[CPEO-BIF] Gowanus Canal, Brooklyn, New York listing

[Lenny Siegel <lennysiegel@gmail.com>]

On the Gowanus Canal, Fear of Superfund Stigma

By MIREYA NAVARRO
New York Times
April 24, 2009

On a warm Saturday morning, Jose Ilarraza stood by the Gowanus Canal in 
Brooklyn watching two yellow cranes on the other side digging into 
mountains of scrap metal and dumping it onto a barge.

While Mr. Ilarraza, a 40-year-old school custodian, said he likes to 
spend time by the canal, fishing for striped bass near its mouth in 
Gowanus Bay and enjoying "the nice breeze," he never eats his catch.

"There's a lot of garbage," said Mr. Ilarraza, a longtime Brooklyn 
resident. "You don't need to be a rocket scientist to know that." The 
"garbage" in and along the mile-and-a-half-long canal includes 
pesticides, heavy metals and carcinogens like PCBs from more than a 
century's worth of industrial activity. This month, the Environmental 
Protection Agency said that the contamination posed a public health 
hazard and proposed to add the Gowanus to the National Priorities List 
of its Superfund program, an effort to investigate and clean up the 
country's most hazardous waste sites.

Yet the proposal for a comprehensive cleanup, on which the agency is 
seeking public comment until June 6, is pitting federal and state 
officials against the Bloomberg administration and neighbor against 
neighbor.

...

For the entire article, see
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/24/science/earth/24gowanus.html?hp

--


Lenny Siegel
Executive Director, Center for Public Environmental Oversight
a project of the Pacific Studies Center
278-A Hope St., Mountain View, CA 94041
Voice: 650/961-8918 or 650/969-1545
Fax: 650/961-8918
<lsiegel@cpeo.org>
http://www.cpeo.org



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