The Northern Virginia Daily
Article Date: August 13, 2008
Cleanup
complete at Allied Chemical Corp. site
By Jessica Coleman
FRONT ROYAL — Fieldwork at the Allied Chemical
Corp. Superfund site, adjacent to the Avtex Superfund site, has
been completed, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection
Agency.
The EPA conducted a final walk-through in mid-June
to determine whether the site meets all standards. It passed the
inspection, and all cleanup activities are now complete, said
Eduardo Rovira, EPA on-scene coordinator.
"As far as the action, it's done," Rovira said. "As
far as the EPA, it's done."
According to the EPA, Allied produced sulfuric acid
at the site from 1945 to 1986. General Chemical Corp. became the
owner/operator in May 1986, but sulfuric acid was still
produced. Then, in August 1986, Avtex Fibers Inc. purchased and
ceased production at the site, using it instead as a storage and
transfer facility for the sulfuric acid used in its production
of rayon at the Avtex plant. When Avtex filed for bankruptcy in
1989, the site was abandoned.
At that time, EPA began monitoring the conditions
at the 78-acre site, which progressively deteriorated until in
1998 a unilateral administrative order called for the
remediation process to begin.
The order states that in September 1998, the
director of EPA Region III's Hazardous Site Cleanup Division
"determined that a threat to public health, welfare and/or the
environment exists due to the actual or threatened release of
hazardous substances from the site."
The concern of the EPA, according to the order, was
access to the site by the public and transfer of the chemicals
to the river. The site is bordered by the South Fork of the
"Due to the proximity of the residences and due to
the fact that the South Fork of the
In 2004, the property was transferred to Honeywell
International as a result of a bankruptcy settlement with
General Chemical, said Victoria A. Streitfeld, a spokesperson
for Honeywell, in an e-mail.
When the cleanup began, the site consisted of an
abandoned sulfuric acid manufacturing plant, which was
demolished in 2001, according to Streitfeld. The fenced area of
the site contained numerous processing tanks, piping and
buildings. Numerous containment ponds and two areas believed to
have been used to dump wastes lay in an unfenced portion portion
of the site.
According to the EPA's Web site, updated in
December 2007: "Materials which remain at the site include waste
materials from the production of sulfuric acid, including
polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), corrosive and flammable
materials. Materials in the ponds, disposal areas and in the
process equipment may release or may have been released into the
environment."
"There was a lot of sulfur," Rovira said. "That's
basically what they did last year — remove any soils that
contain sulfur."
Honeywell's contractors rece-ntly excavated,
backfilled and graded and seeded two small ponds, a bermed pit,
a perimeter engineered surface-water drainage ditch and a
process-water discharge pit.
"Honeywell has completed the removal of
contaminated soil from the former Allied Chemical Site on
Once the removal was done, the vegetation at the
site came up for review. In May, workers made sure that grasses
and plants emplaced last fall were growing well and worked on
any problem areas.
Now the only question that remains is what will be
done with the site once the EPA has given its approval.
"We will be working with local officials and the
community to determine the appropriate reuse for the site,"
Streitfeld said.
However, no potential use for the Superfund site
has yet been determined, she added. |