Last fall the state environmental agency did more testing at the long-closed munitions site. Six months later, the town is still waiting to learn when the cleanup will start.

HANOVER – You don’t have to look far to see the ghosts of the old National Fireworks munitions company. Just drive to Forge Pond, near the Hanson town line, and look to the other side of King Street.

More than 40 years after the firm quit making military explosives – contaminating the site with Superfund-levels of chemicals in the process – the company’s two-story brick office building stands empty, ever more-weathered as the years go by.



South of there, on both sides of the Drinkwater River and Factory Pond, the tainted old production areas in the 240-acre property remain equally undisturbed.



Six months after a new round of soil, pond and water tests, town officials are awaiting a state Department of Environmental Protection plan to remove the mercury, lead and other toxins from 60 years of manufacturing.



Those tests were conducted last September. DEP spokesman Joseph Ferson said the agency is preparing a report on the tests for the town, and that there’s “no timeline” for when the cleanup will commence.



Town officials don’t sound much bothered by the indefinite schedule. Selectmen chairman Brian Barthelmes said “no one is satisfied with the pace this has been going.” But he added that “it’s probably moving along as quickly as it can” at this stage.



“It’s not a simple fix,” he said. “Our focus now is to make sure that the cleanup is done appropriately, so we can make use of those properties. That’s more important than how long the cleanup may take.”



The long road to a cleanup started back in 1984, when the federal Environmental Protection Agency first surveyed the site. That was 12 years after munitions production ceased, in 1972.



The state has been involved since the early stages, and in 2012 the town persuaded DEP to take charge of the cleanup – thus avoiding the Superfund stigma. In 2014 Hanover got $73 million for the work from a $5 billion federal settlement with Anadarko Petroleum. The cleanup is estimated to cost anywhere between $28 million and $100 million.



While the town awaits DEP’s schedule, selectmen have formed a community advisory committee to survey the entire National Fireworks property and “generate ideas,” as Barthelmes put it, for how the whole site may eventually be used.



The town is getting some free outside help with those ideas. University of Massachusetts-Amherst landscape architecture professor John Mullin is overseeing a group of UMass graduate students who are coming up with their own designs for such possible uses.



Mullin said “the fireworks project” is getting a final review and will be sent to the town “shortly.”



Meanwhile, town officials are maintaining an effort to keep residents up to date on what’s being done. A map of the property and extensive documents from past testing and public meetings are posted on the town web site.



Residents and visitors use the hiking trails that wind through the acreage and along Factory Pond and the Drinkwater River. The town greenway includes a “fireworks trail.” But Barthelmes said the town isn’t worried about that, so long as no one eats the fish they catch.



“From the documents I’ve read, people aren’t at risk from walking in the woods there any more than normal,” he said of subsurface chemical accumulations.



Town officials worked hard – and successfully – to keep DEP from handing the site over to the federal Environmental Protection Agency and Superfund status. Barthelmes has no second thoughts about the effort, and he says other town officials don’t either.



“We’re all still comfortable with the decision that was made,” he said. “This way we at least feel we have a seat at the table.”



