[CPEO-BIF] EPA proposes to designate the Meeker Avenue Plume in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, New York as a federal Superfund site.

[Lenny Siegel <LSiegel@cpeo.org>]

This Brooklyn Chemical Spill Is Constantly Spewing Fumes. The EPA Wants It To Be A Superfund Site.


BY NATHAN KENSINGER
Gothamist (NY)
November 1, 2021

The Environmental Protection Agency has announced a proposal to designate the Meeker Avenue Plume in Greenpoint, Brooklyn as a federal Superfund site.

If the area is added to the EPA’s Superfund National Priority List, it would become eligible for a cleanup as New York City’s fourth Superfund site. The Superfund program seeks to remediate the most polluted sites in the United States, and it allows the EPA to bill the cost of their cleanups to those who caused the pollution. Three other toxic Superfund sites in the city are currently undergoing lengthy cleanup processes, which will take many more years and hundreds of millions of dollars to complete.

Since 2007, the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (NYSDEC) has been working to map and mitigate the Meeker Avenue Plume, an underground reservoir of chemical contamination, but the full extent of the problem has remained elusive.

Poisonous vapors from the plume have so far been detected inside dozens of homes and businesses across a wide swath of Greenpoint and East Williamsburg. The area impacted by the Meeker Avenue Plume encompasses about 45 blocks, which is roughly bounded by Norman Avenue in the north, Monitor Street in the west, Withers Street in the south, and the Newtown Creek in the east.


…

For the entire article, see
https://gothamist.com/news/brooklyn-chemical-spill-constantly-spewing-fumes-epa-wants-it-be-superfund-site

I first wrote about this site in 2009: http://www.cpeo.org/pubs/GreenpointPlumes.pdf

—

Lenny Siegel
Executive Director
Center for Public Environmental Oversight
A project of the Pacific Studies Center
LSiegel@cpeo.org
P.O. Box 998, Mountain View, CA 94042
Voice/Fax: 650-961-8918
http://www.cpeo.org
Author: DISTURBING THE WAR: The Inside Story of the Movement to Get Stanford University out of Southeast Asia - 1965–1975 (See http://a3mreunion.org)

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