Will the Gowanus Ever Be Cleaned Up?

Posted on 30. Jul, 2009 by Mike Reicher in News Features

By Kieran K. Meadows and Mike Reicher

More than two decades after the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency designated a section of the Hudson River a polluted Superfund site, barges finally began scooping toxic sediment from the riverbed last spring.

Miles away, residents of Brooklyn are wondering how long they might have to wait before the government begins cleaning up the Gowanus Canal, their own severely contaminated strip of water.

Since the EPA announced earlier this year that it was considering placing the Gowanus on its Superfund National Priorities List, those with dollars and principles at stake have begun to debate the merits of the EPA’s involvement.

The Bloomberg administration and developers say the Superfund process would take too long and could prevent redevelopment along the canal’s banks, while the EPA, the state and some environmentalists say it’s the only viable way to fully remediate the site. They are all fighting over what is the best way to accomplish what everyone wants: a clean canal.

Many local residents, meanwhile, are left wondering what to believe and where to turn for unbiased information.

“It’s a hugely complicated issue, and as a layperson, I hardly know what I’m talking about,” said Maria Pagano, president of the Carroll Gardens Neighborhood Association. “It’s taken me quite a long time to understand the right questions to ask.”

Superfund, or officially the “Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act of 1980,” forces polluters to pay for cleanups of the most hazardous waste sites in the country. If the polluters cannot be found, then the EPA is able to use some of its own funds.

In the case of the 1.8-mile long Gowanus Canal, a former industrial waterway from the 1870s to the 1960s, many polluters, past and present, have contributed. Manufactured gas plants dumped coal tar and other industrial byproducts into the water. The city’s sewer system still spews untreated wastewater into the canal. Today, both toxic and organic pollutants contaminate the water and are embedded in the underlying sediment.

Besides coal tar sludge, contaminants include PCBs, pesticides, heavy metals and volatile organic compounds. Some of these toxins are being measured in parts per hundred, indicating much higher levels than what the EPA usually measures in parts per million or billion.

Pete Grannis, the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation commissioner, requested last December that the canal be nominated to the Superfund list. While conducting its own investigation, the state discovered coal tar sludge several feet deep and realized a more comprehensive approach was needed than it could provide, according to DEC spokesman Yancey Roy.

Also, its leaders wanted the EPA to coordinate the hundreds of polluters, land and business owners who could be deemed responsible for the contamination. Under the Superfund system, these are known as potentially responsible parties, or PRPs. There are about 150-200 PRPs who have operated along the canal, according a spokesman from Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s office.

Often, the EPA finds itself in court defending challenges from PRPs. This likely adversarial process is what rankles city officials, developers and others who want the banks of the canal to be built upon quickly. They say the uncertainty would deter or delay hundreds of millions of dollars in private investment.

“The Superfund is a very comprehensive cleanup, but it’s not necessarily a very fast cleanup,” said Michael Catania, an environmental consultant and former deputy commissioner of the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection.

Before the EPA announced the potential listing, developers had planned two significant residential projects and the city had drafted a new, residential-friendly zoning plan for the canal area.

Toll Brothers, a luxury homebuilder, was poised to build 460 apartments, retail space and a waterfront esplanade. Gowanus Green, a consortium of developers, plans for 770 residential units, 70 percent of which would meet city affordable housing standards. “If it gets listed we probably would walk,” said David Von Spreckelsen, a vice president at Toll Brothers.

As an alternative, the city is developing a plan that it says would cleanup, or “remediate” the canal to the same level as the Superfund program. “Our proposal will be to bring potentially responsible parties to the table voluntarily rather than going through the long litigious process of suing them under Superfund,” said Cas Holloway, a special advisor to Mayor Bloomberg. “People who do things willingly tend to do them more quickly.”

Holloway said a voluntary process may work because the city intends to have a smaller cleanup bill for the polluters than the EPA. If the city can secure federal cleanup dollars under the federal Water Resources Development Act, as Holloway speculates, it would only ask the responsible parties for a portion of the cost. Under the Superfund program, the EPA seeks the full amount from responsible parties, and pays the amount it cannot secure through its own budget.

Also, Holloway emphasized that any city plan would still need its environmental standards to be approved by the EPA and the state DEC.

Thus far, the city’s approach has been to remediate specific sites along the canal when a developer proposes a project. These cleanups fall under the state or city “brownfield” programs—where developers receive tax credits for cleaning up polluted sites. Cities favor these projects because they can be completed more quickly than they would in the Superfund framework, according to those familiar with the process.

“I don’t know why anybody would go into Superfund if they want to develop within their lifetime,” said Tom Murphy, the former mayor of Pittsburgh, who developed numerous former steel mills into housing and commercial developments. He is now a senior fellow at the Urban Land Institute. Murphy used brownfield programs and deliberately avoided Superfund. “Think of the lost economic value,” he said.

But the brownfield program can fail to address the greater area’s environmental problem and can lead to a patchwork of cleaned up sites, said Brent Carrier of O’Connor Capital Partners, which is developing a brownfield site in Long Island City. (His company has no vested interest in land along the canal). “It’s very property specific,” he said.

The city could lose the ability to negotiate site-specific remediation with potential developers if the project is listed under the Superfund program. This may be one reason the city is resisting a designation, said Dan Herlihy, an environmental waterways consultant in California who has worked on Superfund-listed projects. “The EPA really holds all the cards,” he said.

As it stands, the city is already mandated by the state to clean the canal’s water quality – a related, but separate issue from the underlying contaminated sediment. To fulfill an administrative agreement with the state, the city Department of Environmental Protection currently has a $160 million plan to upgrade the “flushing tunnel” which circulates cleaner water from the East River into the otherwise stagnant canal, and to renovate a sewage pumping station so that more storm and wastewater can be diverted to other parts of Brooklyn.

Also, the city has set aside $15 million to dredge a shallow amount of material from the head of the canal to 750 feet downstream—a project that would help satisfy the state water quality requirements, but would not necessarily remove all toxic sediment. This dredging is scheduled to begin in September 2009 and take four years to complete.

“I’m not a scientist, but skimming the surface doesn’t seem like enough to me,” said Lisanne McTernan, who supports the Superfund listing and is a member of Friends and Residents of Greater Gowanus, a community organization advocating for canal cleanup.

A more thorough dredging plan was being considered before the Superfund discussion, said Holloway from the Mayor’s office. The city DEP and the Army Corps of Engineers had started a $5 million feasibility study to assess what’s needed to clean the underlying chemical-laden sediment, he said.

A complete understanding of the health risks and the expenses of the cleanup required are the dual goals of such studies. But Von Spreckelsen of Toll Brothers believes that people will have such little contact with the sediment it wouldn’t be worth the cost to remove it. “It’s a lofty goal to take that out, but what’s the purpose?” he said.

State Sen. Velmanette Montgomery, one of the few local politicians to come out in favor of the Superfund listing, said that development is only possible in a sustainable, healthy environment.

“The senator came out in front on this because she’s a big believer in science and until people can prove that they can legislate the physical laws of hydrology and metallic leaching, you pretty much have to clean up contaminated areas before you put families with children on them,” said Jim Vogel, the senator’s spokesman. Other politicians, such as Assemblywoman Joan Millman and Councilman Bill de Blasio, whose districts include the canal, have waffled on the issue. They, like the residents, aren’t sure who has the right plan.

Meanwhile, the more visceral problem, many generations have complained, is that the canal stinks. George Washington Plunkitt, a Tammany Hall leader from the early 1900s, wrote that, “Once let a man grow up amidst Brooklyn’s cobblestones, with the odor of Newtown Creek and Gowanus Canal ever in his nostrils, and there’s no place in the world for him except Brooklyn.”

A major source of the odor is the organic material that is washed into the canal from the sewer system and the streets. When it rains heavily, the city sewer system overflows with a combination of storm runoff and wastewater (from sinks, showers, toilets, etc.). The amount that the sewer cannot hold pours out into waterways at low points in the city, such as the Gowanus, which sits in a valley between Carroll Gardens and Park Slope. These events are known as combined sewer overflows, or CSOs, and have been an inherent infrastructure problem for over 70 years.

The Superfund process would not address the CSO problem, and when the canal’s nomination was announced, the city was initially unsure if it might actually inhibit its current plans to dredge the canal and fix the sewer system. The city is concerned, Holloway said, that it could be held liable under Superfund if its CSO renovation work disturbs some of the sediment. Recently, the EPA has met multiple times with the city to explain that sewage cleanup plans would not be impeded, according to Walter Mugdan, the director of the Division of Environmental Planning and Protection at EPA’s Region 2, which covers New York and New Jersey.

Mugdan is clearly the most vocal proponent of listing the site. He points out that the Superfund process includes community involvement, while the brownfield program does not. The public could submit comments until July. Over the following months, the EPA must respond to the public comments, which would clear the way for listing the Gowanus. Also, the EPA will provide what are known as technical assistance grants to independent groups that wish to do their own studies of a polluted site.

“The benefit of the superfund program is that the EPA can act as an overall project manager, not to stop activities that are being planned by municipalities and other interested parties, but in order to coordinate them,” said Vogel, of Senator Montgomery’s office.

While the Bloomberg Administration is still developing an alternative plan, Holloway maintains the city is not actually opposing the Superfund program.

“This is a question of what’s the most effective way to get this canal remediated and also try to preserve the best of what’s already happening in the Gowanus neighborhood,” he said. “Since everybody wants to get it clean, the plan that can get it clean the fastest is the best plan.”

Tags: cleanup, Environmental Protection Agency, EPA, Gowanus Canal, pollution, Superfund