Queens Tribune

If a report issued by an independent environmental scientist this week is accurate, residents of a new development in College Point may end up with more than they bargained for with their properties - more mercury, more PCBs, more exposure to carcinogens and more long-term costs.

Dr. Thomas Goreau, working in cooperation with the local Marine Pollution Action Network, completed a preliminary field survey of the College Point waterfront areas targeted for housing development, revealing evidence of alarming levels of metals and toxic organic waste in coastal sediment and waters.

The report on the waterfront areas adjacent to McNeil Park focuses on the potential impact of an 86-unit housing development approved by the State Department of Environmental Protection this summer. The houses, which are slated to be constructed by College Point Properties near the intersection of Fifth Avenue and 121st Street, would occupy an 8.6-acre site that spent decades as an industrial landfill.

The site, Goreau said, should be regarded as a brownfield that would have to undergo thorough remediation and restoration before people could safely live on it.

William Seevers, a representative of ETG, the environmental engineers who were hired by College Point Properties to perform a study on the site, declined to comment on Goreau’s report.

Beyond the environmental impact caused by future development, which may release tons of toxic material now largely trapped in coastal sediment, Goreau found evidence that residents of existing homes nearby may be at risk from the accumulation of mercury and other toxins. He recommended that residents living in homes along the waterfront undergo tests for brain, spinal cord, kidney and liver damage that can affect those living near high levels of toxic metal pollutants.

“How dangerous it is, we don’t really know. We have to measure it,” Goreau said. “My concern is interaction with the environment and [toxic material] leaking out into the food chain. People are fishing off this area all the time.”

Goreau, a Harvard-trained scientist and former Pew Fellow in marine conservation, offered strong criticism of the remediation plan filed by the housing developer, which has already received approval from state regulators. While that report focused on conditions in the landfill — admitting the presence of PCBs, toxic metals and industrial waste — Goreau found no attempt to deal with the leaching process through which tidal waters pump waste material out of the landfill, circulating the toxins into coastal waters.

The state-approved clean-up plan called for ground pollution from the landfill to be sealed under a plastic barrier, but Goreau’s findings suggest that such a solution would not stop continued contamination. “I think what the developers are planning to do is putting a plastic sheet over it,” he said, “but what they don’t address at all is tidal pumping along the edges.”

Above all, however, Goreau expressed alarm that the developer’s plan places liability for environmental safety on future homeowners, like those already living near the site. “The people that own those apartments and condominiums have the legal liability for the land they are living on now,” he explained. “I guess developers have gotten away with it in the past, but it ought not to be done in the future.”