For nearly three decades, more than 25,000 tons of carpet waste has sat on the site of an abandoned rifle range in Warren. The town wants to get rid of the carpets so it can finally develop there, but without financial help, town officials have their hands tied.
Mountains of carpet dwarfed a municipal pickup truck as Sherry Howard, Warren’s town manager, and Joe Cifaldo of the town’s public works department, recently drove through the 70-acre property.
“That’s just a little one,” Howard said as the truck passed a mountain of carpet the size of a house.
The roads on the plot of land are made of the material. Some of it has been covered in soil and grass, creating unnatural hills and valleys. It’s far more material than what could have reasonably been used for five berms surrounding the rifle range, which was the proposed use for it.
It’s a carpet wasteland. And the town’s only financial hope of cleaning it up — an application for $2 million in federal Brownfields cleanup funds — was denied in May.
Without that money, the carpet will have to remain.
The 25-year-long dilemma in Warren shows how seemingly impossible it can be for small communities to remove toxic debris without financial assistance, creating both an eyesore for residents and threatening their health and safety as concerns over leakage of per-and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, and other contaminants grow.
The saga began in 1997, when the Maine Board of Environmental Protection approved Chester Randall Dunican and his wife, Kathleen, to use 164,000 cubic yards of waste material from the Gates Formed Fibre Company in Auburn to create berms for their proposed rifle range in Warren, according to Maine DEP documents.
They bought the property from a man who already had an active shooting range on the site with intentions to grow the business. The Dunicans said they were going to cover the waste material, which was mostly polyester and polypropylene carpet waste from old trucks, with soil to prevent stray bullets from leaving the property.
By 2000, a Maine DEP inspection found that 75 percent of the material was uncovered, the Dunicans had dumped nearly twice as much material as it was licensed for and the couple was nowhere to be found.
The state took the Dunicans’ company, Steamship Navigation, to court in 2003 and the Maine DEP received $410,000 from the former owner to help clean up the project.
The town has been trying to pawn off the waste ever since. The Maine DEP proposed using some of the material to fill a quarry at the former Maine State Prison once it was demolished, but ultimately did not after Thomaston residents raised concerns over the plan. Later proposals included recycling the waste into composite lumber and burning the material for fuel. Despite promising results, both plans eventually fizzled out.
The carpets are leaking PFAS into the soil and the highly flammable materials are a fire hazard.
The Maine DEP provided early documents from its legal correspondences with Steamship Navigation, but did not answer additional questions.
The town resisted foreclosing on the property for decades out of fear that it would be held liable for the cleanup. But in 2022, the town finally voted to do so after the Maine DEP guaranteed it wouldn’t be liable.
The town is still responsible for the cleanup, though, if it wants the property to be developed. But without financial help, the town can’t do much with its small tax base, Howard said.
That’s why it applied for a Brownfields grant — a program with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency that funds assessment and cleanup of contaminated properties in communities, states and tribes. The town learned it was denied the funds in May, Howard said.
“We are looking forward to the Brownfields to get it cleaned up,” Howard said. “And so that the town doesn’t have to have that material still on the property.”
She doesn’t know why Warren didn’t receive the grant, but she’ll meet with the EPA this summer to learn why, Howard said. Then the town will apply again.
In the meantime, there’s nothing the town can do, Howard said. It doesn’t want to use tax money to clean up the site, and the tax base for the town of less than 5,000 isn’t big enough to provide the $2 million needed to do the cleanup anyway.
The Maine DEP used the litigation funds it won from Steamship Navigation to demolish old buildings on the former rifle range and to clean up some asbestos and lead.
But to be truly cleaned up, the carpet mountains will have to be consolidated into one spot and covered with soil to make a giant plateau, Howard said.
Ideas for development are still just that, but because of PFAS contamination, the plot can never be residential. The Maine DEP assured the town that once the carpet is covered, it will stop leeching PFAS, Howard said.
The town has considered placing solar panels on the property, but with a 600-acre solar farm in the works and a town ordinance that restricts how much land in the municipality can be used for solar, that may not happen.
