by Alex Brooks
A meeting on PFOA was held on November 30 at the Petersburgh Town Hall. There were no public proceedings – state and county officials were seated at tables around the room and available to answer questions from the public.
[private]One table had DEC officials. Rich Mustico who is managing the landfill investigation and Tom Gentile who is handling investigation of air emissions from the Taconic Plant were at this table. Another table had several people from the NYS Department of Health led by Rob Swider, and a third table had several people from the Rensselaer County Department of Health, where Rich Elder was doing most of the talking.
Concerning the landfill investigation, Mustico said his team has finished collecting the first round of samples and is working on a “site characterization,” which will summarize the nature and extent of contamination at the landfill, and formulate a plan for further investigation based on that. Mustico said the site characterization is underway now, and it takes about a month. Once a draft report has been put together, it will be passed around and commented on and revised.
Tom Gentile spoke of a plan to test emissions from the Taconic Plant for a wide variety of perflourinated compounds including PFOA and PFOS to characterize what is coming out of the plant right now through air emissions. A task force to carry out this testing is expected to come to the plant in a week or two.
The talk at the NYS Department of Health table was mostly about flushing the Petersburgh municipal water system after the carbon filters are all hooked up. The filters arrived about two weeks ago and are expected to be operational within a couple of weeks. Supervisor Webster said they would be functioning before Christmas.
Taconic presented a plan for flushing the system to a group of people from the NYS DOH and the County Health Department on Monday December 5, and it was accepted. A meeting has been scheduled to talk with Water District residents about the procedures that will be used to flush out the system and to flush individual homes. It will be on Tuesday, December 13 at 7 pm at the Town Hall. [/private]