The Roanoke Times | File 2003

Millions of abandoned railroad ties are piled at the former D.E. Hammond & Co. on Bolling Street, a former recycling company that closed in the 1990s.

| Amy Matzke-Fawcett

amy.matzke-fawcett@roanoke.com, 381-1674

RADFORD -- The city may soon be one step closer to ridding itself of a 26-year-old eyesore along the New River.

The city recently received a $23,400 federal grant to fund a site evaluation at the former D.E. Hammond & Co. at 1 Bolling St., a former recycling company that closed in the 1990s and the site of tens of thousands of abandoned railroad ties.

While the grant would allow for an important step in the cleanup process, the actual removal of ties could take millions of dollars and years to complete.

The ties have been piled there since 1984, when D.E. Hammond's owner, David Hammond, entered into a contract with Norfolk Southern to receive the ties and possibly resell them. But the ties became more than Hammond's company could handle, leading him to file for bankruptcy in 1990.

Since then, the fate of the site has been in question.

"There's just no good answer for it," said Basil Edwards, Radford's economic development director. "All of the solutions we've found over the years have been enormously expensive."

Environmental Protection Agency grants could be available for cleanup if the city wanted to take ownership of the land, but the city has declined to take the land from Hammond because of liability concerns, Edwards said.

The ties are preserved in coal tar creosote, which acts as a preservative and insecticide, and the site is a fire hazard because of the amount of material piled there. Hammond also owes back taxes on the property, although city officials would not provide the exact amount owed.

The newest grant, approved during Monday's city council meeting, will study the feasibility of using microgasification to dispose of the ties.

Microgasification is a process that converts woody products, such as railroad ties or agricultural residue, to synthetic gas by exposing it to high heat in a down-draft gasifier, said Mary Ann Sigurdson, spokeswoman for American Cogeneration LLC.

American Cogeneration is a company specializing in disposing of creasote-treated railroad ties and the company that would dispose of the ties if the study deems it a feasible way to remediate the site.

The synthetic gases created then can be used to power turbines or internal combustion engines, Sigurdson said.

"It gives us new hope for the site," Edwards said. "It's been worked on in fits and starts over the years, but we'll run into cost issues or logistical issues and it falls by the wayside again."

Because the feasibility study is still in the preliminary stages, it's unclear how long the process of clearing the site could take or what it could cost. In 1994, officials met with the Department of Environmental Quality and noted the cleanup would cost $1.75 million, with only visible ties being removed.

If American Cogeneration agrees to remediate the site, it would pay for the cleanup, Edwards said. Sigurdson said it was too early to estimate costs.

The EPA grants available to the city could also be available to the company if officials chose to apply for them, he said.

Hammond also would have to approve work to be done on the site because it is privately owned, Edwards said.

In 1994, Norfolk Southern offered to dispose of the ties, but with no one to break them down or load them on to rail cars, the proposition fell through, according to memos provided by the city.

Hammond, now a long-haul truck driver living in Elliston, has maintained throughout the years that Norfolk Southern should be responsible for cleaning up the site.

When the contract was signed in 1984, Norfolk Southern agreed to pay Hammond $6 per ton of ties.

"The railroad is the shipper and generator of the waste, so they should clean it up," Hammond said Wednesday. "I lost everything in this -- my house, my farm, my business. And the railroad's getting away with murder."

Hammond said he didn't want the city or the state paying for the cleanup.

"I'm for anything except the city putting money into it, because it's Norfolk Southern's waste," he said.

There are similar railroad tie sites across the United States, Sigurdson said.

"What happened to him is not uncommon," Sigurdson said. "There are sites like this all over."

Norfolk Southern regional spokesman Robin Chapman wrote in an e-mail that Hammond "became the owner of the ties more than 20 years ago when he contracted to clean roadbed materials out of gondola cars and to properly recycle or dispose of those materials. He is fully responsible for the ties and for the tie pile in Radford. Over the past 10 years or so, Norfolk Southern has offered several times to the [Virginia Department of Environmental Quality] to provide rail transportation for the ties, provided the state had a suitable disposal location for them."

Chapman went on to say he was aware of the effort to dispose of the ties but referred questions to the Department of Environmental Quality.

The Environmental Protection Agency is conducting a separate study of the site, Edwards said, and a report should be issued next month.

A 2003 EPA study showed creosote and other chemicals used to protect the ties from weathering had not leaked into the surrounding soil, Edwards said.