New Life For Formerly Contaminated Windsor Locks Industrial Property

Five years ago, the property at 800 Old County Circle in Windsor Locks had been left, possibly to rot with barrels of chemicals still sitting on the site.

The barrels’ content, hazardous liquids, were left sitting unprotected from the elements, in some cases, while other vats of chemicals used in the tool manufacturing process were left unsecured.

Today, the property at then end of the industrial cul-de-sac just off a main road to Bradley International Airport is changing. A new aerospace component manufacturing business is relocating to the site. The hazardous materials have been removed from the property, save for some oil soaked soil that will be remediated shortly.

And the man accused of abandoning the contaminated property that it cost nearly $600,000 to cleanup was arrested earlier this month and charged for violating several state and federal environmental laws, in addition to failing to pay his former employees more than $15,850 in back wages.

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This summer, the single-story brick and clapboard-sided manufacturing building will have a new life when it becomes the home of Spectrum Machine and Design, LLC, and company owner Gary Poesnecker is anxious to bring his business, now located in Glastonbury, to Windsor Locks.

“We hope to be a good neighbor,” Poesnecker said Monday afternoon.

When Spectrum Machine and Design purchased the property in December 2011, the state and federal environmental agencies, and their respective contractors, had already removed much of the contaminated materials that had been discovered on the property, home to the former location of the Bennington Tool company.

In April 2008, nearly one year after Bennington Tool, Inc., closed, environmental officials were summoned to the abandoned facility for reports that dozens of barrels had been left to rot in the parking lot and that dozens of others inside the factory were leaking waste, including cyanide, chromium that exceeded safety levels and oil that was considered to be ignitable, according to court records.

In total, environmental contractors removed about 150 barrels of chemicals from the property, according to a warrant for Donald Cunningham’s arrest signed May 16.

It took a about six months for the remediation to be completed and cost $600,000 to clean the Windsor Locks property, and another site at 116 Broad Brook Rd. in Enfield where Cunningham had operated a secondary business called Heat Treat.  

On June 7, five years after he closed Bennington Tool, Cunningham, who is formerly of Middletown and who had moved with his wife to a small town in New Brunswick, Canada, was arrested at a Maine border crossing. Cunningham is being held on $350,000 in bonds at the MacDougall-Walker Correctional Institution in Suffield. He is scheduled to appear next in Enfield Superior Court on July 2.

On Monday, Poesnecker said that the property’s history was already in the past when his firm purchased the site in December 2011. Poesnecker said he considers the site as an opportunity to expand his business, which has outgrown the Glastonbury facility where it has been located for 12 years.

With the minor environmental cleanup soon to be being and the refurbishment of the building underway, Poesnecker said he hopes to be fully relocate his complex parts and tooling business to Windsor Locks in July.