CIRS Mold Toxicity Treatment in Mantua, VA

Officials have not identified the person found dead inside a home after a destructive fire in Fairfax County the day after Christmas.

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FAIRFAX, Va. — Officials from the Fairfax County Fire Department have confirmed that a body was found inside a home after a destructive fire sparked a day after Christmas.

The fire was reported just before 6:45 p.m. at a home on Goodview Court in the Mantua area of Fairfax County, according to the fire department.

When crews arrived they saw the house was already engulfed in flames. The fire was extinguished around two hours later.

Fairfax County Fire reported one person was injured in the fire and a second person was originally unaccounted for.

On Tuesday, Fairfax County Battalion Chief Derrick Colden reported that a person was found dead inside the home. While the victim's family has been notified, Colden did not release any identifying information regarding the person found dead following the house fire.

More information will be available after a medical examination.

Police are on scene assisting the fire department, which Colden said is standard procedure any time a body is found.

There is no word on how the fire started at this time.

Colden took time during the press conference Monday to remind everyone to check their smoke detectors have working batteries. It is unknown at this time if that was a contributing factor to the destructive fire.

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WILLIAMSBURG — In a world dominated by fast fashion, Colonial Williamsburg is inviting guests to take a step back and experience the historic art of mantua making.

On Wednesday, mantua makers at the Millinery Shop are undertaking the task of making a full dress in a day for the Gown in a Day program. The work will start at 8 a.m. as the mantua makers cut, assemble and sew a new dress for Bray School teacher Ann Wager, portrayed by Nicole Brown.

The program began in 1993. The gown created during the event is just one of many produced over the course of a year, tradeswoman Rebecca Godzik said.

“It’s just a consolidation so that the visitors can actually see the whole process,” she said. “You don’t have to be here two or three or four days to see one gown take shape. It’s really consolidated work time and then removing somebody from that work team to be able to talk.”

According to Godzik, it takes one pair of hands doing nothing but focusing on one task for about 10 or 11 hours to finish a gown. That time includes all the planning and three fittings as the gown is fitted directly on the model’s body.

Beyond just making the gown — a full day’s work on its own — the team in the millinery shop will also educate visitors on the prevalence and importance of sewing in the daily lives of those in the 18th century.

“What I love about this program is there’s so many layers to it,” Brown said. “There’s so many layers of understanding, looking at how things are racialized, how they’re gendered. It’s really interesting.”

In the 18th century, sewing was a universal skill, taught to both young boys and young girls, usually in the home.

“Everybody can sew a button; everybody can mend a tear; everybody can put a patch on something,” Godzik said. “It’s like learning how to read, learning how to write, learning how to type today. It’s just your basic kind of life skills.”

However, that universality did not necessarily translate to the manufacturing of clothing. Godzik compared the difference between seaming, tailoring, millinery and mantua-making — all different fields and skills in the world of clothing manufacturing — to knowing how to hammer a nail versus knowing how to build a house versus knowing how to build furniture.

“There’s a gender-dominated division of labor within the clothing trades to the degree that most tailors are men. Most mantua makers are women; most milliners are women,” Godzik said. “But that’s not a hard and fast divide.”

At the Williamsburg Bray School, a school for Black children, the students’ education included sewing. Much of what they learned is called “sampler work,” an expression in a physical form representing a variety of different skills.

According to the National Museum of American History, samplers have become important representations of early American female education, helping to illuminate the lives of women in early America. Like any schoolwork, some students might have enjoyed it while others didn’t.

“One of my favorite samplers in the 1840s (is) from this young girl who basically stitches out her name, her age and (that) she hated doing every single stitch,” Brown said.

When Brown wears her new gown, she will be able to interpret the experience of it being produced for visitors that come to Colonial Williamsburg.

“I can step out of characters and talk about, ‘Hey, I think you need to go talk to these wonderful tradeswomen at the shop,'” she said.

“It gives (Brown) as an actor a cultural literacy that Ann Wager would’ve had,” Godzik agreed. “The cultural literacy of the process of the making but also the cultural literacy of the community. (It’s) somebody talking to you and saying, ‘What do you need? What can I do for you? How does this work for you? How do you want it to look?'”

As Brown said, seeing the process in action gives her a better understanding of how people in the 18th century were laboring over everyday necessities such as clothing.

With the resurgence of skills such as knitting, crocheting and embroidery since 2020, it’s been rewarding to see handcrafting increase in popularity again.

“Anything to bring it back and to increase visibility and knowledge that this is a really cool thing that people can do,” Godzik said.

Sian Wilkerson, 757-342-6616, sian.wilkerson@pilotonline.com

By Paul Kurtz

PHILADELPHIA (CBS) -- A local nonprofit group that provides repairs and improvements for low-income homeowners in Philadelphia was celebrating a milestone today.

More than 100 volunteers celebrated outside a modest, two-story rowhouse at 3852 Melon Street, the 100th house that "Rebuilding Together Philadelphia" (RTP) has repaired in the Mantua neighborhood over the past four years.

Delores Clark, 86, has lived there most of her life and says the house needed a lot of work.

"My god! They put in new pipes and a new wall," she recounted happily today. "The put a railing for seniors in my bathroom, and they took up all the old carpet that had been on the floor and put hardwood floors in. And they did a beautiful job."

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RTP renovates about 70 houses each year, and executive director Stefanie Seldin says all the grunt work is done by an army of volunteers.

"They really come out of the woodwork," she said today. "It's a wonderful project. We lucked out with a beautiful day. And people really do want to give back."

After Mantua, Seldin says, they'll move on to the area called "Eastern North," near Temple University.

"It's very interesting because there's a lot of development going on there," Seldin tells KYW Newsradio, "and we're really hoping to be able to allow long-term homeowners to remain in their homes and not feel the pressure to leave from gentrification."

RTP has renovated 1,300 homes across Philadelphia since it launched 27 years ago.

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Above, the Pickett Road tank farm in Fairfax City. The proposed school bus parking lot would be in the grassy area in the southeast, or lower right, corner of the property, just north of Fair City Mall.

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The words "Pickett Road tank farm" have a special resonance with folks who've lived around here since the early 1990s. That's when a massive underground gasoline spill was discovered in the Mantua neighborhood just east of Fairfax City, the result of hundreds of thousands of gallons of gas leaking into the ground over a period of many years from the vast petroleum storage field on Pickett Road at Colonial Avenue.

The media descended, a huge cleanup was launched, protests were staged, investigations were conducted, Congressional hearings were held, and the EPA began overseeing remediation — which continues to this day. It was called one of the largest underground leaks in the United States in years.

Worse, dozens of homeowners sold their houses in Mantua because of the gas beneath them, which over 22 years has slowly been pumped out or absorbed by the ground. Texaco, which took responsibility for the spill, bought those houses and its successor, Chevron, remains the largest property owner in Mantua.

The neighbors are freaked out, for obvious reasons. Renowned environmental disaster site. School buses chugging around in close proximity to fully loaded gasoline tankers. The sound of 50 buses churning to life at 6 a.m. every weekday morning, and doing their required daily back-up warning beep tests near a residential neighborhood.

But the City of Fairfax has done its homework, and it has been searching for years for a place to resettle this bus lot. They are assured by the experts that the site is uncontaminated, and never really received much of the underground plume, which instead extended about 2,000 feet east across Pickett Road and into Fairfax County. They think the buses and tankers will have enough space to maneuver. And they feel the neighborhood is far enough away, and screened by trees, that it won’t be affected.

Still, this chapter of the “Pickett Road tank farm” saga, circa 2012, continues to unfold. The details are after the jump.

A semi-complicated real estate history, and the opportunity to sell the current bus lot for a $4 million profit, gave Fairfax City the added urgency to find a new lot now. Neighbors say that shouldn’t matter.

“They’re in a bad position,” said Mark Tosti, a retired lawyer and member of the Comstock Neighborhood Association, who quickly whipped up a detailed 24-page petition opposing the tank farm lot. “But it’s pushing them into taking a cataclysmic position.”

City officials think this is a good, if unorthodox, site to lay the long search for a bus lot to rest. The city does not assume any legal responsibility for the ongoing cleanup of the gas leak or future spills, and will construct the parking lot carefully so that wells and pipes and trenches will continue to monitor the plume, City Manager Robert Sisson said.

And City Fire Marshal Andrew Wilson, who is extremely knowledgable about the tank farm’s operations and the two decades of remediation efforts, said, “As far as we know, there’s no contamination under that area,”and tests show there hasn’t been for years. Putting a 50-space parking lot there “is going to have no effect on the ongoing remediation,” Wilson said.

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The city tried and tried to relocate the buses at nearly a dozen different places. Then last year, a buyer for the lot offered the city $8 million. Now the city really wanted to relocate the buses. Last fall, it focused on the grassy, unused slice of the tank farm on its southern edge, behind Lifetime Fitness.

Motiva, the company that ownsthe site (but had nothing to do with the leakage), thought this was a terrible idea. Fairfax City threatened to use its powers of eminent domain to force a sale. Motiva, a joint venture of Shell Oil and Saudi Refining Inc., responded in April with a letter reminding the city that this was a federal cleanup site and “we believe that this location is a poor site for a bus parking lot for many reasons.”

Among those reasons were that “residual or non-mobile product [gasoline] remains in the subsurface,” the letter said. “Re-mobilization of this residual product might occur from a significant weather event, construction activities or a change in hydrogeology due to construction of the bus lot facility.” The letter cited numerous specific monitoring and recovery wells that would need to be preserved, along with the trench, various piping and stormwater management.

The city was undaunted. Then-mayor Rob Lederer, and soon-to-be Mayor Scott Silverthorne, met with Comstock Homeowners Association leaders in February. The association president, Sam Fisher, said he relayed the news to his association, and no one in his group raised any complaints.

But when it became clear that the city was going to cut the deal, other Comstock residents leapt into action, and testified against it at a July 24 city council meeting. Their concerns were acknowledged, but the council was ready to roll, and voted to pay $1.25 million for the 2.2 acres, plus allocate another $2.6 million for the costs of carefully building the lot.

Tosti raised the issue of whether the city, and then the county, would assume legal liability for spills or cleanup, that it could be drawn into the EPA consent order and “the financial distress of the remediation could be horrific.”

Sisson and Wilson said that wasn’t true. “The party who spilled is always the responsible party,” Wilson said, and Randy Chapman, overseeing the cleanup for Virginia’s Department of Environmental Quality, agreed.

Tosti pointed to the April letter, which said the bus lot ”will obstruct/interfere with” major portions of the monitoring and remediation. Sisson, in a letter to residents this week, said that since the letter was written, “the city has satisfied Motiva’s engineers and specialists” that the cleanup will be uninterrupted.

The homeowners also are concerned about the noise, particularly the buses starting up and testing their backup beepers at 6 a.m. Sisson said the lot will be 500 feet from the nearest residence, and, including a 100-foot turnaround area, it will be 600 feet from the buses to the closest Comstock townhouse.

Jane Campbell, another Comstock resident, said homeowners’ groups in Mantua, Pickett’s Reserve and Pine Ridge are joining their petition to the city council, asking them to reverse themselves. Tosti said he would be filing an amendment every week, raising more points of concern.

Fairfax City, meanwhile, is plunging ahead, hoping to use its profits from the Eleven Oaks deal to build the bus lot and be done with it. The neighbors have other hopes.

Here is a video that state Sen. Chap Petersen (D-Fairfax) made outside the tank farm last year calling for better safety regulations on the facility. Those regulations eventually passed and were signed into law.

Providence Community Center will be celebrating the final Food Truck Friday with games and music, a well as two local food trucks.

Michael O'Connell, Patch Staff

|Updated Thu, Aug 19, 2021 at 3:38 pm ET

FAIRAX, VA — As the summer winds down and families prepare for the start of the new school year on Monday, the Providence Community Center will be hosting its final Food Truck Friday this week.

Fairfax County Supervisor Dalia Palchik, whose office is located in the center, launched the weekly food truck event last month to highlight and support local businesses and food vendors.

To help celebrate the end of Food Truck Fridays, Tobago Bay Calypso Band will be performing from 11:30 a.m.-1:30 p.m. Visitors can also enjoy several family friendly games, as well as free ice pops, lemonade and cookies.

Palchik's office has also invited two vendors to park their trucks in the center's parking lot from 11 a.m.-2 p.m. on Friday. Empanadas de Mendoza, which specializes in Argentinian street food, and Hangry Panda

Chef Peter Tran described Hangry Panda's menu as a fusion between the different styles of food he learned how to make growing up.

Find out what's happening in Fairfax Citywith free, real-time updates from Patch.

His mother taught him how to cook Vietnamese food in their Woodbridge kitchen. When he got his first job as a hibachi chef in 2005, he learned all about Japanese cuisine.

"I always had a passion for cooking and I love to cook," Tran said. "Also, I have a desire to own my own business, be self employed, and work for myself. I have a lot of ideas. When I worked for somebody else, I can't really unleash and use those ideas to combine my tastes with food."

Owning and operating a food truck seemed like the perfect solution to satiate Tran's desires for sharing his cuisine with others and being a business owner.

"A truck allowed me to kind of be at different locations," he said. "Also, it allowed me to have a rotating menu and do different things. Trends are changing, people's tastes are changing and that's what really made me fall in love with a food truck over just normal brick and mortar."

Although the truck provided some freedom, it at also presented some big challenges, namely finding places to park.

"Before the pandemic, we able to go street vending in D.C., in Arlington, in downtown Alexandria," Tran said."But now, you can just pop up at a place, but nobody knows if you're out there on the street anymore."

The challenge now is to find events where Hangry Panda can set up. During the summer months, it's been easier. Tran was invited to park outside neighborhood gatherings, like he did in July at the Mantua Swim and Tennis Club in Fairfax.

"The best way for us to really get an event is if somebody reached out to us for like a birthday party, catering wedding or catering a bar mitzvah, some type of prepaid gig," he said.

Customers can book Hangry Panda on it website or Facebook page. They can also place a pre-order for Friday's event at the Providence Community Center on both trucks' websites.

"If somebody pre-ordered, it will allow us more time to prep everything properly and prepare the food properly for them so they don't have a long wait," Tran said.

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