In the most recent success for its brownfield program, the Georgia Environmental Protection Division in March removed a Chatham County site from its Hazardous Site Inventory List.
The 755 acres on the southern bank of the Savannah River between Old Fort Jackson and The Elba Island LNG facility has been redeveloped as the SeaPoint Industrial Terminal Complex.
The SeaPoint site is the latest of 425 brownfield sites cleaned up since Georgia began its brownfield program in 2003. The sites range from single dry cleaners to large industrial tracts like Atlantic Station in Atlanta. There are plenty more awaiting action.
“About 460 sites are still listed as undergoing cleanup,” said EPD spokeswoman Sara Lips.
The key to cleanup is two-fold. First, there must be a property owner willing to make it happen, said Bill Anderson, Executive Vice President with Terracon, which assisted with the SeaPoint cleanup. Reed Dulany, chairman and chief executive officer of Seapoint parent company Dulany Industries, fits the bill, Anderson said.
“I’ve been doing this for for almost 40 years, and it was, you know, the secret sauce is the partnership and the collaboration of working with one another and having an owner that had a vision for the property and had the commitment to put in the time and the effort and the money to clean up, to protect the environment, to protect human health, … (and) to restore the property into a condition that can be further developed in an environmentally friendly way.”
But as any real estate agent knows, “location, location location” is also important. SeaPoint has that too, with plenty of deep water access.
“It’s a mile on the Savannah River,” said Philip Rowland, vice president of operations with Dulany Industries.
It’s also in a Federal Opportunity Zone and according to according to a University of Georgia study, has the potential to create 1,700+ new high-wage jobs and to generate an estimated annual economic impact of nearly $1 billion.
What is a brownfield?
Colloquially, a brownfield is a site that’s previously hosted an industrial use. Its opposite is a greenfield, a plot of land that’s never been developed. The brownfields being clean up under the Georgia Brownfield Program are those where the presence or potential presence of a hazardous substance complicates its reuse. EPA estimates there are more than 450,000 brownfields in the U.S.
The Georgia Brownfield Act provides liability protection to prospective purchasers of these contaminated properties. In exchange, they must investigate and clean up soil and source material to meet certain standards.
“So instead of going in and buying a property and being completely at risk for whatever else happened there in the past, like a landfill, you gain some protection from that by buying it under the Georgia Brownfield Program and following the Georgia Brownfield requirements,” Rowland said.
Brownfields are not the same as Superfund sites, which are more severely contaminated and rely on federal intervention. Georgia has 22 Superfund sites, four of which are in Glynn County.
Site history
The Seapoint site was actually listed as two hazardous sites on the state Hazardous Site Inventory. One was the Deptford tract, a former city dump that fronts President Street Extension and now hosts a solar array and bee hives.
The other, larger site was long a facility that produced titanium dioxide, a pigment used in an array of products ranging from paint and plastics to paper and sunscreen. American Cyanamid began manufacturing there in 1955. The site changed hands to Kemira in 1985, then Kerr-McGee in 2000. In 2005 Kerr-McGee spun off Tronox Pigments to take over the manufacturing and the environmental liability. That company went bankrupt in 2009, leaving the site contaminated with unacceptable levels of lead and arsenic as well as volatile and semivolatile compounds. The company used both onsite sulfate and chloride processes to process titanium dioxide, adding to the cleanup demands.
As part of the bankruptcy settlement, site ownership was transferred to Greenfield Environmental Trust Group, with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Georgia Environmental Protection Division and state and federal governments serving as beneficiaries of the trust.
In 2014, Dulany Industries, Inc. was selected to purchase the site for a purchase price that equaled the $38 million estimated cost of the cleanup and to undertake an environmental clean-up effort designed to return the site to productive use.
The site’s long history meant it was hard to know at the outset what the cleanup would entail. Federal environmental regulations were first implemented with the creation of the EPA in 1970.
“This site began as a chemical plant in the 1950s when none of the environmental regulations that we think of today even existed,” Rowland said. “And so, you know, so they basically free wheeled it for 20 years, and then only did what they had to do for the next 50.”
Cleanup activities
That cleanup involved removing contaminated soil from some spots and in other cases capping it in place.
“The corrective action required 84 different work elements across the property,” Anderson said. “A work element could be removing a hot spot that was contaminated with metals or volatiles or semi volatiles. A work element could be closing out a wastewater pond. A work element could be just cleaning up of titanium dioxide, which was the product that they they they manufactured here.”
Wetlands on the property complicated the cleanup. For example, a hurricane eroded hazardous materials into the marsh.
“We had to go into the marsh and remove that material, stockpile it, and then place it back in a condition and then cover it so that was no longer able to erode and go into the surrounding marsh,” Anderson said.
Still, the cleanup came in several million under budget, with the excess money reverting to the state to remediate other sites on the list.
“We don’t get a rebate, just the goodwill,” Rowland said.
Dulany Industries has an opportunity to create more goodwill with a nearby 62-acre parcel on East President Street that was first listed on the Hazardous Site Inventory in 1998.
“We’re also working on a similar environmental remediation project at SeaGate Savannah and hope to get that site de-listed as well.”
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