A Florida neighborhood says an old factory has made them sick. Now developers want to shake up toxic soil
KRisten Burke and her husband, Harold, moved to their home in Russell Landing, a rural suburb just outside of Jacksonville, Florida, almost fifteen years ago. The quiet and close-knit neighborhood is located next to a rugged pine forest and a blackwater canal. “This was our dream house,” Burke said.
It wasn’t until 2018 that she realized the extent of the pollution lurking next to her: According to Burke, who recently became part of a local watchdog group, an industrial plant that once operated nearby left barrels of toxic waste buried in the ground and never be used again. came back to clean up.
Just past the fence at the end of their street you can still see many of these 50 gallon barrels sticking out of the ground. The neighborhood was aware of the abandoned factory, which closed in the 1990s. But now residents and former workers say the contents of these barrels, along with groundwater and air pollution that government agencies have failed to adequately regulate for decades, have contributed to a pattern of cancers, heart disease, birth defects and genetic disorders.
In recent years, Burke and her neighbors have become increasingly vocal about the health risks of living in Russell Landing, as developers have eyed the site of the former factory with the aim of building new housing to address Florida’s affordability crisis.
“The fear is that if excavators start turning over that ground and cutting down trees, (then) all the waste will come back our way,” Burke said. “Every day people ask me if it is safe to live here.”
Last August, Burke started a citizen advocacy group along with other community members whose lives have been impacted by Solite, the company that owned the plant until it closed in 1995. Burke, who led and was elected to the county commission in 2020, said she and others were fed up with their concerns not being taken seriously by local environmental regulators and politicians. The group recently paid for soil and groundwater testing to measure the spread of toxins outside the factory. Those results, which came back last October, indicated the presence of toxic metals such as cadmium, barium, lead, chromium and arsenic.
The tests showed what the community had been claiming for years: waste had migrated onto the property and in some cases into residents’ backyards.
Another revelation followed that accelerated the group’s advocacy. Weeks later, Burke and her neighbors learned that a 78-acre parcel within the former Solite property had been sold and was under contract for development with DR Horton, a multibillion-dollar company and America’s largest homebuilder.
TThe Northeast Solite Corporation, as it is now known, opened its first quarry in Clay County, Florida in the 1950s. Workers mined clay and shale from the site, which was then burned at high temperatures in rotary kilns to produce a lightweight cement aggregate. The material has been used to build some of the most iconic structures in America, including the U.S. Capitol, the Freedom Tower and the deck of the original Chesapeake Bay Bridge.
In the 1960s, Solite began using hazardous waste instead of more expensive fossil fuels to fuel its kilns. Solite was contracted by other companies to remove such hazardous waste, allowing the company to generate revenue while acquiring a fuel source for its furnaces at no additional cost. Kodak, General Electric, Revlon, Benjamin Moore and several military bases in the Southeast all paid Solite – and its sister company Oldover – to remove their waste.
“Nothing ever left that property,” said Michael Zelinka, 59, a former factory employee, referring to the way the materials were handled, burned in the kilns or otherwise disposed of on site by placing them in one of the man-made dump the company’s lakes. or buried in blue barrels.
Working at Solite “was hell,” Zelinka said, “and the night was always the worst.” That’s when the furnaces would burn the hardest, he said. Plumes of black smoke billowed into the air for hours and workers were ordered to turn off air quality monitors at the edge of the building. Residents who lived nearby remember seeing treetops light up in an otherworldly orange glow. In the morning, the area was often covered in a thin layer of soot, which environmentalists and hazardous waste experts believed contained dioxins and other toxic elements and chemical compounds. (A representative for Northeast Solite declined to comment on Zelinka’s account of his time at the company.)
Since its abrupt closure in 1995, Solite has claimed that no off-site contamination has occurred; that all hazardous waste was safely contained in surface impoundments called “scrubber” and “overflow” ponds. That claim appears to have been tacitly supported by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Florida Department of Environmental Protection (FDEP). Although Solite was founded long before the existence of these agencies, data indicate that both have known about chemical leaks and malpractice at the factory since the 1980s. Both agencies had issued fines for environmental violations over the years, but no targeted health studies were ever authorized.
“Over the past 29 years since the plant closed … we have worked with (EPA) and (FDEP) with the plant’s consent to investigate and remediate the property,” Albert Galliano, a Northeast Solite representative, wrote in a e-mail. “The results show that there is little impact on the environment.”
As for the blue drums, Galliano said they “contain fiberglass material and debris, likely from a water storage tank or culvert pipe.”
When the Solite factory closed in 1995, plans were announced shortly afterwards to transfer the property to a developer. In 1997, title was transferred to Stoneridge Farms, which had previously tried and failed to sell the property.
There was a possible link between the air, water and soil pollution in the area and the high disease rate published for the first time in the early 1990s, and it remains the most salient concern to this day. Long-term exposure to these contaminants can cause this cause cancer, cause genetic damage and bind to DNA. According to the National Cancer InstituteClay County has a 36.1% higher cancer rate than the state of Florida, and 47.2% higher than the nation.
In 1996, the EPA issued a consent order requiring the 230 acres of surface impoundments to be cleared, which was seen by many residents as an attempt to hold Solite responsible for abandoning the property. So far the site has not been forced to full compliance. (EPA did not return a request for comment.)
Zelinka said he worried about the impact Solite was having on his health and the community after he suffered a near-fatal heart attack when he was 20, which he said stemmed from working conditions at the factory. At the time, his doctors found high levels of arsenic in his blood, which was linked to heart failure. according to the American Heart Association. Once he recovered and returned to work, Zelinka became more vocal about his safety concerns. A few weeks later he was fired.
About six months later, in July 1995, the factory was abandoned overnight. (In the early years, Solite factories in Virginia and North Carolina was also closed due to similar violations and circumstances.) The company reportedly cited rising operating costs, but Susan Armstrong, a local reporter who was present the morning Solite absconded, said it had more to do with increasing noise from civilian and environmentalism. pending lawsuits and fines, and the promise of agencies like the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), FDEP, and EPA to increase the frequency of unscheduled visits.
The citizen task force led by Burke, which meets monthly, has become an outlet for residents to express their frustrations, not just with Solite, but with development in their community in general.
“I don’t need 900 new homes here,” said Randy Gillis, a Russell Landing resident with a rare form of prostate cancer. He worries that an influx of residents could overwhelm the roads and make it harder for him to make his doctor appointments.
DR Horton is often cited as a common enemy within the task force, as is Michael Danhour, the Jacksonville area developer who has been pursuing the Stoneridge Farms property since 2016 and filed the rezoning proposal in 2018. (The proposal was rejected.) He now represents the land trust that sold the development contract for the 78-acre parcel to DR Horton in October.
When asked, Danhour suggested that development is the answer to dangerous pollution. The best way to ensure the cleanup, he says, is to provide a path for developers to purchase the land and rezone it for housing; in return, the seller will set aside part of the sales price for soil remediation. “(Developers) will work with Stoneridge Farms to accelerate cleanup efforts,” Danhour said.
He notes that $2 million of the $3.3 million purchase price of the DR Horton package is earmarked for cleanup of the contamination, as determined by the FDEP. But the task force is quick to point out that the $2 million is based on an environmental assessment from several years ago, with incomplete testing.
“We did what we could with limited resources,” said Bruce Reynolds, a retired hazardous waste expert for the U.S. Army who advised on the task force’s recent tests. Last November, he traveled to Tallahassee to meet with the state environmental agency and present the group’s initial findings. Reynolds and the task force now hope the agency will step in to conduct more substantive testing.
It looks like their plea is working – at least for now. In late December, after reviewing the new materials and test results, the state environmental agency reversed course, writing in a letter to Burke and Reynolds that it no longer agreed with Stoneridge Farms’ claims about the extent of the contamination. Northeast Solite that they will not approve the company’s current proposal and that a different recovery plan is needed. That plan must be submitted in April. (In an email, Galliano said testing is underway and a report will be developed.)
The task force says this marks a seismic shift in the attitude of environmental regulators that they have been waiting for for decades. But residents remain wary about the future of the property.
“I try not to be pessimistic,” Gillis said. “But if I were a betting man, I would say (FDEP) is going to try to tell us that this is not a concern for the community. One day there will be development. I can’t stop that even if I wanted to.”