A company that specializes in cleaning up North America’s worst messes just moved into a 38,000-square-foot building on Derby Avenue in Seymour.
The property is now the Connecticut Field Services Division for Clean Harbors, a Massachusetts-based company that generates more than $13 billion in revenue a year.
The company provides an array of environmental and hazardous waste management services across the U.S., Canada, Mexico and Puerto Rico.
It is best known for its large-scale emergency spill response.
When a tanker truck crashes on a highway and spills diesel fuel — or much more dangerous chemicals — all over God’s creation, crews from Clean Harbors clean the mess.
They were at Ground Zero immediately after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, doing everything from cleaning contaminated manholes to decontaminating emergency response trucks.
When anthrax was discovered in a postal service processing facility in New York City in 2001, Clean Harbor employees decontaminated the site.
They were in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and hundreds of workers were sent to the Gulf of Mexico after the disastrous BP oil spill.
“They pretty much call Clean Harbors for things others can’t handle,” said Joseph Heron, the general manager who is in charge in Seymour.
The 8‑acre Derby Avenue property, just down the road from Tri-Town Plaza, will be the heart of the company’s emergency response unit in Connecticut.
The field services division includes two floors of office space for local managers and account executives — but the building also has a series of massive garage bays where Clean Harbors will be able to store and maintain its large fleet of emergency response vehicles.
That fleet includes vacuum trucks, tankers, mobile command centers, excavators — even two boats.
About 60 people will work in Seymour, although the number fluctuates at any given time depending on what’s happening.
The Seymour building allowed the company to consolidate two separate Connecticut locations into one, while getting what honchos called a great deal on rent — $17,000 a month. In other parts of the country, that amount gets them half the space, company officials said.
The company has a three-year lease with the property’s owner, with an option to sign on for seven more.
And Clean Harbors is looking to hire an additional three to six workers. The emergency response positions pay anywhere from $13 to $30 an hour, based on experience.
“We want to continue to hire from the local community because with emergency response, it certainly helps to have people close,” said Scott Metzger, Clean Harbors’ senior vice president of field operations.
Locally, Clean Harbors crews work regularly out of Sikorsky in Stratford and at refineries in Bridgeport, so the easy access to routes 8 and 15 (along with interstates 84 and 91) was another selling point for the company.
Clean Harbors held a heavily-attended ribbon-cutting ceremony Thursday that included participation by local public officials and representatives from the Greater Valley Chamber of Commerce.
Bill Purcell, the chamber’s executive director, said Shelton acts as the economic foundation for the lower Naugatuck Valley, but as the economy improves, industries are looking north to places like Seymour and Oxford.
Robert Scinto’s development of corporate office towers in Shelton led to an explosion in new businesses up and down Bridgeport Avenue.
The track record could repeat itself, as Scinto is courting tenants for his Fountain Lake project in Ansonia, a stone’s throw from the new Clean Harbors building.
“The development is moving up this corridor,” Purcell said.
Purcell said Clean Harbors is precisely the type of company a town wants. It launched in 1980 as a four-person tank cleaning business.
Today the company employees more than 13,000 people. Last year it spent $1 billion to buy Safety-Clean, a company that recycles engine oil and sells specialized cleaning products to the service parts industry.
First Selectman Kurt Miller, who went on a tour of the facility with Deputy First Selectwoman Nicole Klarides-Ditria and Economic Development Director Fred Messore, said Clean Harbors has already asked how they can pitch in to help the Seymour community.
“That’s what a true corporate citizen is about. The fact the corporation wants to work with the town it is in,” Miller said.
Miller said the town plans to talk about possibly moving some of the town’s emergency management equipment to the facility.
Aside from an influx of jobs, Seymour benefits from the renovated facility because the property’s value will (presumably) increase. In addition, the town can collect taxes on the equipment there, which includes (other than the machinery) $900 hazmat suits and $8,000 handheld devices that detect the presence of mercury in the air.
Click the video to watch Miller’s remarks.
