Poisonous vapors may be affecting over 1K buildings in Greenpoint and East Williamsburg

Published Apr 22, 2024 at 1:01 p.m. ET

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Published Apr 22, 2024 at 1:01 p.m. ET

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Federal officials said they have a $1 million proposal to measure and mitigate poisonous vapors that may have “potentially impacted” more than 1,000 Brooklyn properties in East Williamsburg and Greenpoint for decades.

Officials with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency detailed their plans to address the Meeker Avenue plume at a public meeting last week. The plume, which was first discovered in 2005, spans approximately 45 city blocks and is the result of toxic chemicals left by local dry cleaners, foundries and metalworking shops.

The EPA designated the stretch of properties as a federal Superfund site in 2022. But as officials detailed the first steps of the cleanup that could eventually result in removing some of the underground contaminants, some residents said they worried about what years of possible exposure to the chemicals could mean for their health.

“The state has known that there is a potential threat for nearly 20 years, but the people who are being exposed haven’t known what their exposure might be,“ said Willis Elkins, executive director of the Newtown Creek Alliance, a community group that has long advocated for cleaning up the plume. “That’s like an entire childhood, you know, someone growing up, living in a building with potential exposures, and not knowing.”

EPA officials said the first steps of their proposed plan, which will take five years, will center on assessing the extent of poisonous vapors and quickly addressing sites that present an imminent risk to public health. More than 1,000 residential and non-residential buildings may be at risk, and the EPA is already in the process of evaluating measurements taken at several properties.

They said they believe approximately 100 properties will require some form of mitigation to vent vapors out or block them from entering. That mitigation would likely involve sealing up cracks or gaps in basements, or installing a “sub-slab depressurization system” with an electric fan that blows vapors up and out of the structure above ground.

During a meeting with the Environmental Protection Agency, North Brooklyn residents raised concerns over the poisonous vapors that may be impacting their health.

An EPA outreach campaign to local property owners, residents and businesses is already underway, alerting them to the dangers. EPA officials said they’ve sent postcards and letters to every address in the plume’s footprint, walked each block to knock on doors, posted fliers in laundromats and stores and set up tables with information at parks and greenmarkets.

Still, persuading landlords to open their properties to EPA inspectors remains a major concern. Federal officials said they’d get a court order if necessary, granting them access to a property, though they said they hoped it wouldn't come to that.

“We don’t want people to be at risk. We want to be able to mitigate any problems as soon as possible,” Stephanie Vaughn, the EPA’s project supervisor for the Meeker Avenue plume, said in an interview with Gothamist. “We want to be cooperative, we want the community to work with us, we don’t want to come in and just start ordering access everywhere. But if there is a case where we feel it’s really warranted, we will use that authority.”

Other attendees at Tuesday’s meeting questioned how the EPA would be able to sample all 1,000 properties in five years, given their current pace. The agency began vapor sampling in November and has so far completed samples at 48 properties, including at least 18 residences, 11 public housing buildings and one public school.

Buildings like this one in Greenpoint may be exposed to toxic vapors let out by the Meeker Avenue plume.

“It doesn’t seem likely that they will be able to sample all of the homes, unless more strong action is taken,” said Lael Goodman, a Greenpoint resident who works for the North Brooklyn Neighbors nonprofit focused on environmental issues. “I know that if I was living in the basement or the first floor of any of the homes within the investigation area, I would want to make sure that my air was tested and deemed safe.”

Other residents expressed alarm that the EPA is only required to share its measurements of the toxic vapors with a property owner, potentially leaving at-risk tenants in the dark.

“It's very hard to tell people they are in danger, until it's almost too late, so I am concerned that it’s a hard job they have,“ said Felice Kirby, a community activist who has lived in Williamsburg for over 40 years, after attending the meeting. “Did you go to all of the schools, did you send notes home to the parents, all the churches, did you stand outside the subway stations and hand fliers out? But then you are going to build hysteria, and if they are not finding vapor intrusion in a lot of places, is it right to build hysteria?”

A map of the Meeker Avenue plume superfund site.

The main sources of pollution in the Meeker Avenue plume are the cancer-causing chemicals trichlorethylene, or TCE, and tetrachloroethylene, or PCE, according to the EPA.

TCE is a chemical solvent used as a degreaser and is found in adhesives and paint removers. A 2023 EPA report stated that TCE presented an “unreasonable risk to human health” and that exposure could cause “developmental toxicity, reproductive toxicity, liver toxicity, kidney toxicity, immunotoxicity, neurotoxicity and cancer.”

PCE is a chemical compound used as a dry cleaning fluid, and the EPA states that long-term exposure can cause impaired cognitive and motor performance, and adverse effects on the kidneys and liver, development, reproduction and immune systems. It also notes that studies have connected exposure to PCE with bladder cancer, non-Hodgkin lymphoma and multiple myeloma.

The full extent of the pollutants remains unknown.

As part of the Superfund process, the EPA will do a complete investigation into the sources of contamination, which will take many years. Eventually, this will result in a plan that could remove underground contaminants.

The pollutants were first found in 2005 by Exxon and the state Department of Transportation as part of the cleanup of the Greenpoint oil spill into Newtown Creek. The State Department of Environmental Conservation then began mapping the plume, installing hundreds of monitoring wells into sidewalks, sampling over 166 properties and finding vapors inside dozens of homes and businesses.

Residents of Greenpoint and East Williamsburg live near some of the most toxic sites in New York City, caused by more than a century of pollution from industry and oil refineries. There are separate cleanups already underway of the Greenpoint oil spill and Newtown Creek, which both border the Meeker Avenue plume.

The oil spill, one of the largest in the nation, left 17 million to 30 million gallons of oil sloshing around beneath 55 acres of Greenpoint. That cleanup has been underway since 1978. Newtown Creek is still waiting for a cleanup plan more than a decade after being designated a federal Superfund site.

“There is an extreme amount of environmental hazards that are present there,” said Willis Elkins, who previously lived above the plume for several years. “There is a lot more that the state and the federal government could be doing to really advance comprehensive cleanups in a thorough and timely fashion.”

The EPA has extended the deadline to submit public comments on the proposed plan for the Meeker Avenue plume until June 25th, 2024.

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