Schumer, left, and Ciaravino call on the Department of Defense to clean up the mess
NEW WINDSOR – Standing by the temporary filtration plant put up months ago along Union Avenue by Washington Lake, normally the Newburgh’s primary water supply, US Senator Charles Schumer accused the Department of Defense of “using every trick in the book to avoid paying for a problem they caused.”
The senator acknowledged that when the military began using the chemical, PFOS, commonly used in firefighting foam, the long-term effect was not known. That doesn’t absolve the DoD of responsibility for coming up with a solution.
That’s not happening, said Schumer.
“DoD, USAF, you made the mess, now you clean it up and stop playing games that kick the can down the road.”
Schumer, along with New York’s other Senator, Kirstin Gillibrand and Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney, have urged the DoD to immediately install carbon filtration units at the site of the contamination at the nearby Stewart Air National Guard Base in order to halt the continued discharge of contaminated water into Silver Stream. He has also pushed for including surrounding streams and waterways, including Washington Lake to the DoD’s draft remediation work plan.
For now, the city is getting its water from the New York City aqueduct. City Manager Michael Ciaravino said they are okay, for now.
“But that luxury isn’t going to last forever and at the end of the day, we’re going to be expected to blend back to Washington Lake,” he said. The original projection is sometime in the fall.
Ciaravino said a lot must be done before then.
What we thought was the original startling threshold of 4,900 parts per trillion, we are now being told is in the hundreds of thousands of parts per trillion, which is well above the EPA’s threshold of 60 parts per trillion.”
For now, the state is paying for the city to use the New York City aqueduct water.
