From Brown Field to Green

Last Monday morning Iain and I walked to Zonolite Road to try to find the new park that Dekalb County is building there. I hadn’t actually known what Zonolite was; it’s a brand name for vermiculite insulation that came from Libby, Montana, that was used in the United States until 1990. Vermiculite is a mineral that expands in size when heated, sort of like popcorn; the heating process is called exfoliation, and that’s what they used to do at a facility on Zonolite Road. I assume that the vermiculite came to Zonolite Road by train from Montana, got heated up at the exfoliation facility, and then was packaged for sale as Zonolite brand insulation. Vermiculite mining began in Libby in 1919; at that time they didn't know (or didn't know that it mattered) that the vermiculite ore from Libby was contaminated with asbestos. Since 2000, the Environmental Protection Agency has been working to remove asbestos-contaminated soil in and near Libby.

The plant on Zonolite Road in Atlanta was in operation during the 1950s and 1960s. During the years the plant was in operation, between 499 and 1,225 tonsof vermiculite from Libby, Montana, is thought to have been shipped to the site. Demolition of the buildings there began during the 1960s and was completed around 1990. In 2010, the EPA sampled soil from the site where the plant had been, and found that one area of the site was contaminated with asbestos. Cleanup began on October 31, 2011. By February 24, 2012, 26,000 tons of asbestos-and vermiculite-contaminated soil had been removed. The 13 acre site, along the South Fork of Peachtree Creek, is now owned by Dekalb County, and now that it's been cleaned up, a park is being developed there.



I haven’t been in the Zonolite Road area for years and I hadn’t known there was a park there until I saw it in the South Fork Conservancy’s Watershed Vision for parks and trails along the South Fork of Peachtree Creek; it also came up in the community meeting that I attended earlier this month at Haygood. So Iain and I decided to go find it, even though we weren’t completely sure where we were going. The first road we went down was a dead end with no park in sight, but there were cats and a cat-crossing sign. On another street we found someone to ask, and got pointed in the direction of the park; there still was heavy machinery on the site, and work was obviously still going on. The man who gave us directions said that they were removing some concrete slabs, still. So Iain and I headed off for it, even though as Iain observed it looked more like a construction site than a park.

There was a big open area with tall grass, with a shallow pond in the middle; we were guessing this was where the clean-up work had been done. Beyond that there was a wooded area, with trails. We headed off down one of them, not really knowing where we were headed. How could it be that in the city, so close to my house, there was an area where I’d never been, where there were trails that disappeared into the woods, where it at least felt like one could get lost? We didn’t go very far, but did find the creek and walked back to find an easier place to get down the creek bank to the sandy shore; we ended up walking back to very near where we’d first entered the woods.



We explored upstream and downstream. The water quality didn’t appear to be too bad – there was an area where Iain spotted fish that were several inches long – but there was some trash and old tires that need to be removed. And a persistent sense of wonder, that we could be in easy walking distance from home, but still somewhere where we’d never been.

We walked back past the shallow pond, and returned to the road by the Floataway Buildings, walking past the printer and the vintage clothing store and the sign for the church and the orthodontist’s office with the pink flamingos.





As we were returning home I told Iain that I felt like we’d been on a treasure hunt. We stopped at Alon's and picked up some croissants. It was a great way to spend the morning.