Elizabeth River Project snags nearly $1.2 million in federal money

The Elizabeth River Project, a local environmental group, was awarded nearly $1.2 million on Thursday - the largest grant of its 17-year history.

The federal money will help clean up one of the most polluted stretches of the long-abused river near Money Point in Chesapeake and help industries on the Southern Branch of the Elizabeth implement new and greener business practices.

Don Welsh, the regional director of the Environmental Protection Agency, presented the grant to group leaders at a lunch ceremony in Virginia Beach.

The EPA chose the Elizabeth River Project to receive the money from more than 120 proposals from nonprofit groups and local governments across the nation, Welsh said.

Just a handful of those applicants won EPA grants, including an effort to restore a rainforest in Maui, a plan to replenish trout near an American

Indian reservation in Montana, and a drive to purge a tainted creek outside of Denver.

Much of the $1.2 million targeting the Elizabeth River will go to a major restoration project near Money Point, a peninsula once dominated by factories that produced fertilizers, chemicals and creosote, a tarlike wood preservative.

Tons of the highly toxic creosote, which also causes cancer, spilled into the river during separate accidents decades ago, creating one of the most contaminated zones of its kind in the world, according to published research.

Joe Rieger, a senior scientist with the Elizabeth River Project, said the EPA dollars will help design and construct about 2 acres of tidal wetlands, 4 acres of wetlands and another 4 acres of clean bottom habitat in one section of the contamination zone.

About $150,000 will go toward the group's "River Stars" program, which encourages business, schools and industries along the water to perform environmental projects and reduce pollution.

Rieger said the funds should assist as many as 10 such participants to "go above and beyond" innovative green improvements to further cut pollutants entering the watershed by more than 500,000 pounds.

The money is contained in two similar grants and will be paid out over two years and five years, respectively.

The Elizabeth River Project was formed in 1991 by four people talking around a kitchen table one night.

They wanted to try and revive the river by working with polluting industries and creating a new environmental ethic among citizens and businesses.

Scott Harper, (757) 446-2340, scott.harper@pilotonline.com