After years of trying to deal with a property contaminated with heaps of toxic carpet scraps, the town of Warren has been awarded $4 million from the U.S. Environmental Protection to help clean it up.
The award, which the town applied for in 2024, comes from a pot of $38 million in EPA Brownfields grants awarded to communities across Maine for brownfields assessment, cleanup and revolving loans.
Warren will use the funding to clean up the 71-acre former Steamship Navigation site at 2287 Camden Road (Route 90), which has been littered with 300,000 cubic yards of carpet since the late 1990s when Chester Randall Dunican and his wife Kathleen began dumping the material there to serve as berms for a proposed rifle range.
Much of the highly flammable carpet remains there, steadily leaking per- and polyfluoroalkyl compounds, or PFAS, into the topsoil. The mountains of mouse-fur scraps around the property would fill 90 Olympic-sized swimming pools.
Warren previously applied for a $2 million federal grant to clean up the property but did not receive the funding.
The current grant also will be used to support community engagement activities, according to the EPA.