Galey & Lord site ‘very, very close’ to Superfund cleanup list
By Bobby Bryant, Editor editor@newsandpress.net
The abandoned, contaminated Galey & Lord textile plant on the edge of Society Hill is “very, very close” to being added to the priority list for federal Superfund cleanup, Society Hill Mayor Tommy Bradshaw said. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has proposed adding the 234-acre site as a Superfund priority, Bradshaw said. Now the agency will be collecting public comments on the plan for the next couple of months. Society Hill Town Council happily passed a resolution favoring the project at its Oct. 12 meeting. “I think it’s just a matter of the formalities to go forward,” Bradshaw said. “It would be a tremendous feat. It would mean so much to this community, to the environment, to the three counties around here.” Assuming the plan goes forward, Bradshaw said, the EPA might begin initial prep work fairly soon. Bradshaw couldn’t estimate how long the cleanup might take – a few years, perhaps, he said. The Galey & Lord plant used to be a major employer in the Society Hill area, Bradshaw said. It operated between 1966 and 2016, leaving behind an environmental mess that has made the property impossible to use or sell, he said. The EPA says the site was a textile dyeing and finishing plant. The wastewater it generated was treated at a plant that included several basins near Cedar Creek and the Great Pee Dee River. After the plant closed, the EPA says, its wastewater treatment plant was never “remediated” or cleaned up. The basins are now full. The agency says that as a result of the decades of textile operations, the wetlands and sediments of Cedar Creek and the Great Pee Dee River are contaminated with metals, perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) and perfluorooctanesulfonic acid (PFOS). The EPA says some of the wastewater basins at the site flooded during Hurricane Florence in 2018, spilling wastewater into the creek and the river. “Five years now, it’s been out of business,” Bradshaw said. “The grass has grown up, 4, 5, 6 feet high and it’s just an awful sight.” He said he’s been worried that the site could have sat there for another 15 years with no action taken on it. Bradshaw credits U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham with helping push the project higher within the federal government. EPA has “looked into it, and they’ve seen that it’s one of the more serious cleanup sites that need to be addressed. They see the significance of it.” The resolution passed last week by Society Hill Town Council says that the Galey & Lord plant closing “devastated the community, not only with loss of employment, but leaving an industrial site that cannot be sold because of toxic waste left by the owners.”