Industrial Park

When the Montieth brothers started their sheet-metal industry in 1967, it operated out of a two-car garage in Stratford. Since then, P&M Industries Inc. has grown to a 75-employee company converting thousands of pounds of steel and other materials into employable forms, from vending machine coin boxes to power outlet strips. Last week, the company announced plans for further expansion, breaking ground on a 25,000-square-foot factory addition. P&M is one of several companies in West Deptford that seems to have withstood the effects of the economic downturn, expanding at a time that has forced companies elsewhere to freeze growth plans and lay off workers.

PAULSBORO ? A proposal recently released by the borough would turn a contaminated 130-acre parcel into a $92 million, money-making site for one of the poorest municipalities in the state. Under the plan by URS Corp. of San Francisco, the former site of the BP Exploration & Oil Inc. plant would become an industrial park, retail establishments and port area. A ribbon of trees and bushes would provide a buffer between the site and the surrounding neighborhood. An additional 60 acres of adjacent land, owned by Dow Chemical, are included in the proposal.

For a time in the 1990s, the Fort Washington Office Center was a forgotten place. The former industrial park, one of the first in the nation's suburbs when it was built in the 1950s, was rundown and obsolete, a victim of a slump in the commercial real estate market, a stagnant economy, and the resulting flight of industry from the park. But in recent years, the center has undergone a makeover. On a mission to reinvent itself, the Montgomery County complex is striving to make its veteran status an asset, not a liability.

Nearly $1 million in computer chips has been stolen since November from two technology companies at the Pureland Industrial Park, and local police and the FBI have linked the thefts to resellers in Delaware and New York. In early November, Custom Edge, a subsidiary of the Compaq Computer Corp., reported to Logan police the theft of $661,000 in computer chips and other hardware. A few weeks later, Tech Data, which sells computer parts and servers to resellers, reported a theft of $198,000 worth of merchandise.

Officials at USX Realty said yesterday they had signed a deal with an undisclosed developer to build a 500-megawatt gas-fired power plant here. "It's a community service, if you will, and it's nice for us because we will derive some lease income," said Dennis McCartney, USX Realty general manager. "It will mean jobs, but not thousands. It's good for the industrial park, good for the community, it's good for them and good for the area. This is the place where it belongs. " The place is 25 acres of USX's former steel-production plant, now an industrial park.

It is the quick route out of town that has attracted businesses to the William C. Haines Industrial Center on Route 130. With no municipal tax incentives to offer and no completed buildings to display, developers depended on a new turnpike interchange and plans to revitalize a depressed highway corridor to lure tenants to this 700-acre industrial park in northern Burlington County. "If somebody wants to be at our site, they really want to be there," said Richard J. Cureton, executive vice president of Whitesell Construction Co., the Delran company that owns the land straddling the border of Florence and Burlington Townships.

The developer of the site of the former Mercury Gun Club said yesterday that he planned to go ahead with construction of a light-industrial park there soon, possibly this summer. The move follows a vote by the Board of Commissioners Tuesday night to reject his preferred option, to build 235 townhouses on part of the land. The commissioners voted unanimously against the request for a change to residential zoning. Neighbors said in a hearing before the vote that they feared additional homes would bring more traffic and children, meaning an increase in school taxes.

A chemical spill and the fear of an explosion prompted police to evacuate about 200 people from a half-dozen businesses near Route 541 and Elbow Lane yesterday. "We evacuated all businesses downwind from the spill," Police Lt. Tim Richardson said. Dave Boyer, a driver for the Safety-Kleen Corp., had just made a delivery to the company facility on Connecticut Drive, off Elbow Lane, when he smelled something leaking from one of sixteen 4 1/2-gallon drums of hydrofluoric acid in his 48-foot tractor-trailer.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency officially announced yesterday that it plans to clean up 300 acres of heavily polluted industrial and park land along the Lower Darby Creek under the federal Superfund law. The two-mile stretch is one of the largest and most complicated of the 114 Superfund sites in Pennsylvania, and government scientists estimate that it could be years before they even figure out how to remove the toxins. "This problem has not created itself overnight," said Bradley Campbell, administrator for the EPA's mid-Atlantic regional office.

When they say "life is a work in progress," they probably are thinking about J. Seward Johnson Jr., the noted realist sculptor and millionaire. Once a sculpture is set in bronze, usually, it is finished. But not to Johnson. Johnson fiddles with the work's environment. Eight years ago, he set up Grounds for Sculpture - a lushly landscaped sculpture park housing 130 large pieces of his own and of others - near an industrial park outside Trenton. A fine setting, but not quite enough of a destination, even with free admission.