Photos by Stephanie Klein-Davis | The Roanoke Times

Adele Schirmer (left), director of the Blacksburg Engineering and GIS Department, Larry Parlo and Lenore Duncan look at the renovated Doc Roberts Tire Co. that is now the Blacksburg Town Hall annex.

The reopening of the 85-year-old building has been delayed by various structural and environmental issues.

Critics have expressed concerns over the cost and environmental safety of the new Blacksburg Town Hall annex, the former home of Blacksburg Motor Co., which operated a gas station until 1968.

BLACKSBURG -- From the ground up, the new town hall annex appears to be all that Blacksburg officials say it is: a historic building restored in a way that is energy efficient and environmentally friendly.

Beneath the surface, however, lies a mass of contaminated soil and water.

The $5.3 million project, to be unveiled today at a ribbon-cutting ceremony, occupies the former Blacksburg Motor Co., which included a gas station that operated for more than four decades before closing in 1968.

Over the years, underground storage tanks on the property leaked an unknown amount of gas into the surrounding soil. Before the town started construction, it had three of the five tanks and 259 tons of tainted dirt removed from the site.

But as recent events have shown, enough contamination remains to cause problems -- and raise questions, at least in the minds of some critics, about the safety of the building.

On June 25, workers digging trenches in the basement floor to correct a recurring flooding issue encountered gas vapors coming from the earth. According to e-mails among town officials, the odor was so strong that workers were forced to wear respirators.

After a nearby resident smelled gas, the fire marshal was called. Wayne Garst said the gas levels were so high they saturated his meter, preventing an accurate reading. But he figured there were enough vapors in the air to possibly cause a small explosion had someone lit a cigarette or fired up a cutting torch.

Fans were brought in and the fumes were blown away. But concerns lingered.

"It's a bit of a mess, to be honest with you," said Steve Hill, the developer of a condominium complex across the street who called the fire marshal after one of his residents smelled gas.

"It is not a green site by a long shot," he said of the town's efforts to clean up a brownfield. "They're trying to put lipstick on a pig, but it's still a pig."

Adele Schirmer, the project manager, said the level of contamination beneath the building is not high enough to pose a risk. She noted that the state Department of Environmental Quality has approved the town's cleanup efforts each step of the way.

"DEQ has never said it was a pristine, clean site, " said Schirmer, director of Blacksburg's Engineering and GIS Department. Rather, the state determined that enough contamination had been removed to proceed with the project, she said.

"We are confident we have developed this project in a way that has left the site, the building, the community and the environment in a position that is better than when we started."

A concerned citizen

Last summer, while driving past the work site at 400 S. Main St., environmental scientist David Griffiths noticed piles of dirt, a drilling rig and a tanker truck used to haul away hazardous waste.

The project, Griffiths wrote in an e-mail to the town's public works director, "appears to have turned into a fiasco. What's going on?"

One year later, Griffiths -- a Blacksburg-based consultant who specializes in environmental compliance and groundwater monitoring -- remains both curious and concerned.

He has reviewed DEQ documents related to the project. According to the records, workers digging at the site have hit petroleum-tainted groundwater at least three times: first while removing the underground storage tanks, then while installing an elevator shaft, and again while drilling wells for a geothermal heat-pump system.

Griffiths, who has no official role in the project, said it's possible that tainted groundwater or gas vapors could penetrate the building through tiny cracks in the foundation, leading to what is known as sick building syndrome.

"No matter how well it's sealed, properly or improperly, it's an island in a sea of contamination," he said.

On Monday, as officials worked to ready the building, air samples were taken to ensure that its occupants will not be exposed to any traces of gas. The results are not expected until Monday, the day before employees are scheduled to move in.

A historic renovation

When Blacksburg paid $1.8 million two years ago for a piece of property also known as the former Doc Roberts Tire Co., everyone knew there was a downside to the prime downtown real estate.

As part of the purchase agreement, the town paid $25,000 to the seller to go toward the cost of removing the underground storage tanks and tons of contaminated soil.

But only three of the five tanks were dug up and hauled away. One was left in place because it was so close to South Main Street; the other was not discovered until the following year. That tank, which sits beneath the building, was also left where it sat. Both were drained and filled with concrete.

Because the town wanted to restore a building built in 1924 -- and claim about $1.2 million in state and federal historic tax credits to offset construction costs -- not all the underlying contamination could be removed.

There's no way to know just how much gas-tainted soil and groundwater remains on the site.

But according to DEQ, enough pollution had been removed by March 2007 to no longer pose a threat to human safety, considering that all the nearby homes and businesses are served by municipal water.

The state approved the cleanup and currently has no active oversight of the project.

It is not uncommon for construction projects to go up on the sites of former gas stations with leaking tanks.

"I don't see a problem with it as long as you take into account what you're dealing with," said Robert Howard, a geologist supervisor with DEQ's Roanoke office.

"It really scares some people," Howard said, "But others have learned how to deal with it successfully."

Headaches and delays

Today, the sources of pollution and the worst "hot spots" have been removed, Schirmer said. And the hope is that whatever remains will naturally degrade over the years.

However, heavy rains in recent months have elevated the water table and caused groundwater to seep into the basement. To channel the water to a sump pump, workers dug trenches in the basement floor, filled them with gravel and resealed the concrete slab.

Gas vapors such as the ones encountered June 25 are only present when the soil below the building is disturbed, Schirmer said. But as the basement continued to leak -- a dozen or so minor episodes have twice delayed today's grand opening -- officials had to assume the water making its way inside was contaminated.

A filter was installed in a janitor's closet to clean the water before it is pumped into the sanitary sewer system. In June alone, 9,300 gallons of water that leaked into the basement passed through the filter system.

Town officials also have installed a ventilation system to route air from the basement through a pipe to be released from the rooftop.

While flooding has caused the most recent environmental headache, it was not the first time town officials had to deal with unexpected costs related to the property's troubled past.

In June 2008, water that smelled of gas began to accumulate in the pit of an elevator shaft that workers were digging. The water was pumped into a tanker to be hauled away to a treatment facility. But after the pump was accidentally left on, about 700 gallons of contaminated groundwater spilled from the tanker and into nearby storm drains.

DEQ issued a warning letter to the town but took no enforcement action after the problem was corrected.

The following month, workers again struck contaminated groundwater, this time while digging one of 24 wells to be used for a geothermal heating system. The closed-loop system pumps water from more than 250 feet underground to be used for energy-efficient heating and cooling.

According to a report from Faulkner & Flynn, the town's environmental consultants, "no more than five of the 24 geothermal wells will be located within an area where there is the potential for groundwater contamination."

Schirmer, whose office will be in the new building, said the wells are slightly uphill from where the storage tanks once sat, reducing the chances that gas-tainted water might find its way to them underground.

The cost of revival

The way supporters of the project see it, the town of Blacksburg was perhaps in the best position to take over a troubled property and turn it into a showcase of historic and environmental preservation.

A private developer might not have been willing to bear the costs of cleaning up the site and preserving a former car dealership where some of the first automobiles were introduced to Southwest Virginia.

"We're doing the right thing as opposed to the easy thing," Mayor Ron Rordam said.

But to Hill, the developer who owns property across the street, "that's a double-edged sword."

"Why would a business not do it?" Hill asked. "Because we don't have an open pocketbook. And the open pocketbook when it comes to Blacksburg is the taxpayers."

When it opens next week, the two-story building will house 25 employees from the town's engineering, GIS, planning and building departments.

Of the $3.5 million spent so far on construction, about $200,000 went toward remediating environmental issues, such as lead paint removal and dealing with contaminated groundwater.

That amount does not include consulting fees and last-minute expenses in July, Schirmer said.

Don Langrehr, a town council member who opposed the purchase of the property, wishes that those costs could have been borne by the private sector.

"This is a case where the profits were privatized on the sale of the building, and now the remediation costs are being socialized to the residents and the taxpayers of Blacksburg," Langrehr said during a recent town council meeting.

Langrehr suspects the project's total cost will approach $6 million, once all the remediation costs are covered. "That's a major, major investment for a small town," he said.

Town officials have long coveted the Blacksburg Motor Co. site, which completes a "municipal square" complex that includes the town hall, the police station and the library. By rushing to close the deal, the town may have acted like a "star-struck consumer," Langrehr said.

Rordam countered that for as long as 20 years, planning studies have stressed the importance of using the property as a town building designed to conform with the surrounding architectural fabric -- as opposed to having another drug store or retail outlet.

Yet questions may linger beyond today's opening ceremony.

"My concern is that they have bought a liability," said Griffiths, the environmental scientist.

"Knowing the history of that building, the stigma associated with it, and the problems they have encountered, surely someone other than I has to be scratching their head and wondering if they made the right decision."