Letter print date: June 30, 2001

By Maya White Sparks

The Avtex Fibers plant in Front Royal was closed in 1989 due to violations of environmental regulations. The site was added to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Superfund program in 1986, but it was kept open another three years for a NASA contract, despite the pollution and safety violations.

A grassroots community group, the Coalition for the SAFE Redevelopment of Avtex, has been keeping an eye on the clean-up of the site for the past year and a half. It has been sharing information with the community, canvassing people in the Avtex neighborhood about their concerns and giving feedback to the EPA and others who have a stake in what happens there. After studying the EPA’s plan to store toxic sludge in the 100 year flood plain of the Shenandoah River, the coalition resolved to oppose the plan. We have been calling on those who share our point of view to put public pressure on the EPA to remove the waste from this sensitive, unstable environment.

In 1999, with great fanfare, EPA Administrator Carol M. Browner came to Front Royal and touted the Avtex Superfund site as a model for the redevelopment of future Superfund sites throughout the U.S. It is not our idea of a model cleanup to store zinc, arsenic, chromium, cadmium, copper, lead, nickel, pyrene and other unnamed substances in a river flood plain. This is the wrong kind of precedent to set as the EPA kicked off its pilot "Superfund Redevelopment Initiative." The EPA’s own "Final Ecological Risk Assessment" (February 1999) states that most of the above-named substances have been shown to have harmful effects on insects and fish and thus pose an ecological risk to birds and mammals, such as kingfishers and raccoons, who feed on the lower organisms. I would remind them that people eat fish, too.

Another EPA document points out: "Floodwaters spilling into flood plains may damage waste management structures such as tanks or berms (walls of earth). ..." When it comes to the basin closure plan at Avtex, however, the EPA asserts that their computers can predict the exact pressures Shenandoah Floodwaters will put on the basins’ earthen walls. According to EPA manager Bonnie Gross, their plan "will ensure the waste remains safely covered and intact during flood events." Can they guarantee their calculations will be accurate until the end of time? We do not want an accidental release of approximately 1 million cubic yards of sludge and fly ash to be our gift to a future generation.

Flowing water is an unpredictable force. Just ask the people who live along the Mississippi River. They were recently hit with massive flooding just four years after the last big flood, when statistics had predicted it would not happen again for another 100 years. In the rivers running by Harpers Ferry, W.VA., you can observe brick, metal and cement remnants of factories that were destroyed when waters rose. Or you can drive through Madison County and see where the river actually changed its course and made a new bed for itself during unprecedented flooding.

It is just plain common sense to remove the toxic waste from what the EPA itself calls a "sensitive" environment. But there are other reasons to relocate the sludge and fly ash. The waste basins are situated in an area that the Front Royal community has designated to be a "conservancy park," with public access and adjacent reconstructed wetlands. The storage of sludge and fly ash in this area contradicts the true nature of a conservancy and could threaten a wetland habitat as well as the river ecology.

The Smithsonian has become interested in the project of restoration the ecology at the Avtex site. It plans a forum on the topic this September at the local Conservation and Resource Center. We ask that it fully restore the Conservancy Park at Avtex. To leave huge amounts of sludge stored in holes in the earth is like trying to heal a sore while leaving it filled with poison.

The EPA says it would be too expensive and time consuming to truck the huge amount of waste off site. In its risk/cost analysis of options (as presented to the coalition in March 2000) it did not evaluate using the railroad that runs near the basins. Nor did it consider moving the sludge out of the flood plain onto another part of the site.

For years, U.S. government contracts supported manufacturing rayon at Avtex, despite violations of environmental regulations. Our government has karma to pay here, and it is up to the public to demand that it pays its debt. Let us truly cleanse this land that has been sacrificed for, among other things, the making of rayon nose cones for intercontinental ballistic missiles.

I thank the many people who are risking their health and well being as they work at cleaning up the second worse Superfund site in the U.S. I am grateful that the EPA and FMC Corp. (A former situ user) are there, funding these efforts. Along with the approximately 300 people in the community who have signed a petition, I simply ask that they do the job right.

For further information, contact the Coalition for the SAFE Redevelopment of Avtex at 540-542-1681 or e-mail: Earthfriendly_WAEJR@hot-mail.com