[CPEO-MEF] Niagara County, NY

[Lenny Siegel <lsiegel@cpeo.org>]

Notes from the Underground

by Geoff Kelly & Louis Ricciuti
Artvoice (Buffalo, NY)
May 25 ?, 2006
	
The New York State Department of Environmental Conservation report that 
an industrial site at 47th Street and Royal Avenue has contaminated the 
Falls Street Tunnel with hazardous chemical wastes. The tunnel runs all 
the way across the city and into the Niagara Gorge. The source of the 
contamination, according to NYSDEC, is Frontier Chemical—just across the 
street from the former Electromet, which processed uranium metal for the 
Manhattan Project.

In 1944, in a memo to Captain Emery L. Van Horn of the US Army Corps of 
Engineers, the superintendent of the Linde Ceramics plant in Tonawanda 
described the different courses he might take to dispose of caustic 
liquid wastes contaminated by radiation. The first option, wrote A. R. 
Holmes, was to discharge the effluent into a storm sewer that empties 
into Two Mile Creek, which runs past a public park and into the Niagara 
River. Alternately, Holmes said, the effluent could be pumped into wells 
on Linde’s property, from which it would presumably disappear into the 
water table.

"Plan 1 is objectionable," Holmes wrote, "because of probably future 
complications in the event of claims of contamination against us. Plan 2 
is favored because our law department advises that it is considered 
impossible to determine the course of subterranean streams and, 
therefore, the responsibility for contamination could not be fixed."


...

For the entire article, see
http://artvoice.com/issues/v5n21/notes_from_the_underground


--


Lenny Siegel
Director, Center for Public Environmental Oversight
c/o PSC, 278-A Hope St., Mountain View, CA 94041
Voice: 650/961-8918 or 650/969-1545
Fax: 650/961-8918
<lsiegel@cpeo.org>
http://www.cpeo.org


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