Talks on a long-term lease for the Caneel Bay Resort at Virgin Islands National Park are on hold while the National Park Service evaluates the extent of environmental wastes at the resort/Carolyn Sugg via Flickr.

Hazardous wastes dotting the Caneel Bay Resort at Virgin Islands National Park have halted negotiations regarding the resort's future while the National Park Service focuses on cleanup and further testing. 

Earlier this year environmental testing detected a variety of wastes, some hazardous to humans, on not quite eight acres of the grounds of the once-tony resort. That testing found varying levels of arsenic, elevated levels of certain pesticides, and a "mixture of benign organic materials, plastics, metals, and CERCLA (Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act) hazardous substances, including the pesticide DDT and polychlorinated biphenyls."

Under the preferred alternative cited by a report detailing the findings, thousands of cubic yards of soils would be removed, down to bedrock in some instances. Any hazardous wastes would have to be taken to the continental United States for disposal at an accredited hazardous waste disposal site. Thousands of yards of clean soil also would have to be brought to the site to restore natural conditions, which would be aided through the planting of native vegetation, the report said.

Currently, the Park Service through July 24 is taking public comment on the report and plans to clean up the wastes, Virgin Islands Superintendent Nigel Fields told the Traveler last week during a phone call.

"I expect the final document to become available to the public by the end of August. After that, based upon the recommendations within the report and taking into consideration (public comments), the agency is expected to release its action memorandum on the cleanup that's needed in the areas that we saw significant concerns," the park superintendent said. 

Along with devising a cleanup plan for those wastes, there are other areas of the 150-acre resort's grounds that the Park Service wants to test for more wastes.

"I'm hoping that we can lock in a date within November to do another round of testing very similar to what we did back in February, but to collect some of the information that we weren't able to collect previously," Fields said. "We'll release the results to the public in the spring, and then hopefully have that wrapped up also as early as possible next summer. So that way, we will finalize all the environment investigations at Caneel.

"We'll have a sense of how much contamination is there, and we'll have an action memorandum at that point next summer as well that details what the cleanup will need to be. So in total, we'll know how much it costs and what we can expect for a full cleanup of the resort."

The 100+-page environmental report issued in February traced much of the history of Caneel Bay Resort, going back to 1938 when the West Indies Company "built seven small rental cottages on the former sugar plantation; the resort had been developed with a small hotel and eight rental cottages by 1952, when the owner at that time, Rhode Island Charities Trust, sold the property to Laurance Rockefeller."

The bulk of the resort for all practical purposes isn't operational at this point, as no substantive repairs to the accommodations have been made since hurricanes Irma and Maria struck St. John in 2017 and flattened many of the facilities. However, Zozo’s, a fine-dining restaurant, and Bikinis on the Beach, a small bar and grill, have resumed operations, the report noted.

Among the areas surveyed during the most recent environmental testing was an area used for decades as a landfill to hold "all types of wastes from the resort, including sewage sludge."

Fields, who spent 15 years working for the Environmental Protection Agency as an environmental epidemiologist before coming to the Park Service, said the wastes detected by February's testing "pose potential hazards to human health and to the environment and are within the realm of the habits that we find within CERCLA. CERCLA, generally speaking, is the Superfund law. But (the wastes detected at Caneel Bay ) don't meet the kind of the criteria of like the National Priorities List, which most people think of as those major toxic sites where you have to" remove residents from areas while cleanup is conducted.

"We don't have that type of situation here where there's a national level of urgency. But it still qualifies for a CERCLA cleanup process," he continued. "And the contaminants that we see are largely legacy contaminants, like the chlordane, the DDT. These are things that are now banned, of course, but still persistent chemicals. They persist in the environment for a long time, which is part of the reason why they were banned. So part of this is cleaning up some practices that may have been legal at the time, perhaps, or maybe just continued to be used illegally. We don't know."

The testing, and the forthcoming cleanup, have put on hold talks with CBI Acquisitions to reach agreement on an operations lease to the resort that could take effect in the fourth quarter of 2023. The company has operated Caneel Bay Resort since 2004 under a Retained Use Estate agreement, or RUE, that the late Laurence S. Rockefeller dictated back in 1983. Under Rockefeller's wishes, the resort was to revert entirely to the Park Service in September 2023.

In 2010 Congress passed a law directing the National Park Service to pursue a more typical concessions lease for the resort once the RUE lapsed. That law also allowed the Park Service to acquire property at and near Caneel Bay that was outside the RUE.

Back in 2019 CBI's principal, Gary Engle, told the Interior Department he would walk away from the resort in return for $70 million and an assurance that the company would be held harmless for any environmental contamination on the grounds. But he also said that CBI controls the marina on the bay that services the resort, and so any future operator would have to negotiate a deal to use it.

While Interior rejected Engle's proposal, it remains to be seen how much it costs to clean up the wastes at the resort, and whether the Park Service and CBI can reach agreement on a long-term lease.

"We can't even get a sense of what the lease would be worth until we know we have a cleaned-up site," said Fields. "There's not much for us to discuss without us being able to have evaluation of the property."