{"id":7295,"date":"2017-10-02T12:41:59","date_gmt":"2017-10-02T16:41:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost:10028\/uncategorized\/officials-call-dod-go-beyond-pfos-water-sampling-newburgh\/"},"modified":"2017-10-02T12:41:59","modified_gmt":"2017-10-02T16:41:59","slug":"officials-call-dod-go-beyond-pfos-water-sampling-newburgh","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/napolilaw.lemonadestand.org\/en\/article\/officials-call-dod-go-beyond-pfos-water-sampling-newburgh\/","title":{"rendered":"Officials Call On DoD PFOS Water Sampling In Newburgh"},"content":{"rendered":"

SOURCE: WAMC.ORG<\/a><\/p>\n

U.S. Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer announced earlier this week that the U.S. Department of Defense<\/a> would begin taking water samples for PFOS around Stewart Air National Guard Base in Newburgh. He and other officials say it\u2019s a step forward but far-off from what they want to see happen. So New York state will take the lead.<\/p>\n

Schumer says the sampling came at his urging, after numerous calls to action and an appeal directly to Secretary of Defense James Mattis. In May, Schumer was in New Windsor, accusing the Department of Defense and Air Force of using every trick in the book to avoid paying for the cleanup of PFOS contamination that came to light in 2016.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou know what our parents taught us \u2014 You make a mess, you clean up the mess,\u201d Schumer says. \u201cDoD, USAF, you made the mess, now you clean it up and stop playing games that kick the can down the road.\u201d<\/p>\n

And while the PFOS water<\/a> sampling in and around the base is a big step forward, he says DoD must clean up the full PFOS mess it created. Martin Brand is deputy commissioner for Remediation and Materials Management with the New York state Department of Environmental Conservation.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe sampling effort that the Department of Defense started this week is a small step in the right direction but this minimal effort falls short of the comprehensive investigation we have demanded and for which DoD is responsible,\u201d says Brand. \u201cDEC will closely monitor DoD\u2019s actions as their sampling advances and hold them accountable for quickly cleaning up the Air National Guard base.\u201d<\/p>\n

An Air Force spokesman did not respond to a request for comment. PFOS contamination in Newburgh\u2019s main drinking water source, Washington Lake, was discovered in May 2016. In August 2016, New York state declared Stewart Air National Guard Base a Superfund site. The state has found some of the highest concentrations of PFOS in outfalls from the base, at Recreation Pond. These outfalls drain into Silver Stream and other tributaries to Washington Lake. And while the state is funding a permanent carbon filtration system for Washington Lake, the issue of filtering water from the outfalls remains. Again, Brand.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn the meantime, the state is not waiting for DoD to act, and we continue to undertake our own investigations at Recreation Pond and throughout the watershed to develop and design a system to capture and treat any discharges,\u201d Brand says. \u201cIn addition, installation of the new granular activated carbon filtration system for the City of Newburgh is on schedule to be completed in October and will be fully operational by early December after sampling and testing of the system occur.\u201d<\/p>\n

Dan Shapley is water quality program director for Riverkeeper. He weighs in on word the DoD has begun water sampling around the base.<\/p>\n

\u201cWell, this sounds like progress but, unfortunately, it really is more evidence that the Department of Defense is stalling because the sampling that it is doing is largely duplicative of what the state of New York has already done,\u201d says Shapley.<\/p>\n

He, Schumer and others had been pressing DoD for months to rely upon the state data in the interest of moving forward with remediation. Shapley says from the state data, necessary actions are clear. Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

U.S. Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer announced earlier this week that the U.S. Department of Defense would begin taking water samples for PFOS around Stewart Air National Guard Base in Newburgh. He and other officials say it\u2019s a step forward but far-off from what they want to see happen. So New York state will take the lead.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":7296,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[774],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7295","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-napoli-shkolnik-news"],"acf":[],"page_builder_type":"gutenberg","gutenberg_data":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/napolilaw.lemonadestand.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7295","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/napolilaw.lemonadestand.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/napolilaw.lemonadestand.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/napolilaw.lemonadestand.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/napolilaw.lemonadestand.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7295"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/napolilaw.lemonadestand.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7295\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/napolilaw.lemonadestand.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7296"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/napolilaw.lemonadestand.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7295"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/napolilaw.lemonadestand.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7295"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/napolilaw.lemonadestand.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7295"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}