[CPEO-BIF] Painesville, Ohio vineyard on Diamond Shamrock site

[Lenny Siegel <lsiegel@cpeo.org>]

Ohio State is helping turn Northeast Ohio Brownfield into unique vineyard

By Mauricio Espinoza, Ohio Agricultural Research and Development Center
North Texas E-News
November 30, 2006

WOOSTER, Ohio - Cleveland brownfield developer Todd Davis had a problem. 
A sizable area of his most ambitious project to date - turning the 
1,100-acre, contaminated former site of Lake County's Diamond Shamrock 
Painesville Works into the nation's first sports-oriented resort 
community - was not stable enough to support the weight of structures, 
limiting development options.

Davis consulted with Bill Rish, a risk-assessment expert working with 
him in the ambitious "Lakeview Bluffs" revitalization project, which 
sprawls from the Lake Erie shoreline some 30 miles northeast of 
Cleveland to the outskirts of the city of Painesville, split in the 
middle by the Grand River. Rish began pondering what to do with the 
300-acre settling lake left to nature in 1976 when the Diamond factory 
closed after 64 years of producing chromate compounds and soda ash, a 
chemical used in the glass industry. A wine enthusiast, he had read that 
some of the best French wine grapes are grown in high-lime soils. That 
sparked an idea.

"The soils in this area are comprised mainly of limestone chalk and 
salts settled in a large basin from water coming out of a process to 
make soda ash, called the 'solvay' process," said Rish, who works with 
Columbus-based environmental engineering and consulting company Hull and 
Associates. "Over time, plant growth has formed a layer of organic 
topsoil, which has mixed with the solvay in the top layers. I wondered 
if grapes could grow there."

...

For the entire article, see
http://www.ntxe-news.com/artman/publish/article_38617.shtml

--


Lenny Siegel
Director, Center for Public Environmental Oversight
c/o PSC, 278-A Hope St., Mountain View, CA 94041
Voice: 650/961-8918 or 650/969-1545
Fax: 650/961-8918
<lsiegel@cpeo.org>
http://www.cpeo.org


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