Imminent demolition of tainted paint plant raises concerns for locals.
Early next year, the city of Baltimore is set to demolish the Ainsworth Paint and Chemical Co. plant, an empty eyesore for more than 20 years. Meanwhile, residents of neighbouring blocks say they have not been officially told how to protect themselves from potentially hazardous dust released during the demolition.
Roughly two dozen people gathered on a recent Saturday afternoon at Good Tidings to get pre-demolition advice from two Johns Hopkins-based “community coordinators” who focus on the health effects of urban construction and industry.
“A lot of times what happens is you all are the last people to know that something is about to happen in your neighborhood,” said Patricia Tracey, who was joined by her colleague Barbara Bates-Hopkins, both from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health’s Center in Urban Environmental Health. “We live in a very contaminated city, that’s the bottom line. Dust itself — you don’t know what’s in it.”
Residents’ concerns are based on two decades of intermittent hazardous waste cleanup at the site.
The facility made Fuller-O’Brien paints for more than 30 years before being sold in the mid-1980s to Ainsworth, which specialized in marine paint, according to the Maryland Department of the Environment. Production stopped at the Berea facility in 1988.
Seven years later, state inspectors found hundreds of 55-gallon drums filled with hazardous and explosive chemicals stored in, under and around the building. One drum was leaking, and the chemicals stored included vinyl chloride, a gas that causes liver cancer.
By September 1995, the Environmental Protection Agency had cleaned up the abandoned containers of paints and solvents at a cost of $1.5 million.
After the Baltimore Development Corp. submitted an application to the state in the mid-2000s to voluntarily clean up the site — anticipating a future sale — an environmental assessment identified problem areas on the property.
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