[CPEO-BIF] "Buried Beneath: The Fight to Clean Up Toxic Brownfields in The Bronx, " New York

[Lenny Siegel <LSiegel@cpeo.org>]

Buried Beneath: The Fight to Clean Up Toxic Brownfields in The Bronx

By CUNY Lehman Journalism Team.
City Limits (NY)
January 30, 2023

During the Fall 2022 semester, Lehman College journalism students conducted an investigation on the prevalence of toxic brownfield sites in The Bronx. Using public information, research into federal lobbying records and interviews with experts and residents, the student journalists set out to understand how this contamination happened and why progress towards remediation was so slow.

All across the Bronx there are toxic chemicals in the ground, hazardous enough to the people who live and work nearby that the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) has ordered them cleaned up. Yet years—and in some cases decades—after the dangers were identified, the toxic substances are still here, unremediated. Vacant lots near schools and parks, former industrial properties right beside housing, lots that abut community gardens: sites polluted with substances the state identified as harmful and in some cases, cancer-causing, are patchworked across the borough.

As of publication, there are 53 such locations that the DEC has identified as posing a risk to humans and that are classified as under an “active” remediation plan (when we began the project, there were 59). There are scores more sites where remediation is not active. But active doesn’t mean bulldozers are removing noxious soil or that chemicals that leech through vapor in the soil are being neutralized through alternate processes. It just means a slow and halting administrative process is underway.

…

For the entire article, see
https://citylimits.org/2023/01/30/buried-beneath-the-fight-to-clean-up-toxic-brownfields-in-the-bronx/

—

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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