EPA has $14 million soil treatment plan for New York site

The Environmental Protection Agency recently finalized a $14 million plan to treat contaminated soil at the Vestal Water Supply Well 1-1 Superfund site in Vestal, New York.
“While the EPA has worked to address contamination at this site, an area of soil contamination that was polluting the groundwater was not responding to a treatment system EPA had previously installed,” EPA Regional Administrator Judith Enck said. “Under this plan, EPA will install a soil treatment system that should be able to handle this area of contaminated soil and eliminate it as source of contamination to the groundwater.”
The EPA’s plan will thermally treat, move and capture volatile organic compounds in the soil areas that are not responding to the methods employed in the previous treatment plan. Volatile organic compounds, which have been linked to cancer, can impact public health outside the contaminated site as they can evaporate into the air.
The EPA’s plan will also treat some areas of soil at the site that are contaminated with polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) by excavating that soil and removing it from the site. PCBs can also impact public health, damaging immune, reproductive, nervous and endocrine systems as well as potentially causing cancer.