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August 12, 2007

PCB cleanup to begin at last

Presence detected in early '80s

By DENISE A. RAYMO

AKWESASNE "" More than 25 years after its presence was confirmed, cleanup of PCB-contaminated soil in the northwest corner of the St. Regis Mohawk Reservation starts Monday.

The polychlorinated biphenyls (PCB) contamination is concentrated on four or five spots spread out over a 1.5-acre plot off State Route 37 between the General Motors Power Train plant in the Town of Massena and Raquette Point Road on the reservation.

Two access roads will be built to reach the site, which is situated behind the former Seven Stars Casino project.

Once dug up, the soil will be trucked back to GM property for disposal after it passes through the company's on-site waste-water-treatment plant, said Craig Arquette of the tribe's Environmental Division.

Following the soil's removal, the area will be backfilled, graded and seeded with grass.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency approved the cleanup methods since the contamination level tested at less than 1.0 parts per million.

Any soil with a higher reading would require more rigorous off-site disposal.

Massena's GM plant, which opened in 1959 and is set to close in December 2009, created automobile parts by molding aluminum through die casting.

PCBs were used in the hydraulic fluids of the die-casting machines between 1968 and 1973, and sludge from those fluids was then deposited at the on-site landfill and lagoons.

Surface water was treated then it entered what is known by the Mohawks as Turtle Creek before draining into the St. Lawrence River.

According to documents from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' Agency for Toxic Substance and Disease Registry, General Motors submitted a plan to the state Department of Environmental Conservation in September 1980 with hopes to close its lagoons which, by then, were filled with 1.5 million gallons of sludge.

The remediation plan went to the EPA for approval in 1983, and the EPA placed the GM site on its National Priorities list, which identifies the most serious hazardous-waste sites in the United States.

During the next seven years, reports and fact-finding missions confirmed PCBs were present in the soil and in the St. Lawrence.

At the same time, tests conducted by a DEC pathologist on animals native to the Akwesasne territory showed that frogs, fish, shrews and snapping turtles "" which members of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Nation consider the foundation of the Earth "" were toxic.

In fact, the study found, the PCB levels were so high that the animals themselves qualified as hazardous waste.

This prompted tribal officials to issue an advisory, warning the community not to eat fish from the St. Lawrence, especially women of child-bearing age and all children under 15.

GM's main landfill was capped in 1988, and a remediation plan was approved two years later that addressed the on-site and off-site GM landfill space but not its industrial landfill or the contaminated soil on the reservation.

During the next 17 years, the Mohawks and state officials urged GM to follow through on the second phase of the cleanup, including then-Attorney General and now Gov. Eliot Spitzer.

The work will finally begin Monday, said Arquette.

"It has been since 1990 and even before that this has been going on, and it has changed things," he said. "There is no more fishing and eating any fish caught on the reservation.

"This cleanup doesn't end things for us," Arquette said. "There are still other issues about residents' health."

draymo@pressrepublican.com

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