The Avtex cleanup, which officials said Friday is lose to resolution, shows in microcosm the virtues and flaws of the Superfund law. For more than a decade the Environmental Protection Agency has labored at the site while local officials fretted and complained about the pace of the effort to clean up the debris left when the world’s largest rayon plant closed suddenly in 1989.

Front Royal and Warren County officials have grand plans for the 440-acre site, to bury once and for all the notoriety of a large scale polluter and transform the land into economically productive and environmentally friendly purposes. But their ideas have been stymied by the complexity of the task and the intricate requirements of the Superfund law, which tries to place the burden of any toxic cleanup on previous owners of a site.

Avtex, by closing the plant suddenly and, EPA officials say, recklessly, left everyone in the lurch. The corporation’s swift recourse to bankruptcy further complicated matters and led the EPA to target FMC Corp. which had operated the plant from 1963 until 1976, as the prime source to pay for the cleanup.

Under the agreement announced on Friday, FMC will pay $63 million to finish the remediation, a third of which will be reimbursed by federal agencies that helped prop up AVTEX because it supplied crucial material for the space shuttle. FMC has already spent $18 million at the site and has been operating the waste water treatment plant since 1990 and supplying water to Rivermont Acres residents since 1991.

FMC’s operation of the rayon plant was non-controversial. Although people always complained about the smell emanating from the plant, it was only after AVTEX bought it that the plant gained its notoriety as a source of widespread pollution. But since FMC has the deepest pockets of any firm associated with the site – AVTEX or what is left of it has no pockets at all – it is required to pay for most of the cleanup. That hardly seems fair to FMC stockholders, but the alternative is for the taxpayers to foot the bill, which is even less fair.

The end of the saga is at last in sight. Although the EPA estimates the cleanup may still take seven more years, parts of the site may be turned over to Warren County by year’s end and local officials can begin implementing their plans to develop a business park including commercial, light industrial and hotel-conference center on 200 acres. The remaining 240 acres west of the railroad tracks is slated to become a nature preserve, a fitting and ironic use for the state’s former No.1 pollution site.

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