Residents meet with company redeveloping former Philadelphia Energy Solutions Refinery
SOUTH PHILADELPHIA - It has been four years since the massive fire and explosion at an oil refinery in South Philadelphia. There are still questions and concerns over what’s next for the site.
"Houses blew up. My house shook. In the 60's, I was fighting to shut it down," said Sylvia Bennett, who is still trying to protect her family and community from what's left of the former Philadelphia Energy Solutions Refinery in her Grays Ferry neighborhood.
"We don't need any more fossil fuel in our community. No more deaths. We're tired," she said.
That pain and passion runs deep for residents who came out to Smith Playground Wednesday night for a meeting with Hilco Redevelopment Partners. The company took over the site in 2020 after an explosion and fires in 2019 shut it down for good.
"We really just want to have more of a voice," said Sanija Aikens whose family lives in the neighborhood.
Hilco reps say in the past three years they've worked to take the refinery site offline, decommission it and remove the infrastructure. FOX 29’s Shawnette Wilson drove by the location and reports smokestacks and towers are no longer visible.
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"As of today, we're more than 90 percent done demolishing the refinery infrastructure. It's about a year ahead of schedule actually and all that's left to go are two wastewater treatment facilities that we just recently got the permits for," said Amelia Alcivar. She’s the vice president of corporate affairs for Hilco.
They're planning a Sustainable Logistics and Life Sciences Hub for the 1300-acre site that could bring 19,000 jobs.
"So, companies, technology companies, life sciences companies, logistics, and AI," said Alcivar.
R. Merriman-Goldring is with PhillyThrive who organized the meeting.
"That's going to bring in jobs, but not jobs that folks in the neighborhood have the education or the experience to access," said Merriman-Goldring. She says this is just the beginning of many meetings to come to protect the neighborhood.
"We got to talk about flood protection plans for surrounding neighborhoods, we got to talk about their cleanup plans to remediate all of that heavily contaminated soil that's been accumulating a toxic soup of chemicals for 154 years and we sure got to talk about that development isn't displacing longtime Black residents because that's happening around the city," she said.
Hilco says this is a 10-year-plus project, but they anticipate a groundbreaking before the end of this year on the first phase of construction.
More information on Hilco's Bellweather District can be found here.