Source: http://www.timesunion.com, January 13, 2016
By: Brian Nearing

Ex-Al Tech site needs more pollution cleanup now at public expense

More than 15 years after announcing a “comprehensive” pollution cleanup plan at the sprawling former Al Tech Specialty Steel plant, the state has found more pollution, including toxic PCBs, than was first believed.
And a multimillion-dollar cleanup fund set up by plant owners in 1999 — which DEC officials at the time expected would keep the project from burdening taxpayers — was emptied in 2013. As a result, the state is back on the hook for future cleanup bills.
This month, the state Department of Environmental Conservation moved to include the entire 112-acre plant in the state Superfund pollution cleanup program, up from 31 acres covered under Superfund since 1983.
On Wednesday, the DEC press office released a statement in response to questions from the Times Union. It included: “An estimate for the cleanup cost will be developed over the coming year as the remedial investigations and feasibility studies are completed, and the project will be funded through the State Superfund program.”
DEC moved to expand Superfund coverage of Al Tech, located at Spring Street Road and Lincoln Avenue, after testing of 68 acres begun in 2014 found extensive additional pollution, including:
Unsafe levels of lead in the Kromma Kill, a stream that feeds the Hudson River.
Toxic PCBs in the “soil, fill and groundwater” at the south end of the property. The extent, boundaries and potential spread of the PCBs remain undetermined.
Most of the buildings at plant are “coated with a material that contains PCBs and asbestos at varying concentrations.” This material is dropping off to the ground to become part of the “soil matrix.”
Unsafe levels of PCBs “where PCB-containing transformers were located.”
The plant opened in 1910 and at its peak in the 1950s, employed about 5,000 workers. Al Tech filed for bankruptcy protection in 1997 and got a $4.3 million state loan two years later to emerge from bankruptcy.
In 1999, DEC and then-Attorney General Eliot Spitzer announced a $9 million settlement with plant owners, Chicago-based GATX Corp., to fund a “comprehensive” cleanup of the Colonie plant and another in western New York that was expected to take five to seven years. Then-DEC Commissioner John Cahill said the settlement would keep cleanup costs from being borne by state taxpayers.
A new owner, Altx Inc., a subsidiary of Spanish-based Tubacex, closed the plant in 2002. The property is now owned by Realco Inc., of Windermere, Fla.
The 1999 cleanup covered the plant’s former hazardous waste dump, and groundwater and soil contaminated by corrosive acids, petroleum and PCBs. Tainted sediments from the Kromma Kill were to be removed along with the two waste acid pits and leaky underground fuel oil tanks.
That work was expected to take between five and seven years. DEC has not set any timetable for the latest cleanup effort.