• E-mail
• Print
• Comment
• Font Size
• Digg
• del.icio.us
• Discuss article

Port of Vancouver Buying Land in Cleanup Accord

Posted on: Monday, 15 May 2006, 18:03 CDT

By Allan Brettman, The Oregonian, Portland, Ore.

May 13--VANCOUVER -- The Port of Vancouver is purchasing the production building and surrounding land of Cadet Manufacturing as part of a settlement over the cleanup of toxic chemicals at the site.

For $5.4 million, the Port gets 11 acres and a 75,000-square-foot building near the government agency's headquarters on Lower River Road, west of downtown Vancouver. Port commissioners approved the purchase this week.

And Cadet, a wall-heater maker that has regained profitability after nearly going out of business in 1998, gets the Port as a landlord and frees itself from responsibility for cleaning up the toxic plume under the property. The company, which employs 100 people, signed a five-year lease with two five-year options.

The sales agreement is part of a settlement between the Port and two of Cadet's insurance carriers. The Port and Cadet had disagreed about who would pay to clean up the plume found in the late 1990s beneath the Cadet manufacturing building and under adjacent Port-owned property.

The plume contained a cleaning solvent, trichloroethylene, which was used as an industrial solvent at Cadet until the mid-1970s. The chemical can cause cancer.

By the end of this year, insurance carriers will have paid $10 million toward the solvent cleanup, said Larry Paulson, Port executive director. He said the Port retains the right to seek recovery of $14 million more for the ongoing cleanup, which continues to rise in cost.

With the property sale, the Port takes over the cleanup.

The sale of Cadet's building and land is the latest of many steps the privately held manufacturer has taken in a road toward recovery.

In January 1999, the company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection after accusations from the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission that its heaters were unsafe and could cause fires. The company issued a recall for nearly 1.8 million heaters.

About the same time, the company and the Port, under Washington state Department of Ecology orders, worked to clean up the toxic plume. To date, Cadet has removed 540 pounds of chlorinated solvents from soil and groundwater at its property.

Amid the recalls and at the outset of the cleanup, Cadet temporarily lost its two leading distributors. Sales declined from about $23 million in 1998 to about $16 million in 1999.

However, sales totaled $29 million in fiscal 2005 and are projected to exceed $30 million this year, Hutch Johnson, the company president, said Friday.

Johnson said the company, founded in Portland in 1957 and located in Vancouver since 1972, survived by "focusing on customer service and high-quality products with safety being the primary concern."

Johnson added that the rising tide of house sales in recent years contributed to increased sales.

-----

To see more of The Oregonian, or to subscribe the newspaper, go to http://www.oregonian.com.

Copyright (c) 2006, The Oregonian, Portland, Ore.

Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News.

For information on republishing this content, contact us at (800) 661-2511 (U.S.), (213) 237-4914 (worldwide), fax (213) 237-6515, or e-mail reprints@krtinfo.com.

Source: The Oregonian

More News in this Category