The Virginia Department of Environmental Quality has spent the past two months hearing from Waynesboro residents who have already made up their minds.
At issue is a permit request from Northrop Grumman, the defense contractor that opened a 315,000-square-foot facility on Shenandoah Village Drive in 2024. The company wants permission to release up to 24.9 tons of volatile organic compounds into the air above Waynesboro every year.
That number sounds abstract until you learn what it includes. Among the compounds named in the application are MIBK, a solvent linked to cancer, toluene, which the Occupational Safety and Health Administration associates with organ damage and pregnancy loss, and xylenes, tied to respiratory and neurological problems.
Northrop Grumman leases the property from Shenandoah Village Drive Investment Partners LLC, a Pennsylvania company, and will use these chemicals to build electrical components for aerospace and defense hardware.
The park next door
The plant sits against Coyner Springs Park, 145 acres of woods and streams that feed into Waynesboro’s municipal water supply. People walk their dogs there most mornings. One woman who spends her days at the park with her puggle told WMRA she was born at the old Waynesboro hospital and has lived in the city her whole life. She wonders what she’s supposed to trust anymore. Big companies, she said, have flattened small towns like this one before, and nobody in her circle at the park believes the permit gets denied. A billion-dollar company builds first and asks forgiveness later, in her view, and the state hands out a pat on the head once construction money has already changed hands.
That skepticism has roots that go back nearly a century.
From 1929 to 1950, the DuPont plant that once operated in Waynesboro used mercury to manufacture rayon, and wastewater from the process drained into the South River. The Bay Journal has reported the contamination stretched more than 100 miles downstream through the South Fork Shenandoah, and it never fully left. Fish and snakes in the river still carry traces of it. DuPont eventually paid $50 million in 2017, the largest natural resource damage settlement in Virginia history, and yet a later restoration plan left Waynesboro itself without a direct share of the money. Locals remember that outcome. It shapes how they read every new promise from every new manufacturer that shows up wanting a permit.
What do you think?
A company with a long paper trail
Residents skeptical of self-reported emissions numbers do not need to look only at DuPont’s history to make their case. Northrop Grumman itself carries a record from the other side of the country, one that predates its current name.
Beginning in the 1970s, the aerospace manufacturer Grumman contaminated groundwater beneath its Bethpage, New York, plant with the degreasing solvent TCE, and a 2020 Newsday investigation built on internal company records found the company knew about the spreading contamination for years and publicly denied responsibility during that same period. Confidential consultant memos going back to 1976 warned that the pollution could migrate into neighboring wells, and it did. Company spokespeople told the press the water was safe to drink around the same time federal regulators were privately telling the company otherwise, according to internal meeting notes Newsday obtained.
The Bethpage plume, now roughly four miles long and up to 900 feet deep, sits in the sole aquifer supplying drinking water to a large swath of Long Island. New York’s cleanup plan, unveiled after the state stopped relying on Grumman’s own pollution models, projects the effort will run $585 million over its first thirty years, with full remediation more than a century away. Northrop Grumman has told the state it spent $200 million on cleanup but has declined to itemize the figure, and it fought and defeated a lawsuit seeking to recover more than $30 million in costs that Long Island taxpayers had already covered.
None of that history involves the Waynesboro facility, which manufactures different products under different environmental rules and opened decades after the Bethpage contamination began. But it is the reason a segment of Waynesboro residents object to letting the company track and report its own emissions, rather than paying for an outside monitor. The Bethpage case shows what a company can know internally, and how long it can take that information to surface.
What DEQ has said so far
A first hearing in July, covered by WVTF, drew a packed room of residents pressing DEQ on how the agency would monitor a facility it does not physically staff. DEQ followed with a written response running fifteen pages, addressing public comments point by point. One line in that document has become a rallying point for opponents: the agency acknowledged the permit appears structured to keep the facility classified as what regulators call a synthetic minor source, a designation that lets a plant stay just under the federal threshold that would trigger tougher monitoring and pollution controls. DEQ’s position is that the company’s own emissions tracking, reviewed against that cap, satisfies the law as written.
Northrop Grumman has told reporters it expects its real emissions to land well below the 24.9-ton ceiling and has called itself committed to being a responsible neighbor.
Who’s pushing back
Carrie Eheart grew up in Waynesboro and now lives in nearby Stuart’s Draft. She has spent recent weeks organizing water testing across four sites in Coyner Springs Park, work she’s doing alongside a small group pushing DEQ to either reject the permit outright or require Northrop Grumman to fund independent, third-party emissions monitoring rather than reporting its own numbers. She put the stakes plainly to WMRA: once contamination sets into groundwater, there’s no calling it back. Everything downstream of it goes too.
Waynesboro Vice Mayor Lorie Jean Akanbi represents the ward where the plant sits, and she has broken from silence on the issue. In a statement, she said the city has lived through what environmental damage looks like a generation later, and that independent monitoring would give residents a level of confidence in the numbers that self-reporting alone cannot provide.
DEQ has said it will announce a final decision on the permit by October 22.
Sources: WMRA, WVTF, Bay Journal, Newsday, Virginia DEQ public hearing calendar.