Navassa's Soil Contamination Contained

Excerpt from Coastal Review Online, September 21, 2017. Read the full article here.

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.

Michael Ori