The FICA landfill today.
On October 5, 1987 New York State filed a Federal lawsuit to force the clean-up of the FICA landfill. ”Our suit,” State Attorney General Robert Abrams said, ”alleges that waste generated by industry and dumped at the site over the years is responsible for serious contamination…the dump’s current and past owners and operators can be held entirely responsible for creating the hazardous waste site and required to pay for its cleanup.” The State won the suit. Soon afterward, site operators J & T Recycling produced a detailed report of hazardous substances at the site, complete with field investigations and proposals detailing possible methods for cleanup. It took the state until the end of 1990 to finally approve a plan for investigating the landfill, which ultimately included installing twenty groundwater monitoring wells, testing gases released, and searching for buried metal drums.
In April of 1991, the New York State Department of Conservation decided to allow limited dumping to resume in an effort to re-grade the site. One hundred thousand cubic yards of material were piled against the south face of the landfill in order to eliminate the steep slope and stabilize the garbage piles before covering them with plastic. Bringing in more material (limited to soil, stone, rock dust, concrete, brick, plaster, clearing and grubbing materials, masonry products, tree stumps, wood, wood chips, pavement, and roofing material) was considered safer than redistributing the material at the site.
On March 3, 1993 a meeting was held to discuss removal of some orange-yellow liquid that had leaked out of the garbage piles and collected into a near-by pond. The final plan for cleaning up the 19-acre landfill required that it be capped; that all liquids be collected and treated; and that the groundwater be tested for contaminants and monitored for at-least the next 30 years.
Information from: Metal Contamination and Distribution in Casper Creek Poughkeepsie, New York. Chromium Concentrations Near the FICA Landfill. Elizabeth L. Belk, Dept. of Geology, Vassar College, 1995.
Kipp, Dennis. “Odor from landfill upsets residents.” The Poughkeepsie Journal 4 Mr. 1993. B3.
Please click here for a New York Times article on the 1987 Federal lawsuit against the mobsters
Photo credit: Nadine Souto