Ledyard orders removal of salt

Town informs DRVN Enterprises storage not permitted on site near reservoir

Ledyard — The town of Ledyard has ordered DRVN Enterprises to remove road salt that the company was storing in a building at 20 Lorenz Industrial Parkway, a site within 900 feet of the Ledyard Reservoir, Ledyard Mayor Fred Allyn III said.

After the town was made aware Monday of salt storage on the site within the watershed, town Planning Director Liz Burdick informed DRVN Enterprises, a tenant slated to be displaced from State Pier by the end of the month, that the use was not permitted on that site and the salt needed to be removed immediately, Allyn said.

Allyn said DRVN Enterprises President Steve Farrelly was very understanding and mobilized trucks to move the salt. As of Tuesday morning, most of it had been removed.

Burdick said Farrelly, who advised her he was unaware he could not operate his business on the property, also installed sediment and erosion controls and will remove any equipment on the site when the weather clears.

Allyn said a notice of violation will be sent to the property owner, Generation Four Realty LLC, a company that has an application pending before the Planning and Zoning Commission on Thursday. The site previously was owned by MJ Sauchuk.

Allyn said the public concern is two-fold: a nonpermitted use in a building without a certificate of occupancy and the storage of road salt

within 900 linear feet of the water’s edge of a public drinking water supply.

Watershed

The property, west of Route 117 and east of the Ledyard Reservoir, is within the watershed of one of the reservoirs that supplies water to Groton Utilities, according to the state Department of Public Health and Groton Utilities.

Groton City Mayor and Groton Utilities Commission Chairman Keith Hedrick said the utility has been investigating and engaged the state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection and Department of Public Health for their help accessing the property, which the property owner so far had denied. He said Groton Utilities was working closely with Ledyard. He said the concern was that salt could leech from the site into the water supply and negatively impact the environment.

Rick Stevens, who manages the Groton Utilities water division, said the water in the reservoir, being released by the reservoir, flowing from there through brooks and streams to the terminal reservoir and going out to customers were all tested Friday and the mineral results were within normal, expected levels.

Hedrick said once all the salt is removed, Groton Utilities plans to inspect the property to make sure there are no hazards there.

Generation Four Realty LLC, which owns and operates CWPM, a waste removal and recycling company, has an application pending before the Ledyard Planning & Zoning Commission to modify a previously approved special permit for a recycling facility, according to the town’s website. CLA Engineers wrote in a November letter to the town on behalf of CWPM that the “present owner wants to modify the existing site plan to meet their needs, and to bring the property into compliance.”

Jason Manafort, the principal of Generation Four Realty, said he purchased the property in 2018 and he is working to finish the site plan approval process, which the previous owner did not complete, and bring the site into compliance.

In a Feb. 8 letter to Burdick regarding the pending application, the state Department of Public Health also noted it has “been alerted that in recent days large quantities of what appeared to be road salt have been trucked onto” the site. Eric McPhee, supervising environmental analyst for DPH’s drinking water section, said that raises “an additional concern about the risk this property poses to the water supply.”

“The application submitted does not appear to include provisions for salt use or storage, nor would the Department recommend locating/permitting this type of facility so close to a source of drinking water,” McPhee wrote, adding that DPH also was concerned that CWPM recently denied Groton Utilities staff access to the property to conduct an annual survey.

Manafort maintained that storage is allowed in the zone and he has not seen anything that says salt is not allowed there, but said the town had a problem with it, so DRVN Enterprises is responding.

The issue was brought to light through a complaint by Kevin Blacker, who said it’s not good judgment to have road salt displaced from State Pier and then moved next to a public water supply. He said he would like the Connecticut Port Authority to temporarily allow DRVN Enterprises to use a building at State Pier to store the treated salt.

Salt storage

While DRVN Enterprises has a large pile of salt at State Pier, Farelly said DRVN Enterprises was using the Ledyard site to temporarily store a surplus of treated road salt — which cannot be stored outside for quality control — so DRVN could quickly distribute it to towns and companies, such as Electric Boat, for snowstorms. He said he was storing salt in a building, which although it did not have doors, had a concrete slab and 8-foot containment walls.

“Following DRVN’s decision to store and treat some of their salt at an offsite location, DRVN made the Authority aware of their arrangements with a private landowner; the Authority was not involved in DRVN’s process of selecting the site in Ledyard,” port authority Executive Director John Henshaw said. “DRVN’s current extension expires on February 28th. We expect an update from them towards the middle of this month on their progress in selling and/ or relocating any remaining product off the pier.”

Farrelly said he has been in need of a place to store treated salt since he lost use of a former salt storage building this summer. He requested to use another facility at State Pier for the treated salt but said the port authority said it was not safe to be used for salt storage.

Henshaw said DRVN had disassembled a salt structure, after being given the option to remove or forfeit the structure to the port authority. The structure and the salt pile were in a site of “ongoing geotechnical investigation, planned remediation and other predevelopment activities.” The port authority allowed the salt pile to be relocated to the Central Vermont Railroad Pier. The authority said that to alleviate relocation costs, it has not charged DRVN monthly rental fees.

“I’m in a bad spot, and I’m doing the best with what was dealt to me,” Farrelly said.

While it’s more difficult, he said, he can process the salt on demand this winter and distribute it from State Pier.

Meanwhile, a public hearing on the application for a limited recycling facility at the Ledyard site is scheduled on Thursday via Zoom, Burdick said. Since there are multiple outstanding issues, her staff recommendation will be to continue the hearing so those can be addressed.

“I’m in a bad spot, and I’m doing the best with what was dealt to me.”

STEVE FARRELLY, PRESIDENT OF DRVN ENTERPRISES

Emil Freireich, a physician-scientist who helped engineer effective treatments for childhood leukemia at a time when the disease was considered a death sentence, an advance that magnified the promise of chemotherapy and was credited with saving tens of thousands of lives, died Feb. 1 in Houston. He was 93.

His death was announced by the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, where Freireich worked for half a century and where he died. A spokeswoman for the center said that he had COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, but the cause of death wasn’t yet determined.

Freireich was a seminal name in the modern history of cancer — an iconoclast who took on patients whose cases other doctors considered hopeless and, by dint of determination, experimentation and more than occasional confrontation, vastly expanded the options for treatment.

“He was a towering figure in oncology, inspiring generations of oncologists and cancer researchers,” Siddhartha Mukherjee, the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning volume “The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer,” said in an interview.

“He was a visionary in understanding mechanisms by which cancer cells could acquire resistance to single drugs,” Mukherjee observed. “Using his clinical acumen as well as scientific judgment, he was able to combine the most effective medicines to achieve the landmark cure that galvanized the world of cancer.”

Freireich attributed his fortitude in large part to his upbringing during the Depression in inner-city Chicago, where his widowed immigrant mother labored in a sweatshop and Freireich was cared for by an Irish maid. “My youth was the story of doing what you need to do to survive,” he once told the Houston Chronicle. “Figuring a way out of the mess you’re in.”

Inspired by his family doctor — one of the few professional men he encountered in his youth — Freireich enrolled in medical school and entered practice shortly after the end of World War II. The principal treatments for cancer at the time consisted of surgery and radiation. Chemotherapy was in its infancy. Cancer patients were, in many causes, considered lost causes.

These lost causes included the children Freireich encountered in the leukemia ward at the National Cancer Institute, an arm of the National Institutes of Health located in Bethesda, Md., where he arrived in 1955.

Leukemia is a form of cancer that affects the blood and bone marrow and, uncontrolled, can cause massive hemorrhaging that Freireich said made the ward resemble a slaughterhouse.

“You cannot imagine how horrible it was,” he told the Chronicle. “These were 3-, 4-, 5-year-old kids bleeding to death, bleeding out of their ears, eyes, nose, skin and bowels, bleeding internally, vomiting blood. It was a parent’s greatest horror.”

Before he could attack the cancer itself, Freireich had to devise a way of preventing his patients from hemorrhaging. Shuttling from bedside to the laboratory and back, he determined that his leukemia patients lacked sufficient platelets, the disk-shaped components of blood that facilitate clotting. To persuade skeptical colleagues, he mixed healthy platelets from his own blood with blood samples of his patients and demonstrated the effect.

Further complicating the matter were the limitations of platelets found in donated blood, which degrade after 48 hours — long before it was often transfused. “Because blood bank protocol demanded that the oldest blood be used first,” Freireich told an MD Anderson publication, “the children all along had been getting blood that was too dated to contain platelets.”

Freireich was credited with patenting the first continuous-flow blood-cell separator, a tool used to remove platelets and other particles from donated blood.

His innovations in the use of chemotherapy proved even more revolutionary. He achieved them with colleagues including one whose name produced one of the more remarkable coincidences of nomenclature. Newly arrived at the National Cancer Institute, Emil Freireich (known to friends as “J”) found himself working side by side with the oncologist Emil Frei III (called Tom).

“If Freireich had been a character in a film, he would have needed a cinematic foil, a Laurel to his Hardy or a Felix to his Oscar,” Mukherjee wrote in “The Emperor of All Maladies.” “Where Freireich was brusque and flamboyant, impulsive to a fault, and passionate about every detail, Frei was cool, composed, and cautious, a poised negotiator.”

Working with other researchers, they upended chemotherapy — and vastly expanded their patients’ life expectancies — by combining as many as four anti-cancer drugs that had previously been used alone.

The immediate effects of the highly toxic drugs were catastrophic, sickening patients at times nearly to death.

“They said I was unethical and inhumane and would kill the children,” Freireich told an interviewer years later, recalling the reaction of many colleagues who advocated allowing the children to die in peace. “Instead, 90 percent of them went into remission immediately. It was magical.”