Article date: February 17, 2001

Workers remove asbestos, contaminants from site to make and ‘eco-business’ park

By: Ashley May

The only buildings left on the former Avtex Fibers Superfund site will soon reflect "green design"sustainable development principles unheard of when the plant opened in 1940.

Once the plant’s administrative headquarters, the redesigned 14,000-square-foot office building at 404 Kendrick Lane is a key component of the Avtex redevelopment project, and is scheduled for completion by the end of this year.

Most of the remaining 500-acre plant site, where plant buildings and refuse pools are being razed and cleaned, will become public park land, so the Front Royal-Warren County Economic Development Authority expects the office building and a 165-acre "eco-business" park to be a main source of income for the redevelopment project.

The Army Corps of Engineers is completing the removal of thousands of tons of asbestos from the office building and other plant sites before the redevelopment project can begin, EDA Executive Director Stephen A. Heavener said.

The EDA, charged by Front Royal and Warren County with the oversight of the redevelopment, plans to integrate a 240- acre Shenandoah River Conservancy park by the Shenandoah River, a 30-acre park for professional grade soccer fields, and a 70- acre passive recreation park on the west river bank.

The administrative building will be renovated as a 165-acre green ecological industrial park, which will be put out to bid this summer, after the asbestos is removed and renovations are complete, Heavener said.

"Also known as ‘sustainable development,’ ‘green design’ considers a building’s total economic and environmental impact and performance, from material extraction and product manufacture to product transportation, building design and construction, operations and maintenance, and building reuse or disposal," he wrote in an explanation of the EDA’s vision for the green office park.

Now in its design stages, the EDA will locate its offices in a portion of the building, and former Avtex owner FMC Corp. and the Environmental Protection Agency both will occupy a portion. The remainder will be available for lease, Heavener says.

About 15 office buildings and a 10-acre conference center parcel will form the 165-acre eco-business park, Heavener said. The park will contain restrictive covenants that address a variety of green and eco-industrial standards, and is to be engineered by Painter-Lewis PLC, of Winchester.

Crews hired by FMC, a former owner of Avtex, have already hauled away more than 130 tons of debris as part of the multimillion dollar cleanup effort for the former viscose plant. About 80,000 tons of construction and demolition debris have been removed from plant buildings, and the underlying soils have been excavated since phase one remediation efforts began two years ago, Rick Goss of Decision Quest, hired to manage the effort for FMC, has said.

So far, about five tons of hazardous waste, including residual sludge from plant operations and materials already sealed in drums by the EPA, have also been moved to an approved waste station in Model City, N.Y., Goss said.

Because of the pollution from plant operations, the Avtex plant was designated a federal

Superfund site by the EPA in 1986, and in 1999 was named as one of the pilot sites in the EPA’s Superfund redevelopment initiative.

Avtex, a former rayon manufacturing facility, was first operated by the American Viscose Co. from 1940 to 1963, and then by FMC from 1963 to 1976. Avtex Fibers operated from 1976 to 1989, when the plant was closed for financial, environmental and safety reasons.