EPA submits final plan on Garden City Park Superfund site cleanup

The Environmental Protection Agency has submitted its final proposal to address decades of contamination at a Superfund site in Garden City Park.

Public comments on the proposal can be submitted until Aug. 18.

The federal agency proposes to install monitoring wells at the site "to confirm that contamination levels are decreasing due to natural processes" and to "restrict the use of groundwater" in the area with a ban on digging private wells.

A one-story brick commercial building sits at the site.

The EPA has scheduled a public meeting from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. Thursday to explain its plan and take questions and comments at the Garden City Public Library, 60 Seventh St.

The contamination dates from the 1960s and 1970s, when a fabric-cutting mill at 150 Fulton Ave. operated dry cleaning equipment and disposed of the spent fluid in a well, according to EPA documents from 2015. That fluid leached into the surrounding groundwater and soil and into public drinking supply wells.

Inspectors with the Nassau County Department of Health discovered the contamination in the 1980s after investigating the source of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) in nearby drinking water supplies. The Health Department found the soil and groundwater underneath the former mill were contaminated with trichloroethylene (TCE) and tetrachloroethylene (PCE), which are known to cause heart defects, non-Hodgkin lymphoma and kidney cancer and bladder cancer, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Genesco Inc., the owner of the property at the time, conducted measures more than 25 years ago at the site to clean groundwater and soil. The EPA's latest proposal does not include plans for additional cleanup.

The 0.8-acre property was placed on the state's Superfund list and a decade later, in 1998, was declared a federal Superfund site, which allows the EPA to force the parties responsible for the contamination to pay for its cleanup.

Between 1998 and 2001, contaminated soil was removed from the well area, and a soil vapor extraction system removed about 10,000 pounds of PCE toxic gas, according to EPA documents.

After the cleanup process was complete, the property owner installed a "sub-slab" ventilation system "to protect occupants from exposure to VOC vapors that may enter the Fulton Property from beneath the building," the EPA said.

Groundwater entering two wells in the Village of Garden City — wells 13 and 14 — were treated with an air stripper, which removes toxins by pushing air through the water.

Monitoring wells have also been operating at the Garden City Country Club and one other location since 2017.

In 2015, the EPA scrapped a plan for a separate groundwater pumping and treatment system, declaring it was unnecessary "in part because contamination levels in area groundwater have been declining" since the agency issued its "record of decision," outlining its cleanup plans, in 2007.

Representatives for the current owner, Gordon Atlantic Corp., according to property records, were not available for comment late Sunday.

Kevin Higgins, a spokesman for the Town of North Hempstead, told Newsday late Sunday in a text message that he could not comment on the EPA proposal.

Neither the EPA nor the Garden City water district responded Sunday to a request for comment by Newsday.

Written comments about the proposal can be emailed to the EPA’s remedial project manager for the site: johnson.josiah@epa.gov.

Newsday's Joshua Needelman and Grant Parpan contributed to this story.