by Daniel Bush
Queens lawmakers believe the Superfund cleanup of Newtown Creek is focused on Brooklyn, and they aren’t happy about it.
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) placed the creek on its list of toxic sites last month, the first action in a Superfund cleanup expected to take over ten years and cost hundreds of millions of dollars.
The polluted industrial waterway separates North Brooklyn – home to an enormous underground oil spill – from the Queens neighborhoods of Long Island City, Sunnyside and Maspeth.
Nevertheless, Queens has been largely ignored, a group of officials led by Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney wrote in a letter to Lisa Jackson, the EPA’s administrator.
“Time after time, Queens has been simply forgotten – literally omitted from the studies, the documentation and the EPA’s attention,” they wrote in the letter. “That has to change.”
At a press conference to highlight the problem, Maloney said the federal government’s documentation on the project lacked commitments to clean Dutch Kills, Maspeth Creek and East Branch, all tributaries of Newtown Creek located in Queens.
“We want documentation that the EPA [will] include Dutch Kills and the Queens side,” Maloney said, adding, “I want us to get the exact same attention that Brooklyn does.”
The EPA issued a statement saying it was examining all of the creek’s five tributaries.
The agency is in the early stages of a multi-year study of contamination in the creek, which remains an active waterway more than a century after factories began using it to discard toxic waste. Preliminary data shows the creek’s sediment is loaded with PCBs, heavy metals and other pollutants.
Erik Baard, the founder of the Long Island City Community Boathouse, said if Dutch Kills were cleaned up it could become an important resource for the community.
“I’d love to have [it cleaned] so we can have some sort of community boat program,” Baard said, adding that the federal government could afford to expand the cleanup. Dutch Kills’ “importance to the community far outweighs the nominal additional expense of cleaning it up,” he said.
The EPA has not estimated how much the cleanup will cost, but officials have said it will be more than the Superfund cleanup of the Gowanus Canal, expected to cost between $300 and $500 million.
Both projects have been years in the making, pushed along by organizations like the Newtown Creek Alliance. Laura Hofmann, a Greenpoint resident and member of the alliance, said focused attention on the Queens side makes sense, even if it means the cleanup moves slower.
“I think it should be across the board,” Hofmann said. “What happens on the Queens side is going to affect the Greenpoint side as pertains to the creek.”
via Greenpoint Star
