Maloney, at podium, surrounded by Newburgh City Manager Michael
Ciaravino (left),
DEC Commissioner Basil Seggos and Deputy State Health Commissioner
Brad Hutton
NEWBURGH – “The time for bureaucratic foot-dragging and excuse-making
is over,” Congressman Sean Patrick Maloney (D, NY-18) proclaimed,
during a 45-minute news briefing at the City of Newburgh Water Filtration
plant.
Accompanied by state, county and local officials, and environmental advocates,
Maloney said the intent was to demand action from the Department of Defense,
and to give some assurance to Newburgh residents they do not have high
cause for concern.
“We want to know what people have been exposed to, but I don’t
want to scare people,” Maloney said. “We don’t have
any reason to believe that anyone who has been drinking the water in Newburgh
is going to have a long-term health problem on this. But, we wanted to
give people an accurate snapshot of whether or not they have had some
of this stuff in their blood. And by the way, we all do and whether we
have been drinking the water in Newburgh or not, the question is really
whether they have an elevated level and if so, whether that’s significant.”
Brad Hutton, deputy commissioner of the state DOH Office of Public Health,
noted about 2,200 people have voluntarily been tested, with no startling
results.
State Environmental Conservation Commissioner Basil Seggos said as a precaution,
they are implementing ‘catch and release’ regulations for
any fishing on the seven streams and ponds in the greater Newburgh watershed.
He said several species of fish tested had elevated levels of PFOS.
Riveerkeper Paul Gallay took a harder line.
“This very serious problem; this is a public health problem and
this is an environmental problem,” Gallay said. “There are
people being poisoned. There are fish and other river organisms being
poisoned. All these issues are serious. All these issues need aggressive,
comprehensive, transparent action.”
Gallay said the DoD must “fix its investigation plan.”
That brought Maloney back to the DoD’s responsibility; two points,
as he sees it.
“That they want to do their own investigation; that’s nonsense.
We should do these things concurrently. The state has already done a lot
of work on this. We know where the contamination is coming from. We don’t
need to study it anymore, or if we are studying it more, we need to be
working on stopping it at the same time. The second excuse has been that
they don’t have the authority to spend money on this. That’ll
change after this week because if legislation I’m working on.
Maloney’s bill would require $35 million to be used specifically
for mitigation actions around the base and an additional $15 million to
DoD for carbon filtration of PFC’s at contaminated sites like Stewart.
