Properly this stinks.
The New York Metropolis College Building Authority is contemplating breaking floor on a brand new elementary faculty in Brooklyn – throughout the road from a state Superfund website with a historical past of carcinogens.
The positioning on Dupont Road in Greenpoint, the previous location of vinyl and plastic facility NuHart Plastics, was designated in 2010 because of its twin underground plumes with poisonous phthalates and trichloroethylene, or TCE – the identical carcinogen discovered across the notoriously-toxic Gowanus Canal.
“Being across the street [from a Superfund site] looks bad from a perception standpoint, but from an environmental standpoint, this is the cleanest site we found in Greenpoint,” a rep from the SCA instructed The Publish.
“None of those [alternative] sites were feasible for school construction,” the rep added. “Greenpoint as a whole has a long history of heavy industrial uses – the kinds of problems you find in Greenpoint, you find all over Greenpoint.”
Regardless of the location’s proximity to the proposed Franklin Road faculty, the SCA stated it’s going “above and beyond” code necessities to maintain college students protected ought to the undertaking transfer ahead – together with final 12 months’s addition of a hydraulic barrier between the 2 areas to forestall future contaminants.
Whereas the company says there’s no danger of poisonous vapors rising from the soil, the development authority plans to construct a protecting slab over the bottom anyway – and received’t embody a basement or cellar within the plans.
The contaminants “will never reach the school site” and it’s unimaginable for the general public to come back into contact with the hazardous materials because it’s 12 ft underground, an SCA rep declared.
“NuHart Plastics has never impacted our site, and in our opinion, it never will,” the rep added.
Regardless of the arrogance, the proposal isn’t with out its critics — which panned a earlier iteration of the plan in 2019 because of considerations over the college’s proximity to the hazardous waste (the Dupont Road website is listed within the state’s registry of inactive hazardous waste websites as a “significant threat to public health or the environment”).
“No child should have to go to school next to a toxic waste site, but a generation of Greenpoint children will unless an alternate location for a future school is found,” reads a 2019 petition from North Brooklyn Neighbors, which amassed greater than 6,700 signatures on the time.
“Locating the school near these hazards represents a reckless disregard for the physical and mental well-being of the future school’s students, teachers, administrators, and families,” the petition added.
SCA paperwork additionally present there’s a “potential” presence of asbestos-containing supplies and lead-based paint on the proposed faculty website, in addition to PFAS-containing supplies.
However no contaminants from the NuHart website have been discovered on the proposed faculty website throughout two separate investigations, the SCA stated.
All “suspect” supplies discovered at 257 Franklin St. might be examined and abated as needed per state Division of Environmental Safety necessities, an SCA rep instructed The Publish.
“This proposed school site has been a source of controversy in Greenpoint for two decades due to the significant nearby contamination,” Council Member Lincoln Restler (D-Brooklyn) instructed The Publish. “Fortunately, there has been significant progress to remediate the NuHart Superfund site.”
A city corridor on the revived plan is slated to happen nearly on Jan. 22.
This isn’t the primary time the company has filed plans to construct on a probably harmful website. In 2011, a North Bronx elementary faculty closed simply twenty years after opening because of the presence of TCEs. The varsity had recorded a whole bunch of circumstances of sick college students, the New York Day by day Information reported.
SCA officers instructed The Publish the Franklin Road website stays the most secure possibility for Greenpoint’s rising scholar inhabitants, which is already seeing youngsters in “overcrowded” school rooms. The under-18 inhabitants in North Greenpoint rose marginally from 11 to 11.6%, in line with US Census information.
The positioning close to the Greenpoint Touchdown improvement can be a 20-minute stroll from the closest faculty, a rep identified.
Areas for the brand new faculty are restricted, in line with SCA paperwork, and the proposed location of the brand new faculty – slated to have 450 seats – was chosen for the reason that website is exterior of a flood zone. It additionally has two road frontages for scholar pickup and drop-off.
Remediation on the Dupont Road Superfund website started in 2022 and is now wrapping up, in line with an engineering report filed in November – which discovered TCE dissolved in groundwater at concentrations “significantly exceeding applicable standards.”
The NuHart Plastics website itself is slated to change into a 471-unit residential housing improvement with two buildings and a cellar, in line with state paperwork.
If the college undertaking does transfer ahead, officers say it’ll nonetheless take years for college kids to fill the halls.
“We urgently need a new elementary school in Northern Greenpoint,” Restler, the native council member, added, “but we are committed to soliciting community feedback and hearing from young families about whether they believe this site is safe for their children.”
