Maloney, at podium, surrounded by Newburgh City Manager Michael Ciaravino (left),
Deputy State Health Commissioner Brad Hutton and DEC Commissioner Basil Seggos (right)
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. In the area of the towns of Newburgh and New Windsor, the state departments of health and environmental conservation Monday listed those waters from which anglers should catch and release as Beaver Dam Lake, Lockwood Basin/Masterson Park Pond, Moodna Creek, Recreation Pond, Silver Stream, the stream from Stewart State Forest to Beaver Dam Lake, and Washington Lake.
Riverkeeper 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.
