Adirondack Steel Site, Colonie, NY.
Adirondack Steel is a New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (NYSDEC) lead site where high levels of PCBs have been discovered in soils within on-site drainage ways. These drainage ways lead to the city storm sewer system and eventually the Hudson River. The drainage ways may also flood into residential yards adjacent to the Site. The Site operated as a steel casing foundry from 1918 to 1987. Sometime after the foundry operations ended, approximately 300 gallons of dielectric fluid containing PCBs were drained from electrical transformers onto the ground near the northern pad of the foundry building. According to records and technical documents from the New York State Registry of Inactive Hazardous Waste Sites, an area of more than 0.5 acres was impacted.
In 1992, NYSDEC referred the Site to EPA for an immediate Removal Action under the Emergency Response Program to alleviate surficial PCB contamination at and around the northern pad of the foundry building. EPA completed disposal activities in 1999. The objective of the Removal Assessment is to determine if on-site soil contains elevated concentrations of PCBs and if it is impacting a stream running west to east along the eastern portion of the Site. The analytical data from this investigation will be used to assist EPA in determining whether an EPA Removal Action at the Site is warranted to remove potentially contaminated soil.
The Site currently consists of abandoned buildings and overgrown wooded areas. The area where work will be conducted as part of the Removal Assessment is along the eastern property boundary in the area of the on-site stream. This area of the Site is heavily overgrown and the stream as of July 6, 2011 was running at a low level. As part of the EPA Removal Assessment, which started on June 25, 2011, the EPA Region 2 Removal Support Team is tasked with the collection of up to 420 samples from transect lines and locations determined by the On-Scene Coordinator. The samples collected by EPA Region II RST team and will be submitted to the ERT/SERAS Mobile Laboratory that has been set up on site, for PCB analysis. Ten percent of those samples will be sent to the ERT/SERAS Laboratory for definitive data PCB confirmation analysis. As of August 1,2011, 350 soil and three water samples have been received and were analysed by the ERT?SERAS Mobile Lab. An additional 100 samples are expected to be available for analysis by August 4, 2011.
