Posted on December 21, 2017
By Glenn Coin, syracuse.com
Honeywell says its five-year cleanup of contamination in the bottom of Onondaga Lake is done.
“Honeywell’s historic cleanup of Onondaga Lake is complete,” project manager John McAuliffe said in statement. “Today, the water quality in Onondaga Lake is the best it’s been in more than 100 years.”
The cleanup isn’t final until the state and federal environmental regulators approve Honeywell’s construction and engineering reports. The construction report on the final portion of the cleanup, 90 acres of habitat restoration, will likely be filed in the spring, and there is no date set for the engineering report, said Honeywell spokeswoman Victoria Streitfeld.
“The final engineering report includes environmental easements to ensure the remedy remains intact; the timing depends on getting agreements from property owners such as the state, county, and others,” she said in an email.
And Honeywell is still on the hook to monitor the cleanup for at least 20 years to make sure it’s working. The company has filed a draft monitoring plan with the state Department of Environmental Conservation.
Studies on how to clean up the lake bottom date back to the 1990s, and the state in 2007 laid out a $451 million plan for Honeywell to follow. Dredging began in 2012, and the habitat restoration was completed in November.
The lake cleanup had four parts:
– Dredging 2.2 million cubic yards of contaminated lake bottom, completed in 2014.
– Building and maintaining a landfill for the dredged sediments.
– Capping 475 acres with a sand mixture, completed last year. Construction reports for the capping and dredging have been approved, Streitfeld said.
– Restoring about 90 acres of habitat along the lake shore, which was done in November.
Several nearby sites polluted by decades of contamination remain to be cleaned up.
“The lake bottom is a huge piece of the project, but it’s not the last thing Honeywell has to do around the lake,” said Alma Lowry, an attorney with the Onondaga Nation, which has called for a much wider cleanup of the lake. “There are remaining sites that have to be remediated.”
Lowry has filed a 12-page letter with the DEC on the monitoring plan, saying it’s inadequate and unacceptable.
Source: syracuse.com
