PCB waste to be hauled across state to Niagara County landfill
Porter to receive almost 75,000 tons
The state is sending almost 75,000 tons of toxic waste from a Superfund site north of Glens Falls to a Niagara County landfill.
The PCB-laden waste will be dug out of an existing landfill and scraped from a former salvage yard for General Electric Co., state officials announced.
It will take about 1,500 truckloads to transport the waste by truck, criss-crossing Western New York highways and roadways to get to CWM Chemical Services in Porter over approximately the next year, officials said.
The amount of waste to be hauled here, about 74,600 tons, is the equivalent to the weight of more than 478 Statues of Liberty.
Work began last month in the Town of Queensbury in Warren County as part of a $22.3 million, taxpayer-funded cleanup. None of the waste has arrived in Niagara County, home to the Northeast’s only hazardous waste dump and one of 17 in the country.
The cleanup project is considered large in scale, said Department of Environmental Conservation spokeswoman Lori O’Connell.
Nearly 33,000 tons of waste from a project site in Schenectady County, and nearly 25,000 tons of contaminated soil from a site in Delaware County came to CWM last year, company spokeswoman Lori Caso said.
The facility had about 616,000 cubic yards of capacity remaining in its operating landfill at the end of March, Caso said.
State officials said it was difficult to determine exactly how much of the facility’s remaining capacity would be taken up by this new waste.
Since the shipments will be spread out over more than a year, area residents should see no acute spike in the amount of trucks hauling waste to the site, Caso said.
About half of the Queensbury site’s waste is coming to CWM, while the rest will be treated by a process known as thermal desorption, which heats the waste, separating out the toxins.
Initially, all the waste at the site was to be treated on-site this way.
But the state only got one bid — which exceeded cost estimates by 31 percent — and the project had to be sent out to bid again with different specifications.
The dirtiest waste, or that which contains PCBs at a concentration greater than 50 parts per million, is what’s coming to the Buffalo Niagara region.
D. H. Collins, a Schenectadybased firm, was the only bidder in the first round and the low bidder the second time around.
The firm selected CWM as the disposal site for the cleanup wastes, the DEC’s O’Connell said.
Hazardous waste disposal operations at the CWM site started in 1972, with CWM taking over in the early 1980s. Mercury, PCBs and other wastes are buried there. A 10-acre interim storage cell for radioactive waste, on a portion of 7,500 acres of land taken by the federal government during World War II, neighbors the CWM site.
The General Electric cleanup is being undertaken through the state’s program for the most environmentally contaminated sites.
PCBs, or polychlorinated biphenyls, were used in coolants for electrical equipment. They have been shown to cause cancer in animals, the federal Environmental Protection Agency says. Congress banned them in the late 1970s.
General Electric dumped 1.3 million pounds of PCBs into the Hudson River from its plants in Hudson Falls and Fort Edward before the ban.
In 2005, EPA officials announced General Electric would pay about a half-billion dollars for the dredging of a 40-mile stretch of the Hudson north of Albany. GE has not agreed to contribute funding for the Queensbury cleanup.
Amy H. Witryol, a Lewiston resident who represents the Town of Lewiston on a community advisory committee for CWM, questioned the state’s policy.
“This is a classic example of DEC dysfunction and short-sightedness, to dump 75,000 tons of PCB-contaminated waste near the Great Lakes that could have otherwise been safely destroyed forever without having to truck it anywhere, let alone across the entire state of New York and past all Lewiston-Porter schools,” she said.
