Waretown Wawa Teardown

I was driving north on Route 9 yesterday in Waretown when I saw a cloud of dust up ahead. As I approached the traffic light at Wells Mills Road, I saw that the cloud was rising from what was the Wawa Market as an orange excavator smashed down repeatedly on its roof tearing big chunks of the building away.

In happier days

Now, this was never my favorite Wawa. It was on an oddly shaped plot, it was hard to get into (a tough left turn off 9) and harder to get out of (an impossible left turn onto Wells Mills) and it was shabby inside, but, it was a Wawa, and if you didn't stop at the one at Barnegat, you had to drive all the way up to Lacey for the next one (like a whole 3 miles).  Because the land it was standing on was small and of an indescribable geometric shape, there is no room to rebuild it as a "Super Wawa" (i.e. "gas station"), so there is one less Wawa in the world.

It's been a bad month for Wawas: my local one in Whiting has been closed down for renovation since Oct 22 (not to reopen until the 22nd of this month), which has meant no end of inconvenience for me and my brother & I fear that with the alterations made to the exterior of the building, plus new lighting it will cease to be a mothing hot spot. The equivalent of a nice patch of birding habitat getting mowed down, except that it really isn't ideal for moths to cling to the surface of a building out in the open--easy pickings for predators, not to mention "hunters." We really won't know until spring what the change means for lepidoptera in Whiting until the spring. Not many winter moths around.