Newtown is a small cluster of homes a couple miles from Crozet in western Albemarle County. At one point, Newtown had a school, a community center, a church, and a general store. It was also home to Greenwood Chemical Company, where a 1985 explosion killed four workers and stunned the community. The land became a Superfund site, and soon Albemarle County will try to auction it off to the highest bidder. WMRA’s Christine Kueter continues the story.
When Greenwood Chemical president Al Cereghino closed his plant after an explosion left four men dead and community members shaken and grieving, it was clear the gig was up.
Antoine Sims lived with his family next door.
ANTOINE SIMS: They’d had fires before. They’d had, like, the smaller ones that really didn’t go as far. That was moreso the talk, like, “Yep, they finally blew it up, didn’t they? Mmhm.” Just kind of like, “Yeah, I don’t think there’s going to be anything going on back in there.”
It would be another couple of years before cleanup on the site began. That job fell to the Environmental Protection Agency.
By 1987, hundreds of chemical drums and gas cylinders had been carted off. Chemical lagoons got drained, filled, and capped, and loads of rubble were trucked out. By 1990, EPA officials had excavated 15,000 tons of toxic dirt, and shipped it off by train to Utah to be disposed of.
SIMS: We started drinking bottled water. Definitely. There was the don’t drink the water type of feel around . . . maybe like [19]88, into the 90s. Because at that point, there was the movement around the area again. Stuff was happening again. There was this tearing down of the old building, building a new building. There was the communication with the church about the water. And so, there began to be talk about it, kind of like, “Hey you might not want to drink your water.”
It would be 14 more years before the last of the abandoned chemicals at the site—everything from benzene, arsenic, and cyanide to TCE, toluene and naphthalene—were finally removed.
In 2001, the EPA built a water treatment system that pumped contaminated water from 11 wells on the site and cleaned it. That system’s still running today. Treated water gets discharged into a nearby creek that feeds the Mechums River, a Rivanna tributary, and a municipal water source. In 2012, the EPA passed the reins to Virginia Department of Environmental Quality, which pays a Richmond firm more than $520,000 a year to operate it.
The federal government would later sue both Hustrulid and Cereghino for $22 million in an attempt to recoup costs for the cleanup.
Nearby residents’ well water is still monitored each year, and, so far, it runs clear. The site’s been waiting behind a chainlink fence for the last nearly half century for whatever’s next.
Sims left Summer Rest Lane in the early 2000s. His mom did, too, but not before sarcoidosis took one of her lungs and put her on oxygen. She was in her 40s.
Sims was in his early 30s, and a new dad, when he was told he had sarcoidosis in his kidney. He’d need a transplant, and got one a few years later. He also has vitiligo, an autoimmune condition that affects his skin’s pigment. That’s gotten better with the new kidney, he says, but he'll take prednisone for the rest of his life.
SIMS: I honestly do think that there’s something along with whatever chemicals they were using there that has had an effect on a lot of us, and us that was down from that chemical plant, definitely.
Jennifer Matheny is Albemarle County’s chief of revenue administration. The Greenwood Chemical property is assessed at $100, she says, but no one’s paid its taxes for at least the last 20 years. Whoever buys it at auction must cover that bill and some legal fees at a minimum. That means the 33 acres could sell for between $8,000 and $9,000.
JENNIFER MATHENY We mainly want to get an ownership of someone who pays the taxes and exists, instead of it being kind of in this limbo, which is what it’s really in now. Someone may be able to do something with that property, even if it’s trails or something, you know, I don’t know, but we want to bring it back into the community and get it back on the tax rolls.
Whoever purchases the land won’t be able to build a house or live there. There’s no potable water. Any new buildings must have special vapor barriers and piping to minimize soil disruptions. The site’s wastewater facility is also staying and may run into perpetuity, DEQ officials say.
Sims thinks the government should keep the property.
SIMS: You’re not going to clean the chemicals out of that land . . . there’s no way you got all of it. Like, there’s people’s properties that’s probably got this stuff in the ground, and you [the EPA and DEQ] never went there. Yeah. So, I think the government should be responsible for that property until … yeah. Forever.
But there’shttps://semspub.epa.gov/work/03/2354934.pdfevidence the pollution plume is shrinking. The chainlink is heavy with greenery and birds. Soon, it may be up to someone new to imagine a future for the parcel with stunning Blue Ridge and Rockfish Valley views and a terrible past.
[Royall Shiree song about Newtown “I been walking, all my life, walking to find some break from strife. See, the man, had me down, so I heard, about Newtown. I got the blues, Lord, I got the blues. I got the new boom town blues, yeah. Man, this don’t make no kind of sense.” Royal Shiree]
