PORT SALERNO — Dee Dee Hawken still remembers driving along Cove Road years ago, when the Solitron Microwave plant stood far from the street behind a thick forest of trees.

Janet Kozan remembers when she and her business partner looked to buy the 20-acre site in 2003 as U.S. Environmental Protection Agency officials were cleaning soil and groundwater on the site contaminated with vinyl chloride and related products.

She was taking a chance, she said, but she and her partner were looking to the future in hopes of one day redeveloping the site for commercial use.

“There were several times during that year that I wanted to back out of the deal, but I’m glad we didn’t,” she said.

Kozan and Hawken on Wednesday were at the site of the former plant, which is now the Port Salerno Industrial Park Complex, as EPA Superfund redevelopment coordinators from around the country awarded her the region’s Excellence in Site Reuse Award.

The complex is one of about 400 polluted Superfund sites nationwide that have been cleaned and put back into productive use through the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s redevelopment program.

Hawken, whose company Stuart Web Inc. constructed a printing press on the site, said the property works well for them. “From the beginning, they’ve given us everything we’ve needed to know the area is safe, and it’s gone very well,” she said.

In Lake Park, despite the presence of industrial solvents in the groundwater below the former Trans Circuits plant, another manufacturing business, Concept-Eco, operates at the site of the former electronics components factory while the federal government oversees work to eliminate the pollution.

Inside the Superfund site at 210 Newman Road, Concept-Eco textile workers sew shopping bags, backpacks, safety vests and other products using fabric made from recycled clear plastic bottles.

Concept-Eco President Tom Diemer gave EPA officials a tour of his manufacturing plant Wednesday as environmental engineers prepared to inject a carbon source to trigger the growth of bacteria into wells behind the building as part of a pilot study in bioremediation, or using natural processes to neutralize pollutants such as the perchloroethene that remains in the groundwater behind the Lake Park plant.

Diemer said he is given notice of groundwater cleanup work near his factory and said it has not interfered with his textile business, which has operated at the former Trans Circuits plant since 2001. “It’s been a very good experience,” Diemer told EPA officials.

EPA officials also drove through the Florida Steel site in Indiantown and the former Solitron Devices plant at 1177 Blue Heron Blvd. in Riviera Beach, which is being used by All A/C Self Storage. Solvents and heavy metals at the Riviera Beach site are being cleaned up through the Superfund alternatives program, meaning the same investigation and cleanup processes are used but the site is not listed as a Superfund site on the EPA’s national priorities list.

~By Willie Howard and Daphne Duret, Post staff writers

Tags: Port Salerno, Superfund

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