The long-polluted New York City waterways Gowanus Canal and Newtown Creek, for generations the recipients of various contaminants, are the focus of renewed attention to the cleanup of contaminated sediments. In 2010, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) designated both waterways as federal Superfund sites under the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA), 42 U.S.C. 9601 et seq. A Superfund site is one that EPA has determined poses an unreasonable risk to human health or the environment due to the presence of “hazardous substances,” a defined term that includes chemicals and metals but excludes petroleum. While nearly any Superfund site presents difficulties, the Gowanus Canal and Newtown Creek are large contaminated sediment sites, in which hazardous substances combined with soil, sand and other material have accumulated on the bottom of these bodies of water, and thus pose a unique array of legal and technical challenges.
The Law Department’s Environmental Law Division, together with technical and legal staff from the city’s Department of Environmental Protection (DEP), the Mayor’s Office of Environmental Remediation (OER) and outside counsel, are working to develop strategies to ensure that the CERCLA cleanups at Gowanus Canal and Newtown Creek will be protective of human health and the environment, cost-effective, and compliant with sound scientific and legal principles. It will be many years before there is a final resolution of the issues arising from these cleanups. However, in this article, I will discuss the Environmental Law Division’s ongoing work with DEP and OER to lay the necessary technical and legal foundations to achieve positive results for the city and surrounding neighborhoods at both sites.
