Dismantling Nears for Lynchburg Industrial Site

The City of Lynchburg, Va., is holding a mid-August meeting to update residents on the status of an approaching demolition project.

According to the Lynchburg News & Advance website, a public meeting scheduled for Aug. 19 has been designed “to brief the community on the approaching demolition of the old Allen-Morrison property on Rutherford Street.”

The city acquired that abandoned industrial site in 2002 and has been planning to convert the property, deemed an industrial brownfield by the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), into a public park. The first phase of demolition is currently scheduled to start in late August of 2010.

Since the 1990s, the City of Lynchburg has been working with the EPA and the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) on how to proceed through the brownfields process.

As part of that effort, EPA Region 3 conducted a review and put together a document titled “Deconstruction and Building Material Reuse to Foster Community Development in Lynchburg.”

Excerpts from that report include the following findings and recommendations:

• Two primary facilities stand on the site, which was abandoned in 1996: Allen-Morrison (87,800 square feet) and Thornhill (86,400 square feet). Starting in the early 1900s, the 16.9-acre site was home first to the Thornhill Wagon Co. and later to Allen- Morrison Corp., which produced metal signs.
• The Virginia DEQ’s environmental assessments of the site revealed soil contaminated with metals and semi-volatile organic compounds.
• EPA’s technical assistance to the City of Lynchburg has included: developing a material reuse inventory tool to collect information on building materials; estimating recoverable quantities of deconstruction materials; estimating costs or values of materials inventoried and identifying regulatory concerns; conducting a hazardous materials survey; assessing the feasibility of deconstructing the Allen-Morrison and Thornhill facilities; conducting a quantitative inventory of the Thornhill facility buildings; and providing recommendations for onsite material reuse.
• The EPA’s technical assistance team determined that the condition of building materials within the Allen-Morrison buildings rendered the materials generally unsuitable for reuse and that it would not be cost effective to deconstruct the buildings.
• Demolition with mechanical separation and salvage of recyclable materials (particularly scrap metal, brick, and concrete) was recommended.
• In addition to finding that there were more than 200 tons of metal on the site, the technical assistance team identified fixtures that could be salvaged to maintain the site’s architectural heritage, such as large timbers and wooden doors with interesting pressed metal (most likely tin) finish. The team said it may be possible to leave a portion or entire wall of the Thornhill buildings intact as a backdrop for a small outdoor theatre or other aspect of the redevelopment.