BANGOR DAILY NEWS • December 31, 2021
Residents in Warren have resisted foreclosing on an abandoned rifle range in fear that taking over the property would make the town liable for cleaning up nearly 27,000 tons of carpet-like material that was left on the site. But with the latest effort by the Maine Department of Environmental Protection to remove the material set to expire at the end of the year with little to show for it, residents are losing faith that the state agency will be successful in cleaning up even part of the site. The mountains of carpet-like material arrived around 1998, when the DEP allowed the rifle range owner to bring in the materials from Auburn. Steamship Navigation claimed it was going to use the material as berms to stop bullets from leaving the property. But the berm project was never completed, and soon after the materials arrived, the property owners seemingly disappeared.