The Washington Post-A foul odor prompts worry among Ivy City residents about toxic chemicals

2024-03-22T00:12:55.016Z

For years, neighbors puzzled over the source of a burning stench pervading their blue-collar corner of Northeast Washington. The odor has been foul enough at times that they say they have shut their windows and stayed indoors.

The list of suspected causes in Ivy City — an epicenter in recent years of new condos and fashionable bars and restaurants — has included the heavy traffic coursing through the area, auto body shops, distilleries and the battalions of D.C. school buses and garbage trucks that use the neighborhood as home base.

But residents, along with environmentalists and community advocates, have settled on what they are convinced is the most likely culprit — a manufacturing facility that has operated for 90 years in an easy-to-miss one-story building at the end of a residential street.

The company, National Engineering Products Inc., makes a sealant for the Navy, using chemicals like formaldehyde, acetonitrile and methylene chloride that can lead to health problems, including cancer. NEP didn’t have to obtain an air pollution permit because it opened decades before federal law started requiring such certification. The company also began before zoning laws would have barred it from operating in a residential neighborhood.

Responding to neighborhood concerns, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the D.C. Department of Energy and Environment (DOEE) began conducting air quality tests last year. While more testing is planned, the agencies both say results so far show that emissions pose no immediate health risk to residents.

NEP’s president, Nicole Barksdale, when reached on her cellphone, said the company has been cooperating with city and federal officials and has submitted an odor reduction plan — DOEE officials say they are reviewing it. “We work on it all day and every day,” Barksdale said before abruptly terminating the call.

Nevertheless, neighbors, as well community and environmental advocates, fear that NEP’s emissions are a danger to residents, including a mother and her six children who live in a house adjoining the company’s building on Capitol Avenue NE.

Shawn Scott, who purchased her home in 2011 through an affordable housing program, said she was unaware of what was going on inside the plant when she moved next door. Now she worries that NEP’s emissions — an air vent on the company’s rooftop is outside her kids’ bedroom window — have aggravated her children’s difficulties, which include asthma, migraines and learning disabilities. Scott also is concerned that her own ability to smell has been compromised.

“It’s very frustrating living in this situation,” she said in a telephone interview. “You wouldn’t think there’d be a chemical plant in your neighborhood.”

Empower DC, a community group that has long advocated on behalf of the neighborhood, along with residents, environmental activists, and academics are lobbying Mayor Muriel E. Bowser’s administration to shut NEP down.

The advocates contend that letting NEP continue to operate is a vestige of what they describe as racist zoning policies that allowed for industrial facilities to amass in and pollute low-income Black neighborhoods such as Ivy City. “We would not tolerate this in Northwest Washington,” said council member Zachary Parker (D-Ward 5), whose district includes Ivy City, referring to prosperous, predominantly White neighborhoods such as Chevy Chase. “No one should have to live next door to an NEP factory.”

In November, 22 public health and science professors from several D.C.-area schools, including Georgetown and George Washington universities, wrote a letter to the mayor and council saying they were “deeply concerned” about NEP and urged the government to “use the powers it has” to stop the company “from operating in the Ivy City community, or in any residential area.”

EPA officials, in a statement, said that the agency, after three rounds of testing, has determined that exposure to NEP’s emissions “are not expected to result in adverse health effects” and that it has no grounds to sanction the company. Officials at DOEE, which also has taken air samples, concurred, adding that more testing is needed to determine whether potential long-term hazards exist.

Hannah Ashenafi, associate director of DOEE’s Air Quality Division, said there are other entities in the neighborhood that emit pollutants, including a nearby auto body shop, a Department of Public Works parking lot and the heavy traffic a couple of blocks away along New York Avenue NE. “We can’t necessarily single out one facility,” Ashenafi said.

Tucked between New York Avenue NE and Mount Olivet Cemetery, Ivy City was born in the early 1870s as a community designed for Black laborers. The neighborhood is located in Ward 5, which over the course of generations has hosted the types of industrial facilities residential communities oppose — a trash-transfer station and parking lots packed with city-owned vehicles, from school buses to snowplows.

In recent years, Ivy City became the focus of real estate developers, including Douglas Jemal, who turned Hecht’s warehouse into high-end rental apartments, and attracted bars and restaurants, a new Target and an organic grocer. Other neighborhood magnets, including a Nike store and TJ Maxx, shuttered during the pandemic.

Andrenette Willis, a retired Parks Department recreation specialist who grew up in Ivy City and lives a block from NEP, said that as a child in the 1950s and ’60s, she and other kids played in a clubhouse next door to the company and never noticed foul odors. NEP workers, she said, would sometimes give her father empty barrels he would use as a makeshift fire pit in her family’s backyard.

It was when Willis became an adult that she recalls noticing in the neighborhood an odor “like burnt rubber,” though “we didn’t know where it was coming from. Every now and then, we’d go out in the morning, and we’d say, ‘What’s that smell?’”

In more recent years, as she became aware that NEP was a chemical plant, the stench worried her enough that she has taken precautions, including not sitting on her porch. “If I smell that smell, I go back in the house,” Willis said. “I don’t know how it’s going to affect my life.”

Terrence Campbell and Jade Watkins, both 34, bought a condo two doors away from NEP in 2020 without knowing anything about the facility. Watkins, a public school teacher, said she has noticed a foul odor from time to time but never connected it to NEP until she read on the internet that the company was operating a chemical plant.

“I feel a little bamboozled because I didn’t know what the company did,” she said. “That could have been a deciding factor in whether we bought or not.” Her husband, a web designer, said that when he leaves their condo, he has been aware of an odor but didn’t think much about the origin until Empower DC organized a protest of the company last summer. “I’m not walking around a lot,” he said. “When I go outside, I go straight to my car.”

NEP has long been a focus of concern for Empower DC. The group, which maintains a headquarters in Ivy City, was instrumental in recent years in pushing the city to turn a vacant early-20th-century public school in the neighborhood into a community center — a $35 million project that is now being designed.

Empower DC also was successful a dozen years ago when it mounted a legal effort to stop the administration of Mayor Vincent C. Gray from building a bus depot for D.C. to New York motor coaches on the grounds of the school, a landmarked building dedicated to Alexander Crummell, a prominent 19th-century Black minister and educator.

Now Empower DC is using similar arguments it made about the buses to press its case against NEP, accusing the company of further endangering a low-income population already exposed to intolerable levels of pollution. Parisa Norouzi, Empower DC’s executive director, said the city’s willingness to allow NEP to operate in its location contradicts D.C. leaders’ expressions of concern about race, income and health disparities.

“They have talked the talk of racial equity, but when we come down to it, we haven’t changed anything for the most impacted Black communities,” Norouzi said. “What progress are we making if we grandfather the polluters into these neighborhoods? We’re supposed to make changes to do better, and yet we leave these communities to have these harmful conditions.”

Tommy Wells, DOEE’s former director, is among those who doesn’t think NEP belongs in a residential neighborhood. But he understands the obstacles that are in the D.C. government’s way. As DOEE’s leader, he said, he instructed agency employees to investigate whether NEP was violating city regulations, hoping that the infractions would give him reason to take action against the company.

“We couldn’t find the grounds to do that,” said Wells, who served eight years as the agency’s chief until he stepped down in 2023. “We went in there with the idea that we didn’t like it there. We didn’t see them breaking the law.”

Wells said one way for D.C. to deal with NEP is take over the property through eminent domain, a maneuver it has used to seize land needed for Nationals Park and for the confounding intersection known as Dave Thomas Circle in Northeast, where a Wendy’s franchise stood for decades. Parker said he’s considering introducing eminent domain legislation, a process that would require support from Bowser and a majority of the council. “We are looking for every opportunity to get rid of this toxic chemical plant from our community,” he said.

In the meantime, Scott said she cannot move because the terms of her purchase stipulate that she cannot sell the house for its full value until she has lived there for 15 years. “I’m kind of stuck,” she said. “Also, I don’t want to sell it to another family and now they’re living next to a chemical plant, too.”