MIDDLETOWN — People living near the former Middletown Paperboard site are getting fed up with the mountain of debris towering over their homes more than a year after the building was demolished.
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Marva Gaston told our news partners, WCPO-9 TV, that she moved back to her hometown after retiring from a 36-year-long career in the Air Force and wondered if the pile across the street from her home would ever be taken care of.
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“Once they piled up the dirt, it’s like, OK, what’s next? What’s next? And there never was a next,” Gaston said.
The pile is only a few hundred feet from her front porch, and dust from it regularly flies onto her home, cars, and even herself.
Gaston said the thought of breathing in particles from the massive pile of industrial remains has her concerned for her health.
“We don’t know what’s in the dirt,” she said. “We don’t know what’s in the pile.”
Gaston took her concerns to the Middletown City Council during its last two meetings, WCPO-9 TV reported. She demanded that something be done about the mountain near her home.
At the city council meeting on Tuesday of last week, Gaston reiterated her concerns that she thought went unanswered at the council’s meeting two weeks earlier.
At the meeting, Middletown Mayor Elizabeth Slamka called on a representative of the company cleaning up the property, Tom Mignery, to address Gaston’s health concerns.
Roughly a dozen samples from the rubble pile had come back to meet commercial or industrial-rated property standards set by the state, according to Mignery.
“It was properly abated of all asbestos before demolition,” he said.
Mignery said the soil on the property will still need remediation, but the future of the gravel pile is the city’s responsibility, as it could be used to grade the property when properly cleaned, in industrial use elsewhere or sold for profit, WCPO-9 TV reported.
Slamka then called for City Manager Ashley Combs to develop a timeline for the rubble pile to be addressed.
Councilman Paul Lolli suggested that the pile be leveled off to mitigate dust issues, as a plan for addressing it is developed, and Vice Mayor Steve West called for Gaston’s dust issues to be addressed in the near future.
“I think that’s something we need to look at right away,” he said. “I mean, if that’s something we can figure out pretty quickly on this. I mean, in this picture, it looks like she lives in Colorado.”
WCPO-9 TV asked Gaston if the council member’s response to her most recent visit gave her hope for a quick resolution.
“I believe in giving people the benefit of the doubt, but, at the same time, I’m not going to be satisfied until something happens,” she said. “When it’s gone, that’s when I’ll be happy.”
WCPO-9 TV also reached out to the city administration for a timeline for addressing the rubble piles, options to mitigate dust, and potential uses for the property once cleanup is complete.
A spokesperson for the city said he forwarded the questions to the Community and Economic Development Department and the Public Works Department, but they have yet to respond.
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