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Alberto Rodriguez', Los Primos Auto Repair and Sale, is one of six businesses at the intersection of Cooper and Irving Avenues in Ridgewood, Queens, that have been targeted for demolition as part of a cleanup plan released recently by the Environmental Protection Agency. The businesses are within a Superfund site, the term for sites covered by a program that finances the cleanup of hazardous waste.
The small, triangle-shaped tract, hemmed in on one side by an abandoned rail spur, does not look particularly active... But for business owners like Mr. Rodriguez, who have turned the block into a one-stop shop for automotive needs ... the proposed plan threatens to uproot well-established livelihoods.
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Mr. Rodriguez’s shop sits atop land formerly occupied by the Wolff-Alport Chemical Company, which from the 1920s through the 1950s extracted metals from imported sand. In the process, the company produced waste containing two radioactive elements, thorium and uranium, which it disposed of by dumping the waste into sewers and perhaps also by burying it .......
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| https://cumulis.epa.gov/supercpad/cursites/csitinfo.cfm?id=0206479 |
Those measures wreaked havoc with Mr. Rodriguez’s business, he said.
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The demolition plans are not final. Another possibility raised in the plan is the demolition of just the vacant warehouse and the excavation of soil around the remaining buildings. That option would require government checkups every five years, the plan said, with maintenance costs “in perpetuity.”
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The health risks from the radiation at the site are small, said Dr. David Brenner, the director of the Center for Radiological Research at Columbia University Medical Center, who reviewed the E.P.A.’s risk estimates at a reporter’s request. If no further remediation were done at the site, a future resident would see an increased risk of cancer of about 0.005 percent, the plan predicted.
Walter Mugdan, an acting deputy regional administrator for the E.P.A., acknowledged that the site’s tenants “are not in any significant danger at all.” But the agency’s goal, he said, is to ensure that the site can be used in the future, perhaps even for residential development.
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Any demolition would not be undertaken until 2019 or 2020 at the earliest, Mr. Mugdan said. About two dozen Superfund sites are ready for cleanup at any given time, he said, but because of limited funding, usually work begins on only six to eight each year. The projected cost of the government’s preferred plan for the Wolff-Alport cleanup is more than $39 million.
The E.P.A. often seeks to hold companies responsible for the contamination financially accountable for the cleanup, but Wolff-Alport has been defunct for decades. Mr. Mugdan said his agency would try to determine if the company ever sold itself to any existing firms.
The protracted timeline for demolition offers small consolation to the site’s current tenants. “The rent is crazy. I can’t find a place like that,” said Mr. Rodriguez, who pays $3,600 a month in rent.... The E.P.A. will offer small businesses up to $25,000 to help them set up at another location....
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By VIVIAN WANG
The New York Times https://www.nytimes.com
August. 4, 2017
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