Allegany Ballistics Lab:

A Look Into the Relationship Between Military Corporations and Communities

Keyser's cafe; Queen's Point Coffee, expressing its West Virginia pride with a mural of local legends and cryptids.

Introduction

The relationship between Allegany Ballistics Lab and the community of Keyser is long and complicated. While the lab has economically supported the area by providing jobs to its residents for over eight decades, it has also caused Keyser to experience a variety of long-term issues. Not only have several explosions taken place over the decades that have resulted in the loss of over a dozen workers' lives, but the soil, air, and water in the surrounding environment are damaged due to the petrochemicals and heavy metals that the site leaks into them. In this project, we explore how the Keyser community around Northrop Grumman understands and experiences pollution and risk coming from a superfund site. While some community members feel frustrated about the presence of the lab, its negative impact on the environment, or the choices its leadership makes about funding, others are unbothered by Allegany Ballistics Lab. Some even feel that its presence is an asset to the community of Keyser. This complicated dynamic is further inflamed by Northrop’s status as a military site. The leadership there maintains a strict veil of secrecy that makes gaining information about its inner workings difficult. Despite this barrier, we felt compelled to research the effect of this site on the tight-knit community of Keyser, and we worked to gather every available source to compile information on this complicated relationship.

Superfund Notice

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announces its plan to control pollution and environmental harm caused by Northrop Grumman's actions.

Photo Creds: Rocky Mountain News

Key Phrases and Terminology

Petrochemical: A chemical isolated or derived from petroleum or natural gas ("Petrochemical" 2026)

Products made from petrochemicals include such items as plastics, soaps and detergents, solvents, drugs, fertilizers, pesticides, explosives, synthetic fibres and rubbers, paints, epoxy resins, and flooring and insulating materials. Petrochemicals are found in products as diverse as aspirin, luggage, boats, automobiles, aircraft, polyester clothes, and recording discs and tapes (Britannica Editors, 2025)

Heavy Metals: A group of naturally occurring metallic elements of high molecular weight and density compared to water (Fisher and Gupta, 2024)

Fenceline Community: A community that "lives immediately adjacent to highly polluting facilities" and "is directly affected by the traffic, noise, operations, and most-concerningly, chemical and fossil fuel emissions of the operation" ("Frontline and Fenceline Communities")

Superfund: Common name given to the U.S. law called the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act of 1980, or CERCLA

Allows EPA to clean up contaminated sites and forces the parties responsible for the contamination to either perform cleanups or reimburse the government for EPA-led cleanup work
When there is no viable responsible party, Superfund gives EPA the funds and authority to clean up contaminated sites ("What Is Superfund?" 2025)

Military Industrial Complex: network of individuals and institutions involved in the production of weapons and military technologies (Weber, 2025)

Bird's Eye View of Northrup Grumman

Literature Review (Summary)

The purpose of this literature review is to identify the sources used in the project and connect them to three general themes that contribute to the overarching project topic. The literature review will help readers understand the selection of sources and further our main topic. Our research question is how the Keyser community around Northrop Grumman understands and experiences pollution and risk coming from the Superfund site. The topic will be divided into three central themes based on the literature: Economic Dependency, Environmental Justice and Community Response, and, lastly, Military Waste and Effects.

Economic Dependence in Appalachia started when coal was found and has created a cycle of dependency on the exploitative extraction of resources. This directly affects people in a community by polluting the air, water, and soil. Northrop Grumman has been polluting the people of Keyser, West Virginia, with Petrochemicals and Heavy Metals, which have leeched into everyday life. The Ballistics Lab is classified as a superfund site, which means “It allows EPA to clean up contaminated sites. It also forces the parties responsible for the contamination to either perform cleanups or reimburse the government for EPA-led cleanup work.” (Environmental Protection Agency, 2025).

Environmental Justice and Community Response addresses how the community responds to pollution and creates an equitable life for its residents. The topic category features community responses to pollution and how people respond to and interact with pollution, along with the company that causes it. Environmental pollution causes inequality in many aspects of life, from socio-economic status to physical health. Maura Stephens addresses 15 struggles for organizing social change groups in rural areas, five of which we use to try to explain the lack of activism in Keyser. Jerolmack and Walker also suggest that partisan beliefs may influence ideas about environmental risk. Another key idea for our research is Davies' idea of "slow violence," which draws from Rob Nixon's work. Slow violence is "a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all" (Davies 2018). We argue that Keyser's experience with pollution from the ABL site is an example of this type of violence.

Military Waste and its effects are the last category of the project, and it goes into depth about the impact that the military has on a community's health and well-being. Northrop Grumman is a Ballistics Laboratory that is contracted by the United States Navy and is located in Keyser, West Virginia. The sources cover a variety of topics, including the pollution that centers around military facilities, permanent war readiness, and analyzing toxic discharges in military sites.

Methods

We began our research by compiling peer-reviewed sources detailing the impact of petrochemical plants on surrounding communities. These sources ranged from discussions of the negative environmental impact of the military and military contractors to the economic dependence of towns on the military to environmental justice and community response. Each of these plays a key role in our understanding of how cities like Keyser operate, enabling us to conduct our field research and determine which questions to ask.

We found all of our primary sources through three methods: the first was a Facebook post calling for Keyser residents to share their stories and engage in conversation about their experiences with Northrop Grumman. The second was through Potomac State University, which provided contact information for several individuals we interviewed. The third was through online archives, which allowed us to research the site's history before it was Northrop Grumman. While on our initial research trip on March 30th, we conducted semi-structured interviews with several individuals who work and reside in the town of Keyser. They ranged from residents living in the housing there to university staff with working knowledge of the town’s history and environment.

One individual was Nicholas Gardener, the library director at Potomac State, who doubles as Keyser’s town historian. The purpose of this virtual interview was to learn more about Keyser, specifically how it has changed since Northrop Grumman's development. He also provided us with supplemental materials from the library that we could access digitally. We also interviewed a chemistry professor, Ajaya Sankara Warrier, at Potomac State College, who plans to conduct tests on local water sources as an activity for his newly created STEM Club. While he has not begun this testing, he believes that, based on his conversations with his students, the water sources in the area contain organic contaminants from human activities. He was hesitant to say anything about petrochemical pollution or the Laboratory with full certainty, but he did offer to inform us about the results of the water sampling once they are completed.

One last person we interviewed while on our initial research trip was one of the College's Financial directors, Dr. Megan Webb, who told us they hadn’t received any funding from Northrop Grumman. She told us about her frustrations with the lack of funding and with the company’s lack of interest in developing a relationship with them. One of our members reached out to Dr. Webb recently about their Day of Giving breakdown and was told that Northrop Grumman did not donate to them.

In addition to the interviews we conducted, we took various photographs around the site, including the road signs leading up to the Northrop Grumman facility. Many of which said “U.S. Government Reservation” or “Trespassers will be prosecuted.” The facility was not open to the public, so we were unable to photograph the site. In addition to the images from the facility, we took pictures of the town of Keyser, as well as several other buildings and road signs along the Potomac River. The digital archives allowed us to research information directly related to the site. We tried to find primary sources from several different newspapers and compare them to one another to gain a better understanding of the events.

We joined the Facebook group Eye on Keyser - A POSITIVE DIFFERENCE and created a post that stated: “Hello! I’m a student from WVU, and I’m doing a research project on Keyser, specifically the relationship between Allegany Ballistics Lab and the community! If y’all know anything and are willing to talk, please message me! Have a great day!!! This post received nine responses, ranging from serious to lighthearted. One person mentioned an explosion at the lab in 1961, and several suggested we speak with the people at the Allegany County Museum. We also had one person say, “Mostly TOP SECRET OPERATIONS.” We also referenced the Community Involvement Plan, which was released by the Naval Facilities Engineering Command Mid-Atlantic (NAVFAC) in April of 2025. It details the Environmental Restoration Program at ABL’s Plant 1 in Rocket City, WV, and how it would foster dialogue between the Navy and the communities surrounding ABL.

Allegany Ballistics Lab

Photo by Laci Gaidis

Danger Sign

Photo by Laci Gaidis

Economic Dependency

Northrop Grumman is the 5th-largest military contractor in the United States and regularly receives contracts from the Department of Defense to develop weapons for the Navy. They have several locations across the country and collectively are worth $81.71 billion. While ABL has been the largest employer in Mineral County since its creation in 1942, Northrop Grumman currently employs over 1,000 people locally and has added 500 more with its recent expansion this past year. Northrop Grumman’s latest expansion is due to the $178 million it received from the Department of Defense (DoD), which it used to add a new state-of-the-art building at ABL. This building is their new Missile Integration Facility, which was added to expand production capacity and enable them to deliver 300 strike missiles per year (Northrop Grumman 2025). The vice president of weapons systems at Northrop Grumman bragged, “...the latest shining example of how Northrop Grumman’s $1 billion-dollar-plus investment in advanced manufacturing facilities since 2018 ensures we’ve got the capacity needed to meet growing customer demand…” (Northrop Grumman 2025). With all this expansion and money being invested in the company, one would expect the surrounding communities to be flourishing as well.

Despite Keyser’s proximity to the highly successful Northrop Grumman, it is clear that Keyser itself is not an affluent area. One notable aspect of Keyser is its poor infrastructure. Almost every building in town has visible damage. Faded paint, crumbling walls, graffiti, and piles of rubble greet visitors everywhere they look. A parking lot filled with heaping piles of stones and rusted metal from what appeared to be a destroyed building sits next to a mural honoring the work of JR Rollins. Many small businesses line the streets, from a pet store to a hairdresser, to small boutiques and shops. Contrary to the hours displayed on their storefronts, many of them do not maintain predictable hours. Keyser’s poor maintenance only becomes clearer when compared to the more affluent area in closer proximity to Northrop Grumman.

This even appears in census data, with most cities surrounding ABL in Allegany County having higher median household incomes and lower poverty rates. The data collected suggest that towns or cities more than 3.3 miles from ABL have lower median household incomes and higher poverty rates. This data doesn’t include towns from Mineral County surrounding ABL due to their lack of available data. The only data available within Mineral County that were within a 15-mile radius for examination were Keyser and Fort Ashby, WV. In total, Mineral County has a population of 26,854 and a median household income of $69,375, roughly $20,000 more than the average in Keyser. The poverty rate is also lower at 14%, which is 17.8% lower than Keysers' at 31.8%. This calls back to what anthropologist Catherine Lutz discussed when analyzing the financial impact Fort Bragg had on Fayetteville, NC. Fayetteville has a population of 209,485, with most residents employed at the Fort. Their median household income is $54,562, and their poverty rate is 18.2%, which is typical for the area since it is heavily military-occupied.

Keyser's issues stem not only from a lack of economic equality but also from unequal educational funding. Northrop Grumman has had a long-standing partnership with Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh, PA. They even created an accelerated master's program in 2019 to help the school grow its pipeline. Many engineering students at Carnegie Mellon end up working for Northrop Grumman due to the funding of school programs and scholarships. Northrop Grumman created a scholarship for high schoolers entering engineering fields, which provides $10,000 each year as long as they keep their grades up and come work for them after they graduate. While they fund Carnegie Mellon, they don’t fund the schools closest to them, such as West Virginia University in Morgantown, WV, and Potomac State College in Keyser, WV. Both schools place a strong emphasis on STEM fields and meet all the criteria that Northrop Grumman lists on its website for eligibility for funding. This criterion mainly centers on tax-exempt schools that emphasize STEM education with an engineering focus. Both WVU and Potomac State College meet these requirements.

Dr. Megan Webb, Director of Development at Potomac State College, was very willing to share her frustrations over the matter. She stated, “I want to create a pipeline from our school to their company.” She discussed how she wished they had received funding because their science building is in disrepair and lacks equipment. She also reviewed Potomac State’s donor list from the most recent Day of Giving, an annual event hosted by the school to raise funds for student scholarships and academic programming. She noticed that Northrop Grumman was not on this list, which only compounded her frustration.

The economic disparity in Keyser, WV, is correlated with ABL, as evidenced by census data, the city's condition, and interviews. Most residents of Keyser have lived there for over 15 years (Community Involvement Plan, 2025) and have made the best of their circumstances. The financial situation Keyser is in is not due to their choices or lack of care; it is due to a system that prioritizes profit over the well-being of their communities. Sadly, because ABL has been an integral part of the city for so long, the residents of Keyser have simply gotten used to being financially left out. However, they do have a strong community where kindness and compassion seem to prevail over the economic injustice they face.

Chart of Economic Data

Community Involvement

Community reactions to toxic pollution vary widely, but according to our observations in the town, the people of Keyser do not seem to engage in widespread mobilization against the Laboratory. In fact, despite the area's history of environmental damage, the people of Keyser do not seem concerned about the Allegany Ballistics Laboratory site at all. Based on our observations, five challenges to organizing in rural communities introduced by Maura Stephens (2016) may help to explain the lack of community activism in Keyser. These are growing poverty, shrinking funding of human services, environmental degradation from infrastructure and heavy industries, residents who believe they will benefit, and public passivity due to inadequate education, lack of civic engagement, or an unwillingness to “rock the boat.” Jerolmack and Walker’s (2018) suggestion that partisan identities can influence ideas about environmental risk may also be significant. Importantly, we want to emphasize that there is not a singular reason that can give an explanation, but rather a complex mix of internal and external factors that contribute to inaction.

Growing Poverty and Shrinking Funding for Human Services

Economic disparities can leave citizens feeling stuck, anxious, and/or helpless
- Keyser: $46,955 median household income with 31.8% poverty rate (Fig. 1)
  - Decreased $10,390 from 2020 Census (Canfield, 2026)
- West Virginia: $60,798 median household income with 16.7% poverty rate (U.S. Census Bureau)

Funding cuts to human services leave struggling citizens behind (Stephens, 2016)
Worries about everyday expenses (groceries, rent, car payments, etc.) overtake "distant" environmental worries, especially when the pollution is not largely noticeable, such as in the case of Keyser.

Environmental Degradation

Keyser has a history of extractive industry (Swick-Cruse, 2024)
- Earliest known industries were iron- and salt-making
- Town is named for a Baltimore & Ohio Railroad official, William Keyser
"Slow Violence" (Davies, 2018)
- Many buildings in Keyser had some type of visible damage
Both industry and government sources have contributed to the violence

Hopeful Residents

Majority of resident respondents to the Community Involvement Plan Survey (2025) claim to be fairly to completely confident in the Navy's ability to address environmental dangers at ABL
Many people we spoke to on our visit said they know former and current employees
- One of the largest employers in Mineral County
Potomac State College Director of Development Dr. Megan Webb would like to create a pipeline between the school and ABL

Public Passivity

Mostly due to lack of information in Keyser
- Most of the people we asked about the pollution could not tell us anything beyond their status as a top employer
- Site is contracted by the U.S. Navy, meaning certain information is extremely hard to find
- "I was not aware of the existence of environmental restoration efforts at ABL... so there must not have been much concerted effort at reaching out to the local communities by ABL; I don't remember receiving any info from my counterpar[t(s)] at the Allegany County, MD... as well." -respondent from Community Involvement Plan Survey, 2018; emphasis in original

Partisan Identities

Mineral County leans more conservative politically
- April 2026: out of 19,507 total voters, 11,144 are registered as Republican Party voters (Voter Registration Totals, 2026)
Certain aspects of conservative identities- a devotion to self-reliance and property rights, respect for the military, and the perception of activists as "liberal outsiders," for example- can lead to residents showing support for potentially risky industries (Jerolmack and Walker, 2018)

While we are suggesting that these factors may have something to do with the lack of visible mobilization in Keyser, we want to emphasize that our research does not even begin to delve into the myriad of socioeconomic factors that contribute to the decision to mobilize or to not mobilize. The research that we have completed should be used as a stepping stone for further investigation in the future.

Train Tracks Cutting Through Keyser

Conclusion

Northrop Grumman's Ballistic Laboratory in Keyser, West Virginia, is impacting local communities. They are polluting the American people while creating warheads for conflicts abroad. Runoff of petrochemicals and heavy metals is not getting treated safely and is ending up in Keyser's water supply. The United States Military is often omitted from Environmental Justice cases, which could lead to increased pollution in the future if these companies don’t take necessary precautions, and could harm the people of Keyser in the process.

Economic dependence creates a reliance on companies that don’t care about the well-being of the people in the community or their workers, and further their influence on a site by sponsoring community events. The loyalty that arises from dependence on these companies makes it difficult for people to acknowledge their wrongdoing. In this case, Keyser is suffering from slow violence and is being polluted through the air, soil, and water while still being financially supported by the company. The exploitative nature of the relationship between the community and Northrop Grumman causes a cycle of structural poverty through economic trade-offs and the erosion of social welfare (Lutz, 2007).

The community is not completely oblivious to the signs of exploitation, as they have historically been a major part of the coal network in West Virginia and have suffered immensely. They have also taken their own action to combat slow violence and advocate for their community by keeping a record of local actions and pollution data.

In conclusion, Keyser, West Virginia, is at the forefront of a plethora of modern-day problems, from Military spending on international conflicts, economic dependency on corporations, and how the community handles these conflicts and challenges. Northrop Grumman, while it provides the most jobs out of any company in Keyser, is slowly polluting the air, soil, and water of the people. How much will they accept and bear?

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