EPA Working on Cleanup of the Fulton Avenue Superfund Site
By Michelle Sobhraj
Staff Writer
Remediation of the Fulton Avenue Superfund site may begin in two years, says the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency -- almost 10 years after the agency first placed the Garden City Park site on its national priorities list, and 33 years after the site was abandoned.
Staff Writer
Remediation of the Fulton Avenue Superfund site may begin in two years, says the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency -- almost 10 years after the agency first placed the Garden City Park site on its national priorities list, and 33 years after the site was abandoned.
The EPA held a meeting at the Garden City Village Hall in March to announce its proposed plan for the site.
The agency also held a 30-day comment period and made the proposed plan and other related documents available at the Shelter Rock Public Library and the Garden City Public Library.
Kevin Willis of the Environmental Protection Agency, told Nassau News that the EPA will have to " enter into a legal agreement with the responsible parties, do the engineering design work, and then construct the remediation system," a process that should take approximately two years, he said.
Willis also said that the EPA found contaminants not discovered during their first investigation of the site and will soon begin a "second operable unit" on the site.
The EPA plans to oversee the removal of contaminants from the ground water and to perform chemical injection to prevent further contamination. The site, shut down in 1974, was once a fabric-cutting mill.
The construction process will affect neighboring residents in an area that is primarily industrial. Willis said the EPA will be "will be digging up some streets in Garden City to install the extraction wells and the associated piping to bring the contaminated groundwater to the treatment system."
He said traffic will be disrupted for a few months.
Nassau County has 17 sites listed on the EPA’s priorities list [http://www.epa.gov/superfund/sites/npl/ny.htm], one of the highest number of sites for a given county on the list.
Peter A. Bee , the mayor of Garden City, said the village has hired an environmental law firm to help recover the funds spent over the years for its costs in protecting wells from the plume given off by the site.
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