A move to clean up a toxic site that was once the home to the Midland Cereal Building in the northern Colorado city of Brighton is receiving funding from the Environmental Protection Agency.
The Midland facility at 640 Baseline Road was built in the early 1920s and designed to manufacture the company’s most popular product, Whole Wheat Nuggets, for regional and national distribution.
The company’s products, however, never rivaled such industry mainstays as the Grape Nuts Cereal, manufactured by the General Foods Corporation, prompting Midland to go out of business by the end of the decade.
In later years, the Midland facility was used as a warehouse and distribution center for several different companies.
A $500,000 Brownfields Assessment grant has been awarded to Brighton to conduct an environmental assessment of the Midland site, while also developing a clean-up plan.
The grant will also allow city officials to conduct assessment and clean-up plans for sites formerly inhabited by the Petroleum Wholesale company, the Brighton Grain Elevator, and the Wilmore Canning Factory, which was built in 1908, and was later used to house German prisoners of war during World War II.
According to a press release issued by the EPA, a majority of the targeted Brighton properties are located next to the railroad that runs through the city, prompting concerns about arsenic and other potential contaminants.
Those concerns additionally include the presence of “heavy metals, asbestos, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, dioxins, furans, polychlorinated biphenyls, polyfluorinated compounds, and petroleum compounds.”
Brighton officials have said that once the vacant industrial properties are cleaned up, the sites could be used for everything from mixed-use developments, marketplaces, restaurants, breweries, and housing.
The Brownfields grant, said Brighton Mayor Gregory Mills in a statement, “will help us attract more employment, tourism, retail options, and investment in core areas of the city.”
In a press conference announcing the grant, Kelly Watkins, chief of staff for the EPA’s Region 8, remarked that the Brownfield Assessment grants entail “partnerships between governments, housing authorities, private developers and others to help revitalize the most dangerous and polluted sites into cleaner, sustainable, and more environmentally just places that benefit the surrounding communities.”
By Garry Boulard
