Source: https://www.stargazette.com, December 19, 2018
By: Tom Wilber

Elmira High School is one of 1,290 active and 220 potential toxic legacy sites statewide, according to an analysis of state records by the Elmira Star-Gazette.

Some, like the former IBM site in Endicott now owned by i3 Electronics, are still working factories. Others, such as the Morse Industrial area in Ithaca, are abandoned or mostly abandoned.

The largest, by area, is the Seneca Army Depot. The former munitions storage and disposal facility covering 10,600 acres in Seneca County is polluted with an array of hazards ranging from industrial solvents to radioactive waste, the extent of which is still being uncovered.

These sites might be classified as “brownfields” — targeted for use by a private owner, or state Superfund — most of which are orphaned and left as a taxpayer problem. Some are also designated as a “national priority” on the federal Environmental Protection Agency’s Superfund list, which means the urgency of the problem warrants federal funding.

What most share in common: industrial pollution spilled, leaked or dumped that tends to be hard to remove and hard to isolate.

PCBs, for example, can be spread by windblown dust and sediments in water. Industrial solvents, like TCE, can poison aquifers and create toxic vapors that move through the ground and drift into basements through a process called vapor intrusion.

Reliable records of exactly what or how much was spilled or dumped are generally scarce. Cleanups often span generations, and questions almost always linger.

In Rochester, administrators of Rochester Prep High School decided to vacate a building they leased at 690 St. Paul St. last year amid sustained student protests over concerns of toxic chemicals left at the former Bausch and Lomb manufacturing site.

As with the Elmira school, state health officials have assured the building is safe after a system was installed under the foundation to prevent TCE and other hazardous chemicals from infiltrating.

But the cleanup is not complete, and sampling shows “off-site vapor intrusion is a potential exposure pathway that warrants additional investigation,” according to records from the state Department of Environmental Conservation.

In Niagara County, the legacy of Occidental Chemical Co.’s disposal practices have left many lasting impacts. The most notorious is Love Canal — the neighborhood built over a 70-acre toxic dump, and later evacuated and condemned.

Today, the chemicals at Love Canal remain entombed in the ground, covered with an impermeable liner, and surrounded by monitoring wells and systems to collect runoff. Although some nearby streets have been reoccupied, the small working-class homes and school at ground zero have long been demolished, and the area remains fenced off.

And that’s the way it will stay: State and federal governments have declared the Love Canal cleanup complete.

At the other end of the state, General Electric is winding down a cleanup of PCBs in the Hudson River first detected in the late 1970s. The federal Environmental Protection Agency determined that waste was dumped from two of the company’s capacitor manufacturing plants and spread along 40 miles of the river.

After years of study and litigation, the company dredged 2.7 million cubic yards of sediments along 40 miles of the river between 2009 and 2015. Testing and monitoring of the sites is expected to last at least another generation.

In notorious company with both Love Canal on the western end of the state and the Hudson River cleanup on the east sits Onondaga Lake, more or less in the center.

Once the pride of indigenous peoples and location of the council fires for the famed Iroquois Nation, the lake was critically polluted by mercury, PCBs and a multitude of other waste dumped by Allied Chemical throughout the mid-20th century.

Honeywell, Allied Chemical’s successor, dredged 2.2 million cubic yards of lake bottom in 2014, although the pollution ran far deeper. In a plan to prevent it from bubbling to the surface, approved by the federal EPA, the company capped 475 acres, leaving close to 10 million cubic yards of contaminated sediment buried under the lakebed.

Similarly, a toxic waste site on the western shore — deemed too expensive to excavate — will instead be covered over with dirt and asphalt, according to a cleanup plan recently released by the state Department of Environmental Conservation.

Leaving the bulk of hazards entombed in the ground falls well short of making things right, according to environmental advocates.

“Superfund is supposed to be a removal program, not a capping program,” said Judith Enck, former EPA Region 2 administrator under President Barack Obama. “Polluters advocate for capping for one simple reason: It is cheaper than removal.”

With too few Superfund dollars to go around, the EPA “has to negotiate to get as much as it can, because it has so little financial leverage,” added Enck, now a senior fellow at Bennington College.

Love Canal, the Hudson River and Onondaga Lake are counted among the state’s most dire environmental warnings. Costs of cleaning these three iconic legacy sites alone reportedly exceeds $2 billion, and that doesn’t factor in health impacts, litigation, and a generation of economic and environmental losses tied to each site.

The scale of pollution is epic but not unprecedented. Many less famous catastrophes in New York state pose severe and lasting threats, costing taxpayers and private industry billions in cleanup, and health risks that defy a price tag.

Hundreds of municipal drinking supplies serving millions of New Yorkers have fallen victim to ravages of unchecked 20th-century industry. Today, these remain offline or fitted with special “air strippers” to purge contaminates. They include more than a dozen municipal wells in the Southern Tier, stretching from Johnson City to Olean.

The Kentucky Avenue Wellfield Area, covering 7,680 acres in Chemung County, has the dubious distinction of being, by area, the third-largest active hazardous waste site in the state. It was taken offline in the 1980s, and the aquifer remains poisoned to this day by TCE and other hazards.

For more than 30 years, the EPA has been working on plans to restore the Kentucky Avenue aquifer by treating groundwater at an old Westinghouse site that appears to be the source of contamination.