Excerpt from the Brunswick Beacon, January 30, 2018. Read the full article here.
NAVASSA — Residents and others will be able to weigh in on the use of Navassa’s Superfund cleanup site during a weekend community vision workshop Feb. 23-24.
The community vision planning sessions the evening of Friday, Feb. 23, and all day Saturday, Feb. 24, will offer residents, community leaders, business owners and other community stakeholders a chance to brainstorm ideas and provide feedback to land-use planners for reusing the Superfund site once the cleanup effort is completed.
Representatives of Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality (NCDEQ), and the Multistate Environmental Response Trust (Multistate Trust), three groups heading up the cleanup process, strongly encouraged the general public to participate at the February meetings during a progress update meeting Jan. 23 at Navassa Community Center.
“We want to see the community be involved. We want to see your vision out here. What types of future use you would like to see,” Dave Mattison of the DEQ said while reviewing the history of the project for the audience.
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Richard Elliott, project manager for the Multistate Trust, said they hope to have a report with the study data finished in March that would describe the impact of the creosote to the soil, subsoil, sediments and ground water.
“We understand people are frustrated by how slow the testing has gone, but we really need to understand what’s there,” he said.
Elliott said the study would also include a human health risk assessment to explain what impact using the site would have on people and an ecological risk report on how the site would impact animals.