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EPA shares how Dewey Loeffel clean up will start in August
Jul 18, 2018 1:04 pm
Kenneth C. Crowe II reports in the Albany Times Union that over 50 people filled St. Mary’s parish hall in Nassau July 17 to hear from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency about plans to start cleaning up the pollution there beginning in August. From 1952 until 1968, an estimated 46,000 tons of toxic industrial waste was dumped at the Dewey Loeffel Landfill site in southern Rensselaer County, spilling in to the T11A stream that heads into the Valatie Kill, a protected trout stream that runs into Kinderhook Lake in Columbia County. Now it is a Superfund site, filled with PCBs, or polychlorinated biphenyls, a suspected carcinogen. The General Electric Co. begins removing the contaminated soil and sediments in August. EPA representatives could not say how much GE and other companies are paying to remove the pollution. “We’re going to be focusing on near-term dredging in an unnamed tributary. Most importantly, we’re listening to the community, the concerns, the needs they see in the neighborhoods,” EPA Region 2 Administrator Pete Lopez said at the meeting. Read the full story in the Albany Times Union.