Ten million gallons of toxic gunk trapped in the Brooklyn aquifer . . .

http://nymag.com/news/features/32865/


The Ooze
Ten million gallons of toxic gunk trapped in the Brooklyn aquifer is starting to creep toward the surface. How scary is that?


-snip-

What Seggos discovered—or rediscovered—wasn’t an oil spill, exactly. Rather, it was a mix of gasoline, solvents, and associated poisons bubbling up from the very ground: a thin dribble that betrays the presence of a supertanker’s worth of the stuff submerged in the age-old geology of Greenpoint. It’s actually more than a century’s worth of spills, leaks, and waste dumped by oil companies that has pooled into a vast underground lake, more than 55 acres wide and up to 25 feet thick. First discovered by the U.S. Coast Guard in 1978, the Greenpoint spill has been estimated at anywhere between 17 million and 30 million gallons—three times more oil than the Exxon Valdez spill. That makes it the largest known oil spill in American history.

-snip-

The good news is that the toxic goop saturating the sandy soil is at least partly capped by a semi-permeable clay layer, the natural legacy of Brooklyn’s 10,000-year-old geology. But the oil can still travel laterally. Experts advising some of the residents suing say they’ve found the stuff beyond the contaminated zone, leading them to believe the lagoon may be much larger—up to 30 million gallons—and encroaching deep into the residential side of Greenpoint. The oil companies have removed 9 million gallons so far. So depending on whose experts you believe, there could still be more than 20 million gallons of toxins sloshing around down below.
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I'll bet there are similar toxic areas under other old port cities around the world, depending on their underlying geology.

nt

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There has been a tremendous amount of publicity about the oily, noxious and gunky mess left after the flooding in NOLA. Most Louisianians are familiar with the dumping that Standard Oil did in the early days of oil exploration, drilling and pumping. Hunters moaned loudly about the deterioration of the swamp and surrounding lands and water and still do today.

T'was said that this destruction poisoned So. LA for years to come. Think we have our own lake of WMD beneath South Louisiana? We also have cancer clusters, with a lot of leukemia affecting both children and adults, a high incidence of breast cancer, etc., though we are always told that our rate is no higher than it is in other areas. Understand that oil companies own Louisiana, so, you have to wonder what areas and who paid for the testing? We also have chemical plants up and down the Mississippi River and West, including Lake Charles.

I wonder how pure the famous Chicot Aquifer is and if our soil and water have been tested by experts with no axe to grind. I also wonder if it is even safe to breathe NO air. Living in Lafayette, we still have people who tell us that our once-wonderful city of New Orleans smells. I wonder who certified that it was safe to breathe NO air. I hope it wasn't the same breed who certified ground zero in NYC pure as the driven snow!

I am hoping that there will be some long term academic studies of the environmental issues in NOLA. I think we're going to learn some very unpleasant things in the next few years.

"Cancer Alley" for nothing....

which a long-time ago used to be the mecca of jewelry making...

benzene in the air

It's a floating blog filling crevices and caverns above the water table and below the clay surface. The creek is contaminated, yes. Brooklyn does not draw well water now, although they used to. Now water comes from upstate. But drinking water is not the concern, it's the carcinogens rising into people's homes.

"After a four-day barrage of criticism from Gov. Christine Todd Whitman of New Jersey, Gov. George E. Pataki and Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani said yesterday that they would delay at least until next winter a city plan to dump 560 million gallons of raw sewage into New York Harbor while repairing valves in a Manhattan sewage pumping station."

i read where there was a huge amount of solid sewage in one part of the shoreline in the new york city area they think the bottom layer goes back to the the early days of new york city....ick

Do you remember where you read about it; or, do you possibly have a link?

Honestly, I am getting very depressed about the horrible way humans have treated the oceans and rivers which sustain us. I couldn't believe all the WMD that have simply been dumped in the ocean when they are outdated or of no use because of more modern technology.

Killing our future with no compunction appears to be as prevalent today as it was when ignorance abounded.

I hope everyone kicks this; it is so important. Seems to me that all of the military-industrial complex that have received obscene amounts of profits should spend a great portion cleaning up their horrible messes.

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9E01E0DE163EF93AA25751C0A961958260
After Whitman's Criticism, Sewage Dumping Is Put Off - New York Times

from this page

http://www.google.com/search?q=sewage+in+new+york+harbors&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a
sewage in new york harbors - Google Search

and my bf lives in Greenpoint. not cool at all. real estate has been soaring there, too.

...What he learned, mostly through Freedom of Information Act requests, was that Mobil—the company that had likely spilled most of the oil—had quietly agreed with state officials to assume responsibility for the necessary cleanup. In return, the state wouldn’t make any more demands: no timetables, no fines, no set outcomes. Both sides could avoid a bitter, costly, and potentially embarrassing court battle. And by keeping it quiet, there would be no public panic—or costly liability.

Alarmed, Riverkeeper initiated a lawsuit in January 2004 against ExxonMobil...in order to force the company to clean faster and more thoroughly. This triggered a round of private lawsuits: Two of the nation’s best-known tort lawyers trekked to Greenpoint to represent the Polish immigrants...who live there—not to mention the young creative class that has been gentrifying the area for over a decade. Even the state...is threatening to sue now, too.

I read the story and ever since I've been telling him to move. It's very scary.

The benzene is frightening.

It's criminal really and disgusting. I feel for the people who live there and all the flora and fauna destroyed.