PCBs arrive at Porter landfill without notice
CWM says transfer began in July
PORTER — More than 500 truckloads of PCB waste from a site north of Albany already have been hauled to the CWM Chemical Services Model City landfill here, a company spokeswoman confirmed Friday.
Lori Caso said the waste from a salvage site in Queensbury began arriving here in July, and will continue until early next year. When the project was announced two months ago, state officials estimated 1,500 truckloads would be needed to empty the Queensbury site.
Caso said the number of truckloads fluctuates from day to day, but she said the shipments have been coming almost since the state Department of Environmental Conservation’s decision to send the waste to CWM was revealed in July.
Two Niagara County elected officials said they did not know shipments had arrived at the landfill.
“I didn’t know the shipments had started already,” State Sen. George D. Maziarz, R-Newfane, said Saturday. “I am extremely displeased to hear that they have and we haven’t been notified about it.”
Maziarz said he was aware a contract had been signed in July.
Niagara County Legislator Clyde L. Burmaster, R-Ransomville, a prominent foe of the landfilling, was also surprised by the news.
“I didn’t know it had started,” Burmaster said.
Several politicians had urged the DEC to reconsider its position. Maziarz met with DEC Commissioner Alexander “Pete” Grannis on the issue and also delivered thousands of petitions against any shipments.
The DEC originally wanted to treat the 74,600 tons of waste on-site in Queensbury.
But because the state only got one bid, which exceeded estimates by 31 percent, the project was sent out to bid again with altered specifications.
Ultimately, the agency decided on landfilling. CWM is the only licensed hazardous waste disposal site in the northeastern United States.
Maziarz said the DEC is “unnecessarily shipping that waste here.”
The DEC commissioner has said it’s 30 percent cheaper to landfill the waste from Queensbury than to treat it on-site.
“I do not buy the bureaucratic doublespeak that regulations require them to take the lowest bid,” Maziarz said. “It’ll always be cheaper to shove it down our throats. I think that if this were being shipped to Westchester County, Nassau County, Suffolk County or midtown Manhattan, Pete Grannis would find a way around the bureaucratic regulations.”
“This community needs someone who is willing to stand up for us, not the special interests of a billion-dollar corporation,” said April Fideli of Youngstown, president of Residents for Responsible Government, a local environmental group, in an e-mail to The Buffalo News.
Caso said the trucks carrying the waste, owned by D.H. Collins of Schenectady, follow the usual route to the Model City landfill, traveling along Route 18 in front of the Lewiston-Porter Central School campus.
She said the trucks observe “blackout hours,” not going past the school during times when buses are loading or unloading.
“There have been absolutely no incidents,” she said.
“Apparently there’s been no issue with the traffic,” Burmaster said.
“PCBs have been landfilled for years and are safely disposed of in modern hazardous waste landfills such as Model City,” Caso said.
Critics of CWM say landfilling is an outdated technology and cheered when the County Legislature passed a resolution calling for an end to its use in the state on July 22.
Caso said there is no chance waste from a far larger PCB removal project, General Electric’s dredging of the Hudson River, will come to CWM.
“It will never come,” she said. “It has to be shipped out by rail, and CWM doesn’t have rail service.”
GE’s Hudson River dredging Web site says, “After processing, the dried sediments will be loaded onto rail cars that will be staged at a new rail yard already constructed on the site. . . . Once full, the rail cars will leave Fort Edward for Andrews, Texas, where the processed sediments will be housed at a storage facility owned by Waste Control Specialists.”
“I think we’ve known that for a long time,” Burmaster said. “That’s why interest in the issue sort of cooled off. Then it heated back up around that Queensbury issue.”
