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The Environment Protection Agency(EPA) announced it has placed the canal on its Superfund list, the first step towards a comprehensive cleanup the agency estimates will take ten to 12 years to complete at a cost of between $300 and 500 million.
“We think that [a Superfund cleanup] will get us the most comprehensive and effective cleanup of this urban waterway,” Judith Enck, the EPA's Region 2 administrator, told reporters in a conference call announcing the listing. “This site has a very long legacy of toxic pollution.”
The canal was built in the 1860's and served as a busy industrial waterway for over a century. The EPA is counting on companies along the canal whose properties contribute, or have contributed in the past, to polluting the canal to pay for its cleanup.
Walter Mugdan, an EPA official, said the agency is in discussion with nine possible polluters, known as potentially responsible parties (PRPs). They include National Grid, Con Edison, the Chemtura Corporation, CIBRO Petroleum Products, among others, as well as the City of New York and the U.S. Navy.
The city's canal-side properties include an incinerator plant and transportation department maintenance facility, Mugdan said, while the navy operated an extension of the Brooklyn Navy Yard on the Gowanus during the Second World War. Mugdan said the EPA expects to finalize an agreement with National Grid by the end of this month.
The cleanup will be done in stages. The EPA has already begun a remedial investigation to identify sources of contamination in the canal that should be completed by the end of 2010. A Feasibility Study evaluating cleanup options is scheduled to be finished by 2012, and the cleanup itself would then be carried out over the next five years. Enck said the EPA built an additional two years into its estimate to account for any “contingencies” that might arise.
The EPA will focus on cleaning the canal's contaminated sediment, most likely by dredging it, leaving the question of combined sewer overflows (CSOs) largely to the city, which has agreed to take on the problem.
“It is very, very likely we will end up dredging a substantial portion of the canal, perhaps all of it,” Mugdan said. Enck said the federal government work would not interfere with city efforts.
The announcement ends a contentious year-long debate between federal and city officials over how to best clean the canal. The city started lobbying hard for its own alternative cleanup plan after the EPA proposed placing the site on its Superfund list in April of 2008, but ultimately fell short, dealing a blow to the Bloomberg Administration.
Enck characterized the heated, year-long debate over the canal as a “wonderful exercise of democracy.” City officials were less enthusiastic.
“It’s disappointing,” Marc Lavorgna, a spokesman for the mayor, wrote in an email. “We had an innovative and comprehensive approach that was a faster route to a Superfund-level cleanup and would have avoided the issues associated with a Superfund listing.”
Enck said the city plan was flawed because it relied on Congressional funding from the Water Resources Development Act that would have covered only a small part of the cleanup cost, something first reported by the Brooklyn Downtown Star last June.
She said in the end “there was really no question” the EPA Superfund plan was the best course of action. “We all now have to roll our sleeves up” and get to work, she added.
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