THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Thursday, December 29, 1994 TAG: 9412290425
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY SCOTT HARPER, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Medium: 93 lines
A North Carolina company has purchased an option to build a $450 million steel mill along the pristine Pamunkey River in King William County.
The announcement Wednesday by Kenneth Iverson, chairman and chief executive officer of Nucor Steel - the fourth-largest steelmaker in the nation - is expected to stir a major economics-vs.-environment debate in what has been a quiet farming community east of Richmond.
``If this area hasn't had a high profile in the past, it certainly is about to get one,'' said Bill Tanger, chairman of Friends of the Rivers of Virginia, a conservation group. ``Obviously, this is a big, big project that a lot of people are going to be looking at.''
Rumors about an incoming steel mill have dominated local coffee talk for months. But Wednesday, Iverson confirmed for the first time that his Charlotte-based company has acquired a one-year option to buy 525 acres of farmland near Cohoke, about seven miles northwest of West Point.
The site, owned by Robert Cutrell, who now is farming wheat and soybeans there, also is near the Pamunkey Indian Reservation. It fronts what outdoor writers and biologists have called the cleanest, most undisturbed river left in Virginia.
Nucor wants to construct a mill that each year would produce 1.8 million tons of flat steel sheeting, which typically is used to make cars, trucks, appliances and pipes, Iverson said.
The mill also would yield about 600 new jobs, he said, noting similar operations in Arkansas and Indiana.
``We want to serve the entire East Coast area,'' Iverson said in a telephone interview from Charlotte.
He stressed, however, that the company also has acquired an option on land for the proposed mill near Charleston, S.C., and that no final decision has been made on where to build the facility.
Asked what attracted Nucor to the Pamunkey property, Iverson said: ``We can bring barges up the river, we have a railroad line crossing the site. We just felt it could be a good site.''
Not everyone agrees.
``I really can't think of a nice way to say it, but I'd prefer that they wouldn't come in at all,'' said Tyla Matteson, chairwoman of the York River group of the Sierra Club. The Pamunkey and Mattaponi rivers both feed the York River, which in turn empties into the Chesapeake Bay.
Roy Hoagland, general counsel for the Chesapeake Bay Foundation in Richmond, said he was not ready to condemn the project, noting how many U.S. steelmakers have taken strides in recent years to clean up their once-dirty industry.
But Hoagland stressed that any steel mill would undergo enormous scrutiny, not only for its impact on the Pamunkey but also for its potential to create air pollution and suck valuable stores of groundwater from the watershed.
Then there are zoning concerns. The site is designated for agriculture, meaning the King William County Board of Supervisors would have to approve what likely would be a politically explosive change in zoning.
County officials would not comment on any aspect of the project.
Iverson said, however, that Nucor has informed the county and that discussions about what the company would need are ``well underway.''
``We've already gotten into some of the environmental studies,'' he said. ``We expect that they'd be done fairly rapidly.''
Iverson said a holding pond would keep wastewater out of the river. Water used to cool molten steel would be recycled in the pond and later fed back into the mill to do its same job.
The facility would be an ``electric furnace mill,'' which he said is designed to reduce air pollutants. Fumes and smoke would be captured within the mill and filtered to meet clean-air regulations, Iverson said.
Similar mills in Indiana and Arkansas have strong environmental records, he said, adding that ``we've had a good rapport with environmental agencies.''
That isn't exactly true, according to environmental officials in those two states.
While one Nucor plant in Arkansas has had no permit violations, a second facility there has been in hot water with the state's Department of Pollution Control and Ecology in 1989, '90, '91, '92, '93 and '94, said spokeswoman Rhonda Sharp.
Indeed, the troubled plant was the source of the fifth-largest fine for environmental violations in Arkansas history, Sharp said. In 1990, Nucor officials paid a $185,000 penalty for violating their air-quality permit, she said.
In Indiana, state regulators cited Nucor in 1990 for violating clean-air regulations at its steel plant, said Pam Koons, a spokeswoman for the state's Department of Environmental Management.
However, Nucor has won applause from environmentalists for its plan to work with USX Corp., the nation's largest steelmaker, to try to develop cleaner, cheaper ways to make steel. ILLUSTRATION: Color staff map
Area Shown: Proposed site of steel mill (525 acres)
by CNB