Rows of low-lying brick buildings and corrugated tin bungalows crowd a 32-acre property in east Burlington. Photos from the 1990s reveal a silver water tower and pristine pipes glowing white in the sun. Now, these structures are rust-red.
This is the former Tarheel Army Missile Plant, or TAMP. A vestigial organ of Cold War-era military manufacturing, it has changed hands several times since the Department of Defense auctioned it off to a private buyer in the early 2000s. For the past three decades, the U.S. Army Environmental Command and the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality (NCDEQ) have investigated and worked to address chemical contamination on the property.
This decades-long timeline may make their restoration endeavor look like a failure. But according to Sue Murphy, an NCDEQ engineer, in comparison to other projects, TAMP has been a resounding success.
“There are over 3,300 contaminated sites in this state of North Carolina, and a lot of them are way worse than this,” she said…