By Will Atwater
About 30 people gathered at Navassa’s Town Hall last week, and another 18 tuned in virtually, to hear representatives from Greenfield Environmental Multistate Trust make a long-awaited announcement: Cleanup of the town’s Superfund site was underway.
The focus of the remediation project is a 100-acre area, the former location of the Kerr-McGee Chemical Corp. facility. From 1936 to 1974, the company preserved wood with creosote, a probable carcinogen, in unlined pits on the property.
In 2010, the EPA designated the former Kerr-McGee location a Superfund site, an area polluted with hazardous materials where the federal government pushes to find responsible parties to clean up the mess. The Kerr-McGee site is one of 38 such hazardous waste sites in North Carolina, and the cleanup is a collaborative effort involving the trust and other organizations, including the Environmental Protection Agency, N.C. Department of Environmental Quality and National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration.
An assessment by the EPA found that almost pure creosote permeated more than 30 feet below the surface of old waste ponds on the property.
The remediation process will proceed in stages. The current work is happening in about 15.6 acres, which once held former treated and untreated wood storage areas, called Operable Unit 2. Officials estimate it will take three to four months to remove the contaminated surface soil. The trust is also responsible for managing the sale or transfer of nearly 154 acres formerly owned by Kerr-McGee.
After a presentation detailing the site cleanup, Claire Woods, the trust’s director of environmental justice policies and programs, announced that 27 acres of land will be gifted to the community. The land will support a restoration project and the creation of the Moze Heritage Center and Nature Park, including water access.
Economic opportunities
“[The land] is going to be donated to the town, subject to a conservation easement that will be held — likely by the North Carolina Coastal Land Trust — and will allow the land to be preserved for beneficial public use far into the future,” Woods said.
Navassa Mayor Eulis Willis discussed his vision for establishing a heritage center on the donated land.
“We are in the Gullah Geechee corridor, and we are looking at [establishing] a repository [where] folks of Gullah Geechee descent can bring artifacts,” he said. “That will help us not only preserve the history and culture, but it also will [provide] economic development opportunities for us.”
The mayor hopes the proposed center and water access will add another destination for folks who charter boat tours in nearby Wilmington. If development plans are completed, Navassa, where 17 percent of the nearly 1,800 residents live below the poverty line according to 2021 data, could benefit financially from tourism and further economic investment in housing and other business ventures.
Additionally, the trust stated on its website that it “has worked to invest remediation funds in the local economy by providing training and employment opportunities to local individuals and businesses.” Since 2016, it has hired and trained some residents to “perform work on a hazardous waste site,” and two local companies were hired to complete work on Operable Unit 2.
Landfill concerns
About an hour and a half northwest of Navassa lies the town of Roseboro, which, like Navassa, has struggled with environmental issues for decades. Black residents who live nearby point to the GFL Sampson County Landfill as a major contributor to soil and water contamination and to poor air quality.
The two communities’ fates are tied together because the landfill adjacent to Roseboro is the destination for some waste from the Kerr-McGee site. Because the landfill receives waste from municipalities across the state, residents there fear other communities’ environmental problems are being shipped to their backyard.
In 2022, N.C. Health News reported that residents of Sampson County were worried that the GFL Sampson County Landfill would be the destination for creosote-contaminated soil from the Kerr-McGee site, but eventually, EPA officials scrapped that plan. Now, soils with “contamination higher than residential and ecological cleanup levels” will be housed onsite in Navassa, according to a fact sheet provided by the trust.
Woods said that because of concerns raised on behalf of Sampson County residents, “We looked at all the waste streams that we anticipated from the work and did everything we could to minimize” what was going off site to area landfills.
According to a transportation and disposal fact sheet, the trust anticipates at most one truckload of railroad ties, 10 cubic yards of stormwater material and a single 55-gallon container of gloves and other personal protection equipment will end up in the Sampson County Landfill.
Transparency issues
The news that hazardous waste will not be shipped from the Kerr-Mcgee site takes one thing off of a growing list of environmental issues that Sampson County residents have with the landfill — especially those living in Snowhill’s Roseboro neighborhood, where some can see the landfill from their homes.
Woods said the trust shared information with the Environmental Justice Community Action Network and Navassa residents about the types of waste it anticipates removing from the Kerr-McGee site and what landfills will receive.
“We’ve done everything in our power to minimize and eliminate material going to Sampson County GFL,” Woods said.
As the remediation project progresses, time will decide whether Sampson County residents agree with Woods.
KEEP UP WITH THE LATEST
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
