The work on the former home of the NuHart Plastic Manufacturing facility continues in accordance with remediation plans due to its designation as a Class 2 Superfund site (thanks to the presence of two toxic plumes) by the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation.
Since November, demolition of the building (which began in August) has been complete, leaving a vacant 49,000-square foot lot with a concrete slab.
Now, both on-site and off-site cutoff walls are being constructed at NuHart West (49 Dupont St.), while a soil mix wall is underway on NuHart East (also referred to as Brownfield at 22-32 Clay St. and 67-93 Dupont St.). These NuHart West walls are designed to serve as barriers to LNAPL, also known as light nonaqueous phase liquids, which are known to impact groundwater quality and cause contamination (the issue is most commonly seen with releasing petroleum products).
Haley & Aldrich, an environmental and geotechnical engineering consulting firm, has been providing monthly progress reports including measured thickness of LNAPL in on- and off-site wells along Franklin and Dupont Streets, air quality reporting, and soil sampling.
For updates and documents on NuHart East, click here; for NuHart West, click here. Air quality reports can be accessed here.
Over many decades many workers and thousands of school children were exposed at both the public and Catholic elementary schools that were located mere feet away from this Harte & Company plant—a plant thta not only creating toxic plumes but spewed toxins the air. Did anybody care, in a poor red-lined Greenpoint comunty of struggling immigrants? Not to mention the two other plastics plants that Harte & Company ran – at the corner of both Noble and Franklin, and Box and McGuiness. I wonder about those “toxic plumes”? Were they “swept under” the proverbial rug? Not to mentio the other and much larger toxic plume adjacent to McGoldrick Park and the huge garbage incinerator that for decades left a daily layer of toxic ash on our streets. A stones’s throw away they’re building a boathouse (of all things!) on the banks of the Newtown Creek Superfund site , This while sewage treatment plant overflow still periodically gets discharged into the creek every single time it rains (and remediation is decades away). With wealthy newcomers flocking to invade Greenpoint’s toxic legacy (and foolishly build their shining waterfront towers in the midst of our flood zones), I fully expect to soon see mutant two-headed yuppies wandering our fair streets & pot emporiums, dazed and confused. Indeed, Indeed, Karma works in strange & mysterious ways. Ask the Lenope, if any of their tribal descendants have survived their exile. Dismissed as disposable “savages” by prior invaders of our shores, at least they respected & cherished both their land and Nature –and their community. We could have learned a great deal from them….
The plume is also beneath the streets.