Free to take more hazardous waste at CWM
Hazardous waste weighing about as much as 478 Statues of Liberty will soon be coming to Western New York from one upstate cleanup site.
As reported in today's Buffalo News, work has begun north of Glens Falls in the Town of Queensbury, and the PCB-contaminated material is coming straight to CWM Chemical Services in Porter.
It will take about 1,500 truckloads to transport the waste by truck, criss-crossing area highways and roadways to get here over the next year or so, state environmental officials said.
At 74,600 tons, it is one of the biggest single projects to have waste shipped here in a while.
No one could immediately be clear on just how much these shipments will affect remaining capacity at the CWM facility.
Company officials said residents should see no spike in truck traffic on area roads.
The cleanup site in Queensbury includes an existing landfill and former salvage yard used by General Electric Co.
General Electric is paying hundreds of millions to dredge a portion of the Hudson River, which swallowed PCBs dumped by two of the company's plants prior to the suspected carcinogen's ban in the late 1970s.
GE has denied responsibility for the PCB contamination at the Queensbury site, meaning this one's taxpayer funded, at least for now.
The state can sue the company if it so chooses.
While only half of the contaminated material is coming to the landfill in northwest Niagara County, the Northeast's only hazardous waste dump, at first none of it was supposed to come here at all.
Initial plans called for all of the waste to undergo a process called thermal desorption. But because the only bid that came in exceeded original cost estimates, the backup plan means half of the material stays on-site to be cleaned with the rest buried at CWM.
Hazardous waste disposal operations at the CWM site started in 1972, with CWM taking over in the early 1980s. A 10-acre interim storage cell for radioactive waste, which sits on a portion of 7,500 acres of land taken by the federal government for weapons production during World War II, neighbors CWM.
—Aaron Besecker
