Defenders of the historically Black community say that, rather than shrink, polluted groundwater keeps spreading.
By Ramon Lopez
Original Air Date: November 28, 2025
Host: Decades after a military contractor polluted the groundwater in a majority African-American community in Manatee County, the cleanup is slow to come. WSLR News reporter Ramon Lopez brings us Part 3 of his series on Tallevast.
Ramon Lopez: For over two decades now, three local women at tiny Tallevast have been battling mega defense contractor Lockheed Martin. Their goal? Keep the historically African-American community in South Manatee County from disappearing.
Photo by Ramon Lopez
Remaining residents there are living on 200 acres contaminated by a shuttered industrial plant now owned by the major U.S. defense contractor. The firm is responsible for cleaning up toxic chemicals in the soil and water wells, which include arsenic and dioxane.
The three women waging war with Lockheed Martin include Laura Ward and Wanda Washington, long-time African-American Tallevast residents. They head a non-profit called FOCUS—for Family-Oriented Community United Strong.
Supporting them is Jeanne Zokovitch Paben, a scrappy Sarasota environmental justice attorney, who is working to obtain relief for the remaining original affected homeowners and hold Lockheed Martin accountable.
Tallevast stretches across seven streets, just east of the Sarasota Bradenton Airport. Many of the 75 or so households still there are owned by descendants of the town’s original founding Black families.
American Beryllium Company in 1979. Photo via UF archive
The trouble there began in the late 1950s when a now-shuttered plant started churning out beryllium machine parts for nuclear warheads. Poor management of the company’s wastewater treatment system led to contamination of the surrounding area.
Lockheed Martin put in place a remedial action plan for groundwater cleanup that will take a whopping 50-100 years to complete. The firm must provide a report on the cleanup work each year. The Florida Department of Environmental Protection, or F-DEP, is overseeing the cleanup effort.
But the three activists say the contamination is spreading beyond the defense contractor’s cleanup ability and Lockheed Martin is resisting all direction from F-DEP.
Lockheed Martin issued a cleanup progress report in January of this year. It said all permit criteria were being met for capturing groundwater plume and removing contaminant mass.
Photo by Ramon Lopez
The report said, “Groundwater Plume Analytics Study data clearly shows that there have been significant and quantifiable reductions in plume areas and average concentration. Furthermore, this information shows that the groundwater treatment system operates as designed and captures all site plumes.”
The three Tallevast activists charge that the multi-billion dollar defense company is ignoring pleas from the townsfolk and, from day one, has left them in the dark, as regards the contamination level and cleanup efforts.
Ward and Washington say the original Tallevast can be preserved as a mixed-use community existing alongside new housing and some additional light industry.
Tallevast’s Amazon distribution center. Photo by Ramon Lopez
But they say Tallevast’s homeowners are being boxed in by new businesses.
Amazon has had a large distribution center there. United Natural Foods, Inc. (UNFI), one of the largest publicly-traded wholesale distributors of health food, in September opened a one million square foot distribution center there, employing 400 workers. 336 apartments will soon be built nearby. A plumbing company warehouse and showroom is in the works.
And they learned in October that an unidentified company seeks Manatee County approval to erect a new 240,000 square foot commercial building across the street from Amazon.
Tallevast’s UNFI distribution center
Wanda Washington told WSLR News that nobody is listening to their pleas.
Wanda Washington: We really need them to sit with our technical people. They’ve made suggestions that have gone nowhere how they could help clean this up and faster. FOCUS’s first position was: Just move the people. You can move the people and you can clean it up as you should, because we do believe some of the slowness of it is because they don’t want to have to compensate going on properties to do the proper things, so they’re going around and taking them all the way around it. If you relocate the people, that would have been the smart thing. It has taken so long now that people are trying to invest in where they are because they figure that’s their only option. That’s why we came up with, “Okay, let’s redevelop Tallevast.” And even that’s not going anywhere.
Somebody needs to listen to the community. I would think it would start local. This is no doing of ours, this contamination. Somebody needs to get us situated. That’s what we want. We want to be made whole. We want to be protected. We want to live as everybody else does. And nobody’s doing that. Nobody’s paying attention. “It’s done. It’s done, and it’s on you.” And it should not be. Government needs to step in and do something for the people in Tallevast. It’s not going away. The contamination is not going away, and even if it does, the effect is already there. Somebody needs to come in and do something for this community. Right now, we are already boxed in.
RL: Lockheed Martin’s latest FDEP-mandated contamination status and cleanup effort report was due out last month. The FOCUS folks will analyze it and then make their next move regarding the snail’s pace cleanup effort, which they say is going nowhere.
They are also considering what to do about the ongoing commercial creep, which they say threatens their historic Black community.
This is Ramon Lopez for WSLR News.
Read/listen to Part 1 and Part 2 of Ramon Lopez’s reports on Tallevast.
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