property and other neighboring rice plantations.

According to the trust, when Mount Misery and Cedar Hill roads were built and roads had replaced the river as the main mode of transportation, the congregation in about 1922 used logs and a team of oxen to move the church from the riverfront to its present location on Cedar Hill Road. The property was given to the church by Edward Reaves, the church’s namesake.

“This was our community church,” Al Beatty, president of the nonprofit Cedar Hill/West Bank Heritage Foundation, said in a statement. “Everyone in the community went to church there. Major groups came there to perform. A revival would bring in 80 – 100 people. If somebody died, they rang the church bell,” he added.

The bell, incidentally, still hangs in place in the church tower.

The church had an active congregation until about 1995, when the church matriarch, Aurelia Gertrude Weston, died. Since then, time and weather have taken a toll on the building.

“Navassa Mayor Eulis Willis helped establish the Cedar Hill/West Bank Heritage Foundation in 2013 to enhance, develop and improve the region’s cultural heritage,” Beatty said. “Saving Reaves Chapel was the primary focus of the Foundation. Then, in 2015, Mayor Willis introduced the Coastal Land Trust, which had completed several conservation acquisitions in Brunswick County, and which has now been able to complete the purchase of Reaves Chapel from the Annual Conference of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. We also appreciate the guidance of Rev. Jerould Richburg and Rev. Dr. Patricia L. Freeman, who served as local liaisons for the Annual Conference.”

Founded in 1992, the Coastal Land Trust’s mission is to enrich the coastal communities of North Carolina through conservation of natural areas and working lands, education and the promotion of good land stewardship.

Camilla Herlevich, executive director of the trust, said the nonprofit had recently expanded its focus to include community conservation and serving communities that had not traditionally benefited from land trust work. She said the grant from the Orton Foundation, a state affiliate of the Moore Charitable Foundation founded by Louis Bacon in 1992, made the purchase possible. The foundation is focused on protecting the Cape Fear River basin’s wetlands, lands, forests and wildlife habitats, as well as supporting educational, health care and community programs in the region.

“This was an extraordinary opportunity to help save a beautiful, historically significant African American structure that has fallen into disrepair,” said Bacon, who is chairman of the Moore Charitable Foundation and the Orton Foundation. “Reaves Chapel was an important pillar in the local community, and the Orton Foundation hopes that our role in helping to save and restore it opens a new chapter in its storied life.”

“We couldn’t be more excited about finally acquiring this irreplaceable community treasure,” said Herlevich. “But we all know that the real work has just begun. We hope to clean up, repair, stabilize, and restore Reaves Chapel so that it can be a gathering place for the community once again. With our partners at Cedar Hill/West Bank Heritage Foundation, we will be seeking advice, assistance, and expertise — not to mention donations and grants — in the days and months ahead.”

The Coastal Land Trust has saved more than 72,000 acres of special places, and has offices in Wilmington, New Bern and Elizabeth City. The trust previously protected more than 18,000 acres along the western banks of the lower Cape Fear River and its tributaries, including a 900-acre tract that it purchased and donated to Brunswick County, now managed by the county as Brunswick Nature Park.

Learn More

• Coastal Land Trust

NAVASSA — The next quarterly public information meeting about the Kerr-McGee Chemical Corp. – Navassa Superfund Site is set for the evening of Tuesday, March 26, in the community center, 338 Main St. This meeting was originally scheduled for Feb. 26 but was postponed.

During the 6-8 p.m. meeting hosted by the Environmental Protection Agency’s Region 4, state Department of Environmental Quality and the Multistate Environmental Response Trust, representatives of the hosting organizations are to present updates about the site and answer questions.

Kerr-McGee and other companies from 1936-74 used the 245-acre site for creosote-based wood treating.  The site is bounded by the Brunswick River, Sturgeon Creek residential area and a light industrial area.

Kerr-McGee dismantled the wood-treatment buildings and facilities by 1980 and in 2005, the site was conveyed to Tronox, a Kerr-McGee spinoff that filed for bankruptcy protection in 2009.

The Multistate Trust acquired the site in 2011 as a court-appointed trustee as part of the Tronox bankruptcy settlement and is  working with beneficiaries EPA and NCDEQ on the site investigation, remediation and redevelopment planning.

The soil, sediment and groundwater are contaminated by creosote-related chemicals. Site contamination does not currently threaten people living and working near the site, according to EPA.

Contact Richard Elliott of the Multistate Trust at 617-953-1154 or re@g-etg.com for more information.

Learn More

• The Nov. 8, 2018, public meeting presentation
• The Multistate Trust
• EPA’s Navassa Superfund Site

NAVASSA – The hope, in the end, is that less than half of the 245-acre grounds of a former wood-treatment facility here will be labeled a federal Superfund site.

Between the land that is believed to be clean – about 100 acres – and areas where creosote-contaminated soil can be removed, perhaps about 90 acres will continue to be deemed an Environmental Protection Agency, or EPA, Superfund site.

“We’ll see. I don’t know,” said Erik Spalvins, the EPA’s remedial project manager for the Navassa site.

Any land within the former Kerr-McGee Chemical Corp. treatment plant site that is not marked Superfund will carry a higher value because it will be relieved of the stigma associated with the label, Spalvins said.

It will likely be at least a couple of more years before the land can be placed on the market.

Federal and state agencies continue to research the extent of contamination on and around the site. Everything from surface and subsurface soils, terrestrial sediment, marsh sediment and groundwater is being tested to determine the where and how much creosote contamination lurks on the land.

Creosote is a gummy, tar-like mix of hundreds of chemicals used as a wood preservative.

For decades, logs were coated in creosote, stacked and dried before being loaded onto trains and transported offsite.

The facility included 245 acres of upland and marsh and was in operation under various companies from 1936 through 1974.

The site was added to the National Priorities List of federal Superfund sites in 2010 because of the contamination in groundwater, soil and sediment.

Water samples taken from dozens of monitoring wells drilled in and around the site show creosote has traveled anywhere from 10 feet below the surface to a depth of as much as 90 feet below the surface.

However, continued testing shows that a plume of creosote in the groundwater appears to be in the same area since the plant closed more than 40 years ago, said Richard Elliott, the Multistate Environmental Response Trust project manager of the Superfund site.

“I would describe it as a stable plume at this point,” he said. “It’s not moving toward a source of drinking water or anything like that.”

Water samples from more than 50 wells are taken every six months, the most recent of which were collected Nov. 5.

Federal officials are going to continue testing samples from the 30- to 40-acre marsh on the site.

Within the marsh, an area of about 1 to 3 acres may pose a risk to so-called ecological receptors, which include any living organisms other than humans.

Samples taken in 2016 and again this year show very little impact to the environment, Elliott said. In fact, the test results from those samples show “less toxicity” than the EPA is comfortable with, he said.

The EPA wants to take more time and be sure that findings from those samples are accurate.

“We are going to verify those results with a 28-day toxicity test,” Spalvins said.

The overall goal is to contain, clean up and restore the land so that it may be re-used for the benefit of the town, which is bordered by Sturgeon Creek and Brunswick River.

Residents, with the guidance of federal and state officials, have drafted four redevelopment concepts for the site.

Each concept, though slightly different, includes common themes: a river walk, ferry access, kayak launch, viewing platform and a park with walking and biking trails.

There’s also space for a heritage center, a rice field where visitors could see how the historically significant commodity here is grown, light industrial and commercial use.

Officials fielded Nov. 8 during the quarterly meeting in Navassa Community Center several questions from residents about the time frame in which cleanup may be done.

“I think that we’re trying to move at a pace that’s not so fast that we’re leaving the community behind,” Spalvins said. “At a site like this where we’re trying to balance community input – these are 50-year decisions so we want to be more cautious and formal in how we do that.”

Realistically, he said, the property would go to market at the end of 2020.

The time frame prompted some residents to question funding for the remediation.

Spalvins and Elliott assured them there is enough money to cover the project.

“We have not spent so much money that I’m concerned we’re going to run out of money in the next 10 or 15 years,” Spalvins said.

Elliott said the intent is to have money left over.

“The money in the trust can only be used for remediation,” he said. “If there is money left in the trust it will flow to the other sites in this trust that need money.”

Learn More

• EPA 
• Multistate Environmental Response Trust

NAVASSA — During the next public meeting about the Kerr-McGee Chemical Corp. — Navassa Superfund site, government officials and Multistate Environmental Response Trust representatives will discuss Hurricane Florence’s impact on the site, environmental investigations, 2018 field activities and possible remediation options.

The public meeting is scheduled for 6 to 8 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 8, at Navassa Community Center, 338 Main St.

The Environmental Protection Agency Region 4, state Department of Environmental Quality and Multistate Environmental Response Trust are jointly hosting the meeting.

From 1936 to 1974, Kerr-McGee and other companies used the 245-acre site for creosote-based wood treating, which is bounded by the Brunswick River, Sturgeon Creek, a residential area and a light industrial area.

The soil, sediment and groundwater are contaminated by creosote-related chemicals. Officials say site contamination does not currently threaten people living and working near the site.

The site was conveyed to Tronox in 2005 a Kerr-McGee spinoff that filed for bankruptcy protection in 2009. In 2011, the Multistate Trust acquired the site as a court-appointed trustee as part of the Tronox bankruptcy settlement. The Multistate Trust is working with its beneficiaries—EPA and NCDEQ—on the site investigation, remediation and redevelopment planning.

Learn More

• EPA 
• Multistate Environmental Response Trust

NAVASSA — Residents can view redevelopment concepts 3-6 p.m. Aug. 9 during an open house for the Kerr-McGee Chemical Corp. Superfund site.

The public meeting to follow from 6-8 p.m. will focus on recent environmental investigations, field activities in 2018, possible remediation options and redevelopment concepts. Representatives of Environmental Protection Agency, North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality and the Multistate Trust will  answer questions.

The open house and public meeting will be at the Navassa Community Center, 338 Main St.

The site is surrounded by the Brunswick River, Sturgeon Creek, a residential area, and a light industrial area. The soil, sediment and groundwater are contaminated by creosote-related chemicals. Site contamination does not currently threaten people living and working near the site, according to the EPA.

Kerr-McGee and other companies used the 245-acre site for creosote-based wood treating between the years of 1936 and 1974. By 1980, Kerr-McGee dismantled the wood-treatment buildings and facilities and in 2005, the site was conveyed to Tronox, a Kerr-McGee spinoff that filed for bankruptcy protection in 2009.

In 2011, the Multistate Trust acquired the site as a court-appointed trustee as part of the Tronox bankruptcy settlement. The Multistate Trust is working with its beneficiaries—EPA and NCDEQ—on the site investigation, remediation and redevelopment planning.

Learn More

• Environmental Protection Agency
• The Multistate Trust

NAVASSA – Residents can meet one-on-one with experts and hear an update about the Kerr-McGee Chemical Corp. Superfund site during a public availability session and meeting Tuesday.

Hosted by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Region 4, North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality and Multistate Environmental Response Trust, or Multistate Trust, the session and meeting will be in the Navassa Community Center, 338 Main St.

During the public availability session set for 3:30 to 5:30 p.m., residents can discuss the site with representatives of EPA, DEQ and the Multistate Trust, who will be on hand to answer questions and share information.

The public meeting will follow at 6 p.m. when the federal and state officials and Multistate Trust representatives will present updates on the site and answer questions. They plan to address the following:

• Remedial Investigation, or RI, which is a study designed to collect the necessary data to determine the nature and extent of contamination, characterize site conditions, and assess risk to human health and the environment.
• An upcoming feasibility study, or FS, of possible remediation options. The FS is designed to identify and evaluate potential remedies to address contamination at the site, and to assess possible technologies and alternatives for their effectiveness in protecting human health and the environment.
• The Redevelopment Planning Initiative, or RPI, for the site. The RPI is the Multistate Trust-led effort to work with citizens, community leaders and other stakeholders to identify community-supported plans for potential site reuses that protect human health and the environment and are environmentally and economically sustainable. A community visioning workshop was held Feb. 23–24, 2018, to provide a forum for citizens to help shape the future of the site.

Kerr-McGee and other companies used from 1936-74 the 245-acre site for creosote-based wood treating. By 1980, Kerr-McGee dismantled the wood-treatment buildings and facilities. In 2005, the site was conveyed to Tronox, a Kerr-McGee spinoff that filed for bankruptcy protection in 2009, according to the press release. In 2011, the Multistate Trust acquired the site as a court-appointed trustee as part of the Tronox bankruptcy settlement, according to the press release. The Multistate Trust is working with its beneficiaries — EPA and DEQ — on the site investigation, remediation and redevelopment planning.

The site is bounded by the Brunswick River, Sturgeon Creek, a residential area and a light industrial area. The soil, sediment and groundwater are contaminated by creosote-related chemicals. Site contamination does not currently threaten people living and working near the site.

Learn More

• Kerr McGee Chemical Corp. Superfund Site
• Multistate Environmental Response Trust

NAVASSA — The extent of creosote contamination in the soil and groundwater on and around a former wood treatment plant is of “various levels,” according to a remedial investigation of the site.

“The most heavily impacted area is what we call the process plant and the ponds,” explained Richard Elliott, the Multistate Environmental Response Trust project manager of the federally designated Superfund site in Brunswick County’s Navassa.

Logs coated in creosote, a gummy, tar-like mix of hundreds of chemicals used as a wood preservative, were stacked and dried before being loaded onto trains.

The top 3 or 4 feet of soil in the area in which the logs were placed to dry has higher concentrations of contamination, but that soil can likely easily be removed and replaced with contaminant-free dirt.

Samples routinely taken from 69 monitoring wells drilled in and around the site reveal creosote has traveled anywhere from 10 feet below the surface to a depth of as much as 90 feet below the surface and it is affecting the groundwater, Elliott said.

“Creosote is heavier than water, so it’s going down,” he said. “It’s dense, so it’s tending to just flow down.”

The plume of contamination in the groundwater is slow moving, staying relatively in the same area since the Kerr-McGee Chemical Corp. treatment plant closed more than 40 years ago.

The facility included 245 acres of upland and marsh and was in operation under various companies from 1936 through 1974.

The site was added to the National Priorities List of federal Superfund sites in 2010 because of the contamination in groundwater, soil and sediment.

The overall goal is to contain, clean up and restore the land so that it may be re-used for the benefit of the small Brunswick County town, which is bordered by Sturgeon Creek and Brunswick River.

Officials with the Environmental Protection Agency, or EPA, the Multistate Trust and North Carolina have been holding quarterly meetings to update Navassa residents about the ongoing investigation into how the contamination is affecting the environment and health of those who live in the community.

During the most recent quarterly meeting held Tuesday in the town’s community center, residents asked an array of questions, including whether some of the animals they eat – fish and deer, for example – are being tested for contamination.

The answer: Officials have not investigated any potential long-term health effects from eating fish and wild game taken from the area.

Dave Mattison, Superfund Section project manager with the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality, or DEQ, said samples collected between 2008 and 2009 of bugs in the marsh revealed that the bugs present were not affected by contamination.

“You saw an absence of critters,” he said, meaning those that were affected were no longer in the marsh.

“Most of that marsh is in fairly good shape,” Mattison said.

Over time, Elliott explained, Mother Nature has taken control of the effect contamination has had on the marsh, which is roughly 90 acres.

Within the marsh, an area of about 1 to 3 acres may pose a risk to so-called ecological receptors, which include any living organisms other than humans, officials said.

“The next phase is what to do about it,” Elliott said. “It’s a tricky thing on how you clean up a marsh. The problem is, the more you get into it the more problems you cause.”

For that reason, officials may focus initially on 1 acre and see how remediating that acre goes before branching out to a wider area.

Elliott said that about 50 to 70 acres of the roughly 153 acres of uplands on the site could be relatively easy to clean for re-use.

Those areas include drainage swales on the property and the top few feet of contaminated soil.

“The likely answer is we’ll just excavate that stuff and put in clean dirt because it’s limited, localized and we can do it quickly,” Elliott said. “You could probably get that clean enough for some type of commercial or even residential use.”

In the areas where creosote has been found as deep as 90 feet below the surface, including where it was processed and placed in unlined ponds, clean up will be more complicated.

These areas may be reserved for industrial use with restrictions, including the depth at which someone can dig on the land, Elliott said.

He encouraged residents to use their imaginations and offer input on how the land may be re-used.

“Don’t let this stuff inhibit your creativity on how you want this site to be used,” Elliott said. “It’s our intent and our charter to do something there that the community agrees with. The community doesn’t have a say in who buys that land directly. On that part of it you’re going to have to believe that we’re going to do the right thing.”

The town does have a say in how to zone the land, which will guide future use of the property.

The site is currently zoned heavy industrial.

A community development workshop is being hosted Feb. 22-24, during which time residents will be asked to give their input on how the land should be re-used.

The EPA is expected to publish in 2019 a record of decision documenting the cleanup plan and detailing how the land may be used.

Learn More

• Multistate Environmental Response Trust Navassa

NAVASSA – Soil contaminated with a wood preservative used for decades at a defunct wood treatment plant here still appears to be confined mainly within the boundaries of the former facility.

Samples routinely collected this year from more than 50 wells on and around the former Kerr-McGee Chemical Corp. site have consistently shown that some areas within the 251-acre property in Brunswick County have higher levels of creosote contamination than others, but that the chemical compound is not spreading, according to the latest results shared during the quarterly community meeting held Tuesday night.

“We haven’t really encountered anything that we didn’t expect out there so far,” said Richard Elliott, project manager with the Multistate Environmental Response Trust that now owns the property. “It probably isn’t going to be totally cleaned up. We just don’t have enough money. Some of the creosote’s going to be there, but it will be contained.”

A total of $92 million to remediate the site and $23 million to restore surrounding land and waterways was allocated from the $5.15 billion total of what became in 2015 the largest environmental settlement in U.S. history.

The wood treatment plant in Navassa was operational for nearly four decades. The plant opened in 1936 and went through multiple owners before being sold to Kerr-McGee, which closed the plant in 1974.

The site was added to the Environmental Protection Agency’s Superfund program’s National Priorities List in 2010. The Multistate Trust was created in 2011 as a result of the settlement to oversee the cleanup and help develop plans for future use for the property.

As EPA and Multistate Trust officials have previously reported, the densest concentration of creosote, a gummy, tar-like substance used to treat wood, is in the area where the chemical was placed into unlined ponds.

“Here, it’s got a lot of contamination and it’s deep, 70 to 80 feet,” Elliott said as he pointed to a map of the site.

A primary theme reiterated during the quarterly meetings hosted by the EPA, Multistate Trust and North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality is that residents and business owners within the small, Brunswick County town are an integral part of deciding how the land should be used.

“Don’t assume we know what you want because we really don’t,” Elliott said.

The Multistate Trust must receive approval from the EPA and the state prior to selling any portion of the land.

“It could be sold to a third party and that’s happened at some of our other sites,” Elliott said. “We want you, the community, to participate in that.”

Navassa Mayor Eulis Willis said the town needs public access to the surrounding waterways.

“We want to get to the river,” he said. “We don’t have deep pockets where we can go and buy up all that riverfront property.”

During the meeting Tuesday, residents were asked, rather than look at the property as one, large tract, to break the site into distinct blocks.

How each segment, or what the EPA terms “operable unit,” is categorized is based on the ease or difficulty in which the contamination within it may be cleaned up or contained.

The block with the largest and deepest creosote concentrations will, in all reality, not likely be cleaned, but the contamination will be contained.

That’s an area that, for example, would not be well suited for a day care facility.

In another block, where the wood at the plant was treated and then stacked onto drying racks to drip-dry prior to shipping, contamination is relatively shallow in the soil, Elliott said.

“That looks like an area that you might just be able to literally take the dirt off the top a couple of feet,” he said.

Testing results reveal light contamination in another block, where creosote is predominately in a couple of drainage ditches.

The area referred to as the southern marsh has started to recover, Elliott said.

“There was an area there that was contaminated, but Mother Nature is doing her work,” he said. “That area is in pretty decent shape. It’s not as bad as I actually thought it might be. It’s marsh, so we have to treat it different from upland soils.”

There is no evidence creosote contamination has infiltrated drinking water sources in the town.

Residents are being urged to follow the existing statewide fish consumption advisory.

Jamie Pritchett with the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Service’s Division of Public Health said Tuesday that fish samples taken in the Cape Fear River, Sturgeon Creek and Brunswick River turned up “some concern” related to striped bass, striped mullet and blue crab.

“We don’t believe any of these are associated with the Kerr-McGee site,” he said.

Residents are advised to eat no more than three meals of striped mullet and blue crab per week. The state has a harvest moratorium on striped bass.

A workshop is set to be hosted Dec. 1-2 at the Navassa Community Center, where residents will get the opportunity to hear about possible uses for the site and share their ideas about how the land may be reused.

The remedial investigation report of the site is expected to be released later this year and presented at the next quarterly meeting Jan. 16, 2018.

NAVASSA – The organization leading the effort to identify feasible options for redeveloping the 251-acre Kerr-McGee Chemical Corp. Superfund site here seeks community input.

The Multistate Environmental Response Trust asks anyone who lives or works in Navassa,  which is in Brunswick County across the river from Wilmington, owns a business or other property in Navassa or is otherwise associated with Navassa to participate in a community survey. The trust is an independent, court-appointed fiduciary responsible for owning, managing, remediating and facilitating the productive reuse and long-term stewardship of the site.

The survey must be completed by Aug. 7. Survey responses will help guide the effort to understand the community’s vision for possible redevelopment of the site.

The Multistate Trust has money for the cleanup that came from the companies responsible for the site contamination, Tronox, Kerr-McGee and Anadarko Petroleum. The funds can be spent only on environmental actions, such as site investigations and cleanup.

The trust is prohibited from using the cleanup funds to:

• Restore damage to natural resources.
• Compensate people for health effects caused by past exposure to site contamination.
• Implement or build site redevelopment, although funds can be used to integrate future reuse into cleanup plans and to engage in multi-stakeholder discussions about future reuse of the site.
• Engage in for-profit activities.

Learn more

• Complete the survey
• Read an updated fact sheet
• Read the Redevelopment Planning Initiative Frequently Asked Questions.
• Visit the Multistate Trust’s Kerr-McGee Navassa website.

NAVASSA — The Greenfield Environmental Multistate Trust’s presentation given June 20 during a public meeting about the environmental investigations, upcoming work and redevelopment planning activities for the Kerr-McGee Chemical Corp. Superfund Site here is now available online.

The meeting and informal sessions held earlier in the day on June 20 were hosted by the Environmental Protection Agency, North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality and the Multistate Environmental Response Trust. The Multistate Trust has been working with EPA and DEQ on environmental investigations and cleanup activities at the Navassa site.

The Multistate Trust is a private entity that owns the site and is responsible for managing, cleaning and working with the town to redevelop it. The trust owns and manages hundreds of former Kerr-McGee contaminated sites in 31 states. The court-appointed trustee of the Multistate Trust is Greenfield Environmental Multistate Trust LLC.

For more information, contact Multistate Trust Project Manager Richard Elliott at 617-953-1154 or re@g-etg.com; EPA Remedial Project Manager Erik Spalvins at 404-562-8938 or spalvins.erik@epa.gov; or DEQ environmental engineer Dave Mattison at 919-707-8336 or david.mattison@ncdenr.gov.

The following are links to materials presented or distributed at the public availability sessions and the public meeting, all available along with other materials at the Multistate Trust’s Kerr-McGee Navassa website:

• Presentation from June 20, 2017 Public Meeting
• Redevelopment Planning Initiative (RPI) Frequently Asked Questions
• Multistate Trust Roles and Responsibilities Fact Sheet
• Remedial (Cleanup) Technologies
• EPA Superfund Process (Community Involvement Activities)
• Fish Evaluation, Kerr-McGee Site (NC Division of Public Health)
• What Fish Are Safe to Eat? (NC Division of Public Health)
• Creosote Fact Sheet (NC Division of Public Health)

NAVASSA – Ella Beatty cannot say with certainty that exposure to creosote led to untimely deaths of residents here, but she wants that discussion brought to the forefront.

“A lot of people here, young fathers, mothers, sisters and brothers have died at an early age in this town,” she said. “People’s needs – that should have been far up on the front burner. Nothing for the human aspect of it – that part, to me, is missing and I feel like we are letting our people down because that part of it is missing.”

Government officials overseeing the cleanup and restoration of a former wood treatment plant that operated here for 40 years say they’re sympathetic, but that any past exposure to the toxin is out of their purview.

“It doesn’t mean that we don’t feel,” said Cindy Brooks, Multistate Trust managing principal. “It doesn’t mean that we don’t see.”

Brooks and representatives from the Environmental Protection Agency, North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality and Navassa Community Economic & Environmental Re-Development Corp., or NCEERC, met with residents Tuesday night to talk about the ongoing investigation, cleanup and restoration process for the former Kerr-McKee plant site.

That meeting concluded a day in which government officials hosted a trio of public sessions for residents to speak one-on-one with various agency representatives about the Superfund site on which a large wood-treatment plant operated for nearly four decades.

Portions of the 250-acre side are contaminated with creosote, a preservative made from various chemicals that, when combined, form a gummy substance applied to wood products such as railroad ties and telephone poles.

In March, officials informed residents that the toxic sludge had been found as deep as 75 feet below the surface.

In all, 59 monitoring wells have been drilled as part of an investigation to determine how far and deep the contamination has spread.

Tuesday’s meeting was the latest in a series of quarterly updates from federal and state representatives overseeing the site.

Throughout the process, residents and stakeholders in the small Brunswick County town just south of Wilmington are being encouraged to participate in planning the re-use of the land.

But people like Beatty, who lives a few minutes’ drive outside of Navassa, want a resolve to the past.

“There’s been so much cancer, so much kidney problems,” she said. “A lot of people, young people in their 40s and 50s, have died from cancer here, more than normal for the amount of people that live in this area.”

Tronox, a spinoff of the Kerr-McKee Corp., which closed the Navassa plant in 1974, created a tort claims trust of more than $580 million after filing for bankruptcy in 2009.

As of last year, a reported 19,000 future tort claims had been filed by victims and family members of those exposed to toxins while working in or living near the company’s plants.

In December, a New York bankruptcy judge ruled that the trust could not automatically deny those claims filed after the company’s bankruptcy proceedings.

LaTanya Beatty-Nixon, vice president of the NCEERC, a nonprofit composed of concerned Navassa residents, and Beatty’s daughter, suggested that representatives from the Garretson Resolution Group Inc., the trustee for the Tronox tort claims trust, be invited to the town to address residents’ questions.

“We hear you,” Beatty-Nixon said. “I hear this over and over again. Don’t think it’s going unnoticed. I promise you, after today, whatever the NCEERC can do to get that ball rolling, we will do that.”

According to the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, long-term exposure to low levels of creosote, especially through direct contact with skin, has resulted in skin cancer and cancer of the scrotum.

People may be exposed to creosote in a number of ways. Those living close to a wood-treatment facility that discharges the chemical into the air or onto the ground can come into contact with the chemical.

Other ways humans are exposed to creosote are by drinking water contaminated with the chemical and eating creosote-contaminated fish and shellfish, according to the registry.

The EPA is collecting groundwater samples from monitoring wells every quarter and evaluating sediment samples from the marsh.

“We’re trying to take samples out of the soil that we can look at and see what’s happening below the ground,” said Richard Elliott, Multistate Trust project manager.

Elliott said at a public meeting in March that there did not appear to be much creosote in Sturgeon Creek, which runs south of Navassa.

The EPA’s remedial investigation report is scheduled to be released in November. A stakeholder’s meeting to hash out possible design plans for redeveloping the site is tentatively scheduled for late November, but the dates will likely change, officials said.

Learn More

• Greenfield Environmental Multistate Trust LLC

NAVASSA – As the investigation continues into how deep and widespread creosote has traveled through Navassa’s soil and groundwater, town leaders and residents must hatch plans to re-use the land where the wood-treating chemical was used and disposed of for years.

The Environmental Protection Agency, or EPA, is drilling additional monitoring wells throughout the town to determine where and how much contamination is in the ground from the former Kerr-McGee Chemical Corp. wood treatment facility.

During a public meeting hosted at the town’s community center Tuesday night, EPA, Multistate Environmental Response Trust and North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality officials updated residents on the latest results of soil and water tested for concentrations of the toxic sludge.

Creosote has been found as deep as 75 feet below the surface, said Richard Elliott, Multistate Trust project manager.

“Some of it is literally creosote,” Elliott said. “There are places, particularly in the production area where they were processing the ties and poles, it’s seeped down into the ground and it’s out there, no question about it.”

Creosote is sitting about 3½ feet deep at the bottom of one 65-foot-deep well, Elliott said.

That revelation drew audible “Mms” from several residents, many of whom shook their heads as they looked at pictures of a black, sludge-soaked cloth pulled from one well.

“You can see there are some places, by visual, that it’s very clean, and then you have creosote,” Elliott said. “We’re basically trying to draw a three-dimensional map of where this stuff is underground. How big is this? How deep is it? What does it look like? We’re trying to understand where that boundary is, but it’s a fairly good size, hundreds of feet in diameter, I would say.”

The Navassa site was once the location of a large plant that operated for nearly four decades treating wood with creosote, a common wood preservative made from a wide range of chemicals that, when combined, form a gummy substance applied to wood products such as railroad ties and telephone poles.

The plant opened in 1936 and was operated by numerous owners before being sold to the Kerr-McGee Chemical Corp., which closed the plant in 1974.

The 250-acre site was added to the EPA’s Superfund program’s National Priorities List in 2010.

In December 2016, officials collected water from 49 monitoring wells. Of those, seven wells contained creosote at thicknesses ranging from 0.07 feet to nearly 3½ feet.

Up until now, the EPA has been sporadically sampling groundwater for traces of contamination. Moving forward, the EPA will collect groundwater samples every quarter.

Elliott said there does not appear to be much creosote in Sturgeon Creek, which runs south of Navassa. Sediment samples from the marsh are currently being evaluated, he said.

He and other officials attempted to answer a barrage of questions from residents wanting to know whether fish and shellfish from the creek are safe to eat and what people should do if they’re concerned about being exposed to contamination.

There are also lingering questions about how or if site cleanup and land re-use planning efforts may be affected by the new administration in Washington.

The EPA may be facing deeper budget cuts, more than the 25 percent initially reported after President Donald Trump took office in January. The president unveiled his preliminary budget plan Thursday, slashing $2.6 billion, or 31 percent, of EPA’s current funding and reducing the agency’s workforce by one-fifth.

The cuts include funding for the Superfund cleanup program.

“No comment,” was the response when CRO asked Franklin Hill, director of the Superfund Division of the EPA Southeast, what effect the cuts may have on work at the Navassa site.

“I would be lying if I said I hadn’t thought about it,” Navassa Mayor Eulis Willis said of the proposed cuts. “Yes, it’s a concern of mine. I don’t know how much I’ll be able to do if it affects us.”

Willis said he had not asked EPA officials with whom he’s familiar about the potential effects.

“Their jobs seem to be somewhat secure at the moment at least,” Willis said.

The president’s proposed budget “reins in” Superfund administrative costs and “would prioritize the use of existing settlement funds to clean up hazardous waste sites and look for ways to remove some the barriers that have delayed the program’s ability to return sites to the community.” The plan would reduce funding for the Hazardous Substance Superfund Account by $330 million.

In the meantime, the process to determine how the former wood-treatment plant site should be used is moving forward.

Cindy Brooks, the Multistate Trust managing principal, proposed Tuesday night the creation of a redevelopment working group that would include residents, town representatives, business owners and the Navassa Community Economic and Environmental Re-Development Corp., or NCEERC.

“The trust is not a developer,” Brooks said. “The implementation of whatever is going to happen out there on the land is going to happen by others. At the end of this process what we hope to have is a potential way to reuse the Kerr-McGee site.”

How much and where the contamination is will help shape just how the land may be used.

The trust is seeking volunteers to join the redevelopment group, which will be chartered next month. A stakeholders’ meeting to hash out two to three design plans is scheduled to be held in September, with a final preliminary plan available for review in December.

EPA officials are urging residents to get involved in the land-use planning process.

“That local input, that local control over what is going to happen is something that’s important to us,” said Erik Spalvins, EPA remedial project manager. “This is about deciding what this piece of property is going to be used for for the next 50 years.”

The EPA’s remedial investigation report is scheduled to be issued in September. A record of decision and a detailed design phase of how the land will be used will be released sometime in 2019 with construction most likely starting in either late 2019 or early 2020, agency officials said.

Learn More

• View the meeting presentation
• Redevelopment Planning Initiative (RPI) Fact Sheet
• Cleanup Progress and Plans Fact Sheet
• Stakeholder Involvement Fact Sheet
• Roles and Responsibilities Fact Sheet
• Contact Names and Phones Fact Sheet

Residents of Navassa, in Brunswick County, are invited to attend a public meeting on Tuesday, March 14 from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. to learn more about research and plans at the Kerr-McGee Chemical Corp. Superfund Site.

The 251-acre site was contaminated by creosote when the corporation treated wood between 1936 and 1974. Testing for the contaminants is ongoing and the firm in charge of working with the site, Greenfield Environmental Trust, is working with the community on future development plans.

The meeting, which will be held at the Navassa Community Center, is meant to update the community about environmental investigations and redevelopment planning at the site. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality and the Multistate Environmental Response Trust are hosting the meeting, where light refreshments will be served.

Learn More

• Read the meeting flyer

NAVASSA — A final work plan has been released by the organization working on the Environmental Protection Agency’s Superfund site here, the former Kerr-McGee Chemical Corp. property, detailing the strategy for more investigation of the site.

The 251-acre site was home to a creosote wood treatment facility from 1936 to 1974. Creosote operations and the subsequent dismantling of the site led to the environmental contamination.

In the Supplemental Remedial Investigation Work Plan addendum dated December 2016 and announced Jan. 10, the Greenfield Environmental Multistate Trust, LLC, lays out the investigation’s status and proposed data collection for 2017.

During past investigations since 1988, the report states that elements of the affected area, including soil, groundwater and surface water, have been tested for contaminants. The Supplemental Remedial Investigation is the latest round of data collection, which is intended to further define the site’s contamination and its potential effects.

The proposed data collection to be conducted in 2017 includes groundwater monitoring, soil sampling and the installation of monitoring wells.

Learn More

• Read the work plan
• View slideshow presented during Dec. 7 community meeting
• CRO’s special report on Navassa’s contamination

NAVASSA – Don’t hold back.

Unlike the long, tedious process ahead in the cleanup and restoration of the Superfund site in Navassa, the message to residents here during an Environmental Protection Agency-sponsored community meeting was simple.

“I don’t want you guys to limit your imagination,” EPA Remedial Project Manager Erik Spalvins said to the crowd. “What is it going to do in the next 50 years? I would open that imagination up and articulate that. It’s our job to come up with different ways to make that happen.”

Residents of the Brunswick County town just south of Wilmington have the opportunity to take an integral part in shaping future use of a former wood treatment plant site.

Portions of the 251-acre site have been contaminated by creosote, a preservative used to treat wood at a plant that was in operation for nearly 40 years before Kerr-McKee Chemical Corp. dismantled it in 1980.

So far, EPA sampling on the property show that a majority of soil with the highest concentrations of creosote contamination is limited to the former process and pond areas.

“We’re getting a good understanding of what’s out there,” said Multistate Trust Project Manager Richard Elliott. “There are some lower concentrations in the former wood-treating storage area and then we want to check the northern end and make sure it’s as clean as we think it is.”

The Multistate Trust, which owns and manages more than 400 former Kerr-McGee contaminated sites in 31 states, is responsible for remediation at each site and helping affected communities redevelop those areas for safe, long-term use.

The EPA in 2010 listed the Navassa site on the agency’s National Priorities List of hazardous waste sites.

Environmental officials know creosote has moved to sediments in the tidal marsh area that borders the property. EPA officials say that the contaminated sediments appear to be confined to the tidal marsh.

They’ve confirmed that a plume of creosote and fuel contamination is in groundwater under the former process area. That plume is migrating toward Sturgeon Creek.

What the EPA has yet to determine is just how much contamination is in the marsh, whether the contamination is moving and, if so, at what pace.

Spalvins explained during the Dec. 7 meeting in a spacious room of the Navassa Community Center that officials do not yet know at what level the contamination in the marsh is affecting wildlife.

One silver lining, he said, is that the marsh appears to be acting as a filter, keeping creosote contaminants from getting into the waterways. But additional sampling of groundwater must be done to delineate the area of contamination.

“There are some things in the soil we want to understand better,” Elliot said.

From now through May of next year, officials will continue to take samples and monitor existing groundwater wells near the plume.

At the same time, the Multistate Trust in January will kick off a redevelopment planning initiative, where officials and residents will begin to discuss future use of the property.

The process is like trying to solve a puzzle.

Residents, guided by the Multistate Trust, will come up with feasible uses for the property. Some uses may not be suitable on certain areas of the land because of potential health concerns related to contamination exposure. That is something the EPA will have to help determine because how the land is used in the future will be integrated into how the site is cleaned up.

“It has to be technically feasible,” said Cindy Brooks, Multistate Trust managing principal. “It has to be economically viable. However, that’s going to happen, it has to be able to sustain itself financially.”

To get to that point, the Multistate Trust will hold what is referred to as a redevelopment plan initiative charrette, which, simply put, is a planning session. This will involve town representatives, local churches, residents, businesses, the Navassa Community Economic Environmental Development Corp. and advisers from the EPA, North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality and various trustee councils.

That session will be followed by market studies and at least one open house before a final potential use or uses are selected.

Clear as mud?

Perhaps, said Navassa’s Mayor Eulis Willis, but he’s got a plan to bring together this community of about 1,900 residents to get the job done.

Forming. Storming. Norming. Performing. Willis said those are the four fundamentals of group dynamics, explaining that a group first forms, then argues before normalizing relationships and, ultimately, performs a task.

“A lot of my folks don’t understand the impact of the opportunity to get involved and what it means for the town,” he said. “I know that it’s going to be three to four months of hit and miss.”

Of a crowd of roughly 100 people at the Dec. 7 meeting, only about 30 or so were town residents, he said.

One of the reasons local turnout was low may have been because the meeting was held on a Wednesday night, the night churches hold mid-week services.

“Every Wednesday,” shouted an unidentified resident who asked EPA officials to move future meetings to another day of the week. “We’re in the South.”

The meeting also drew people representing various organizations, including the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, which is aiding in the process, the Southern Environmental Law Center, as well as Rep. David Rouzer, R-N.C., of Benson.

Christian Preziosi, an environmental scientist and vice president of environmental consulting firm Land Management Group Inc., said his firm submitted proposals to the Natural Resource Trustee Council in October.

“This is strictly for natural resource preservation enhancement,” he said. “It’s intended to replace or offset whatever natural resource effects occurred on-site.”

The firm is eyeing three different areas, one off Mill Creek, another near Indian Creek and one that stretches more than 400 acres near the Cape Fear River.

The EPA will hold quarterly meetings to update the community. A date has not been set for the next meeting, which will be held in the spring.

Learn More

• View a slideshow presented during the meeting
• Multistate Environmental Response Trust
• NOAA’s Damage Assessment, Remediation and Restoration Program

Federal, state and Multistate Trust officials and representatives will hold a public information session Dec. 7 to update the public on work at the Kerr-McGee Superfund Site in Navassa.

The 251-acre site was contaminated by the Kerr-McGee Chemical Corp., which used creosote as a preservative to treat wood between 1936 and 1974. After the facility was dismantled, the creosote was buried on site. Creosote, which is a known carcinogen, and related contaminants are now found in the soil, sediment and groundwater in the area.

The meeting is being hosted by the court-appointed Multistate Environmental Response Trust, which is working with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality on the investigation, cleanup and redevelopment of the site.

Attendees will be updated on the investigation, upcoming work and redevelopment plans at the meeting.

Meeting details:

What: Kerr-McGee Superfund Site update

When: Wednesday, Dec. 7, 6-8 p.m.

Where: Navassa Community Center
338 Main St. Navassa.

To Learn More

• Coastal Review Online’s three-part special report on Navassa
• U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Kerr-McGee webpage

NAVASSA – Officials involved in cleaning up the contamination left here decades ago by a wood-treatment operation say the process will take years, but now that an initial investigation of the Superfund site is complete, a new phase in the effort is about to begin.

Federal, state and other officials updated town residents Tuesday for the first time in about a year on the status of the ongoing work at the former Kerr-McGee Chemical Corp. site. The 251-acre waterfront property in this Brunswick County town is where wood for railroad ties and telephone poles was pressure treated with creosote, a coal tar-based preservative, from 1936 until 1974. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the lead agency in the cleanup, placed the site on a national priority Superfund sites in 2010 because of contamination of groundwater, soils and sediments.

About 65 attended the meeting, including presenters, at the Navassa Community Center on Main Street.

Erik Spalvins, the EPA’s remedial project manager for the site, described the Superfund process as a “formalized, step-by-step, problem-solving approach” that can take as long as 15 years. During the current remedial investigation phase, the past 18 or so months, more than 500 soil samples have been taken at the site, Spalvins said.

“We hope that we can start to assemble some of these results and evaluate where the remaining question marks are and then in 2017 we can produce a document that will be a remedial investigation report,” Spalvins said. “What it’s going to cover is where the contamination is, here’s how high the levels are, here’s how that compares to what a safe level would be and here’s the risks.”

Attention will then turn to the possible options for cleaning up the site – a feasibility study that considers available technologies for cleaning up or containing the contamination.

“Then we make a recommendation as to what we propose to do, that’s the proposed plan, and the EPA makes a decision about which of these options we propose to do,” Spalvins said, adding that options could include drilling wells, building structures to contain the contamination underground or removing soil.

Public meetings are to be held throughout, at each stage of the process, to update residents and receive input.

“I’d say that we’re probably a couple of years from having that proposed plan stage,” Spalvins said. “The remedial design stage might take nine months or a year. Remedial action on a site like this could take two, three, four years for the soil and where we have to deal with groundwater it could take a lot longer.”

An attendee asked about having enough money to finish the cleanup.

Spalvins said the Multistate Environmental Response Trust, which was created in 2011 as result of a more than $5 billion court settlement against the Kerr-McGee Corp. and other related subsidiaries of Anadarko Petroleum Corp., was part of the largest settlement ever for environmental fraud.

“For this site right now there’s about 90-plus million dollars to pay for this cleanup,” Spalvins said. “If the cleanup is not finished, then the EPA will do it with taxpayer money with the state doing cost share. If we are able to do it for less than that, then leftover funds are going to be returned to other sites that the trust manages where they didn’t have enough money.”

The trust could be involved with the site for 20 years, he said.

“Creosote gets into the ground a lot easier than it gets out,” said Lauri Gorton, program manager with the Multistate Environmental Response Trust.

Gorton said the preferred plan is to treat and remove the contaminants, rather than to contain the material on site. Treatment and removal mean fewer limitations on future uses of the site, she said.

Some sites have been able to recycle creosote removed from ground for use at other wood-treatment operations, the officials said.

“No matter what approach we’ve done, the EPA is not going to just leave,” Spalvins said.

Gorton agreed, adding that if the site cannot be completely cleaned, then the trust will be around for the long term to continue monitoring conditions.

Initial Findings

Gorton said the investigation is showing what was expected to be found at the site. No high levels of contamination were found in surface soils where there were never active creosote operations or in areas that could put the public at risk.

The production area included a wastewater pond that was filled when the creosote operation was dismantled in 1980. Soil samples taken at the pond site show creosote contamination 80 feet below ground. Swampy areas in the marsh also show high levels of contamination.

Gorton said follow-up investigation work will begin at the site later this fall.

“What we’re going to see is additional sampling,” Gorton said. “We’ve got some spots want to follow up on.”

This includes the creosote processing areas that are thickly overgrown in the summer, Gorton said. The work will be easier when snakes and underbrush are less of a challenge to site workers.

“We want to make sure we do a comprehensive job,” Gorton said.

Officials said interviews with surviving former creosote workers could help pinpoint other potential areas of contamination that may not be well documented. Several former workers attended the meeting.

“It’s great to have access to a great resource like that,” Gorton said.

Some in attendance asked questions about how the pollution spreads in the groundwater and surface waters of nearby Sturgeon Creek and the Brunswick and Cape Fear rivers, the risks to human health and the kind of work that will take place at the site in the coming months.

Officials said there was no indication of groundwater contamination in the upland areas where there was no creosote production or in upland areas adjacent to the site, mainly because groundwater flows generally toward the creek. Detectable levels have been found in sediments in the rivers and marshes but not on the scale of the marsh immediately adjacent to the production area.

“The other piece of this is there were other wood treaters that have been around and these chemicals are pretty widespread in the environment when you start talking about being around docks and things like that,” Spalvins said. “We’ve detected them but we don’t see them at a level where we think that they’re causing problems.”

An attendee asked about the effects of contamination on the local marine life. Spalvins said fiddler crabs, clams, blue crab and finfish have been sampled, along with minnows found in ditches around the site.

There could be some “very local issues” with the marine life in the marsh but the contaminants don’t move up the food chain. That’s because, in mammals and fish, the chemicals are processed by liver and broken down.

Community Adviser

A community nonprofit group based here has stepped forward to fill the role of technical adviser to interpret EPA documents for townsfolk and assist in providing community input on EPA cleanup actions.

The Navassa Community Economic and Environmental Redevelopment Corp., or NCEERC, has submitted to the EPA a letter of intent to apply for a technical assistance grant from the EPA. The Superfund law allows for issuance of a single grant of up to $50,000 per site to a single nonprofit group, but other groups may partner with the local group. If no other group submits a letter of intent, the group may submit its application by Aug. 31. Any groups wishing to submit a separate application also have 30 days to submit a letter of intent or file a written request for a 30-day extension.

Tonya Spencer, EPA’s community involvement coordinator, explained that the grant allows the community to have a technical assistant to put EPA data into layman’s terms. That’s the adviser’s main role, to review scientific material and help community understand what it all means.

Another role is to gather community input that can help shape plans for future uses of the site.

“It’s almost like a consultant, except they’re working on your behalf,” Spencer said.

The multistate trust will also solicit input from the community about what it would like to see at the site, Gorton said.

“The main role of community is to pick up where the federal authority stops and provide a vision for the future of the community,” she said.

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”

NAVASSA — How would you restore land and waterways damaged by years of contamination?

Officials in charge of cleaning up a former Navassa-based wood treatment plant that’s now a federal Superfund site are seeking answers to that question from people and groups during a public meeting next week in the small Brunswick County town.

“We’re in a scoping period so we really want to know any and every option,” said Howard Schnabolk, a habitat restoration specialist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA. “To get ideas that are on the ground and hear from folks who live in the community is important to steer our efforts. We’re really interested in hearing ideas from them.”

That meeting is scheduled Aug. 18 at 6 p.m. at the Navassa Community Center, 388 Main St.

With a nearly $23 million budget, those in charge of the cleanup, including officials with NOAA, the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service and N.C. Department of Environment and Natural Resources, are ready to begin mapping out how to best restore natural resources around the former plant site.

The money is part of a $5.51 billion court-ordered settlement – one of the largest environmental settlements in U.S. history – between the U.S. Department of Justice and the Anadarko Petroleum Corp. That amount was split between dozens of sites in more than 20 states. The settlement created four environmental trusts to manage the cleanup.

The Navassa site was once the location of a large plant that operated for nearly four decades treating wood with creosote, a common wood preservative made from a wide range of chemicals that, when combined, form a gummy substance applied to wood products such as railroad ties and telephone poles.

The plant opened in 1936 and was operated by numerous owners before being sold to the Kerr-McGee Chemical Corp., which closed the plant in 1974.

It wasn’t until 2002, during a N.C. Department of Transportation bridge project in the area, that creosote contamination was discovered in the wetlands.

In 2010 the site was added to the Environmental Protection Agency’s Superfund program’s National Priorities List.

Efforts to clean up and restore the site are twofold. Most of the restoration, Schnabolk said, will likely occur in and around areas adjacent to the 250-acre site. The remainder of work will take place in riparian areas.

In a recently released restoration scoping document, NOAA lays out guidelines on preferable-type projects to be undertaken around the site. Some examples include coastal marsh restoration, land acquisition, riverbank habitat restoration and benthic habitat restoration. Benthic habitat supports bottom-dwelling species such as worms and mollusks.

Comments and project ideas will be accepted through Sept. 4. After the comment period the trustees will publish a draft plan, the release of which will be followed by a 30-day public comment period.

While restoration plans are being made, the EPA will be cleaning up the contaminated areas of the site

“We think we have about 10 or 15 acres of marsh that are heavily impacted,” said Erik Spalvins, EPA remedial project engineer and the Navassa site manager. “I think we’re going to have 60 to 80 acres of upland area that we’re going to have to deal with. The areas where we have real severe impacts, we’ll take care of it.”

The EPA and Multistate Environmental Response Trust in 2011 collected samples of soil, Sturgeon Creek marsh sediments, surface water and groundwater at the Navassa site. The trust owns and manages more than 400 former Kerr-McGee sites in 24 states.

Samples turned up hazardous substances, including polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, a combination of chemicals that commonly enter the body through breathing contaminated air or by consuming contaminated water or food.

Environmental officials continue to investigate just how much contamination is on the site, land bound by the Brunswick River to the east and Sturgeon Creek to the south.

On-site remediation will be covered through the government’s Superfund program.

Spalvins said he hopes to start contamination cleanup this fall.

“We’re going to be building fences and doing some road maintenance hopefully starting in a couple of weeks,” he said. “We have an investigation work plan that we’re reviewing right now. Our focus for this fall is to do some additional sampling.”

The goal, he said, is to have the site cleaned within five to 10 years, but he warned of “a lot of uncertainty at this point.”

“I think that the marsh part of it will be done in five to 10 years,” Spalvins said. “The town is really excited about the potential for re-use. We’re hopeful that there’s a lot of potential. It’s a wonderful piece of property. The view is just beautiful.”

Town leaders and residents have discussed using the site as a multi-use town center.

The EPA will be releasing notices for future public meetings, Spalvins said. He also plans to be on hand at the trustees’ meeting.

NAVASSA – More than $10 million has been allocated to clean up the site of a former wood treatment plant in this Brunswick County town following a federal lawsuit that resulted in the largest environmental settlement in U.S. history.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the N.C. Department of Environment and Natural Resources have received more than $13 million to restore natural resources damaged from years of operation of a creosote plant, NOAA announced yesterday.

The 292-acre tract was the site of a large plant that operated for nearly four decades treating wood with creosote, a common wood preservative made from a wide range of chemicals that, when combined, form a gummy substance applied to wood products such as railroad ties and telephone poles.

The Navassa site was added to the EPA’s list of Superfund sites in early 2010, about four years before a New York district court judge approved a $5.15 billion settlement between the U.S. Department of Justice and the Anadarko Petroleum Corporation.

That amount was split between dozens of sites in more than 20 states. NOAA expects an additional $9 million will be funneled to clean up and restore the Navassa site.

“We have not received the money yet,” said Michel Gielazyn, regional resource coordinator in NOAA’s Charleston, S.C., office. “It takes a little while for it to trickle down.”

She said she hopes trustees will receive the funds in the next few weeks.

More than $4.2 million has been allocated to studies and cleanup at the site and an additional $917,732 to remedy damages to natural resources in the area.

“Coastal wetlands like the areas impacted in North Carolina provide important environmental and economic services,” W. Russell Callender, acting assistant NOAA administrator for the National Ocean Service, said in a statement. “Using these funds to restore habitat will benefit fisheries and wildlife and provide protection from storms, all of which will directly benefit the coastal communities and economies that depend upon them, while improving coastal resilience.”

With input from the public, a possible multi-year restoration effort will include restoring and protecting wetlands, river and estuary habitats of the Cape Fear River watershed.

“The trustees are currently meeting and discussing types of restoration projects that we think would restore the injury that occurred at the site,” said Howard Schnabolk, a habitat restoration specialist with NOAA.

A public meeting to discuss possible projects will eventually be held, he said. The meeting will give town residents and the general public the opportunity to share restoration ideas.

“We’ve just been in real early preliminary talks about it and don’t have a schedule,” Schnabolk said. “The trustees will eventually put together a restoration plan that will detail the process.”

Similar to an environmental impact statement process, a draft of the restoration plan will be released to the public. The public will get the opportunity to comment on the draft.

“The Fish and Wildlife Service and the other trustees look forward to talking with citizens, restoring the natural resources impacted in this watershed and improving water quality and habitat for the people and the fish and wildlife that depend on them,” Cindy Dohner, the southeast regional director for Fish and Wildlife, said in a statement.

The plant opened in Navassa in 1936 under the ownership of the Gulf States Creosoting Co. and was sold to Kerr-McGee Chemical Corporation in 1965.

Kerr-McGee closed the plant in 1974, leaving behind extensive creosote contamination, a determination made in a 2005 U.S. Environmental Protection Agency-enforced study.

Since then, ongoing studies have been conducted on the site in the small town near Wilmington to determine remediation options and public health effects.

Creosote has been classified as a probable carcinogen by the EPA, with studies showing an increased risk of cancer and respiratory problems in plant workers routinely exposed to the material.

The EPA and the Multistate Environmental Response Trust, which owns and manages more than 400 former Kerr-McGee sites in 24 states, in 2011 collected samples of soil, Sturgeon Creek marsh sediments, surface water and groundwater at the Navassa site.

Samples turned up hazardous substances, including polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, a combination of chemicals that commonly enter the body through breathing contaminated air or by consuming contaminated water or food.

A N.C. Division of Public Health assessment, released in 2012,  found that the creosote contamination did not present a threat through contact or public drinking water. That same report went on to say that further studies were needed to determine whether fish and shellfish in nearby waters were contaminated.

Consumption of contaminated fish and shellfish would directly expose humans to the contaminants.

Trustees must follow certain criteria in restoration projects, including trying to replace the types of services lost from contamination.

“Again, it’s real early to say specifically what would occur,” Schnabolk said. “That question is exactly what the public will be allowed to weigh in on.”