Indianapolis’s largest brownfield site will experience a second life when a city-based manufacturing firm builds its new 150,000 square-foot building on the property. Major Tool and Machine recently purchased the former home of Ertel Manufacturing Corp., which produced auto parts for over 80 years.

It was abandoned in 2002 after its last occupant, the Dynagear Corp, shut down valve production and moved out of the city.

The building is part of a $20 million expansion that promises to bring over 50 new jobs to the area. Major Tool and Machine has been awarded a contract to manufacture steel centrifuge casings for the United States Enrichment Corporation’s new American Centrifuge Plant in Piketon, Ohio.

Quality Environmental Professionals Inc. (Qepi) won the contract to remediate the five-acre site earlier this year and began the process in late August. Karla McDonald, vice president of the woman-owned firm, says the project was completed in record time, several weeks before Major Tool and Machine was scheduled to begin construction.

“We were pulling 130 to 140 trucks of material out a day, seven days a week,” says McDonald, who credits Indianapolis Brownfield Coordinator Chris Harrell for his assistance in coordinating the project.

“Because of the funding timetable with the city, we had to work quickly.”

Before Ertel Manufacturing Corp. took over the site in 1917, it served as headquarters for the Atlas Engine Works. Both companies were major employers in the surrounding community for over a century. Cleanup efforts uncovered a host of contaminants ranging from solvents and petroleum products to lead and asbestos. It was rumored that there were Civil War cannonballs buried underground, though none were found.

The project was funded by several government entities, including U.S. EPA Region V, which contributed $600,000 for contamination removal and disposal, and the Indianapolis Department of Metropolitan Development (DMD), which supplied $1.4 million in demolition fees, $260,000 for investigation activities and an additional $1.5 million for soil remediation services. The Indiana Finance Authority assisted the project with extra funding from a petroleum grant.

Indianapolis Mayor Bart Peterson praised the efforts of city, state and federal employees who helped with the fast-paced cleanup, adding that the site has been a long-standing problem for residents in the surrounding Martindale-Brightwood neighborhood in terms of redevelopment, contributing to various environmental problems.

“To couple this significant environmental accomplishment with a major expansion of a home-grown business is a huge victory to the city of Indianapolis,” said Peterson at a recent press conference. “We are so pleased that Major Tool and Machine is expanding its operations and is turning a once-blighted, abandoned piece of property into a place where people earning a good wage are producing precision-made products that are shipped worldwide.”