WASHINGTON – The Environmental Protection Agency has added the Arsenic Mine Site in the Town of Kent To its National Priorities List (NPL).
The move came a little over a week after US Senator Charles Schumer urged the EPA to take the action.
Schumer previously visited the Nimham Mountain Multiple Use Area and wrote to the EPA to push for the designation, as the toxic mess has been damaging public health and well-being in the area for over 30 years.
Since 1987, arsenic has been leaking from an abandoned mine near the intersection of Gipsy Trail Road and Mt. Nimham Court onto residential properties, exposing local residents to contaminated water and soil, and even hospitalizing multiple locals over the years. Schumer thanked the EPA for heeding his request and adding the site to the NPL, which will allow a comprehensive, federally-funded clean-up effort to fully commence.
“Finally, after more than 30 years of being forced to live with a toxic arsenic mess in their backyards, and with the chemical seeping into their soil and drinking water and infringing upon their health and well-being, Putnam County communities are getting the federal attention they so clearly need through the EPA’s addition of the Kent Arsenic Mine Site to the National Priorities List,” said Schumer.
He said that on April 30 of this year, the EPA’s testing and found concentrations of arsenic prompted the Department of Health and Human Service’s (HHS) Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry to issue an urgent public health advisory on the matter.
Schumer said that in its advisory, the agency concluded that exposure to arsenic found in the soil near the abandoned mine presented, “an immediate and significant threat to human health constituting an urgent public health hazard.”
