Durez / Occidental Chemical

Harry M. Dent founded General Plastics, Inc. on the North Tonawanda property in 1921. The business adopted the Durez Plastic and Chemical Company name in 1926 and developed into a major producer of phenolic resins and molding compounds.

Phenol and formaldehyde were the principal raw materials for thermosetting resins and molding powders used in electrical, automotive, appliance, communications, and industrial components. The Durez name became closely associated with durable molded phenolic plastic before newer polymer families displaced many of those applications.

Durez joined Hooker Chemical in the mid-1950s and became part of Occidental when Occidental acquired Hooker in 1968. Occidental gradually reduced operations during the late 1980s and early 1990s; manufacturing ended in 1995 and plant demolition was completed in December 1997.

The environmental record is divided among the former plant, buried or spilled material, groundwater, the Pettit Cove Flume, Pettit Cove, and Niagara River sediment. Treating all of those areas as one uniform deposit would obscure both the history and remedy.

Pettit Creek was converted into a covered storm-drain system before the mature Durez era. Historical newspaper images preserved by North Tonawanda History record basement explosions associated with gas in the flume in 1949 and a fish kill involving hundreds of fish in 1953. These accounts establish what people observed and what local reporting said at the time; later sampling provides the evidence for particular contaminants and sources.