The Brookfield Landfill - Is It Just the Environment that We are Killing?
For years, I lived in Brooklyn and knew Staten Island as the place with the dump and its accompanying bad smell. The Brookfield landfill was the site of years of illegal dumping of toxic chemicals and industrial poisons beginning in 1974. The site was finally shut down in 1981, but not before an estimated 10,000 to 50,000 gallons of industrial waste per week was dumped into holes dug into the ground. Almost 45,000 people live within 1 mile of the landfill and are in close proximity to airborne and waterborne contaminates. Residents have complained for years about lung irritations, noxious odors and other illnesses and irritations.
It is estimated that the landfill produces approximately 95,000 gallons of leachate per day. Leachate is produced when rainwater enters the landfill and becomes contaminated with the decomposing refuse and other industrial waste. Tests of the groundwater around the Landfill show elevated levels of chemicals arsenic, benzene, cadmium, lead and methyl chloride. Since Staten Island does not draw its drinking water from ground wells, the aquifer under the homes surrounding the landfill is contaminated but, based on testing, poses no harm to residents. Doubt is cast upon these studies by the local residents who are living on top of the contaminated ground water.
For years, Staten Islander’s have known that when the winds are a certain way, unknown chemical smells drift across the Island from New Jersey. Staten Island has some of the highest rates in the nation for certain types of cancer. The higher elevations are the cancers that affect the lungs and larynx. Although Department of Health studies have claimed that cancer rates are slightly elevated, their elevated rates are “statistically significant.”
It took 28 years to begin to agree on a plan to clean up the Brookfield Landfill, all the while potentially exposing residents to unnecessary risk. Is our failure and delay going to be something we look back at, like asbestos, and see its future damage to ourselves and our children? Or will it turn out like the famous book and movie, “A Civil Action”, about groundwater contamination in Woburn, Massachusetts. What these cases have in common is that when we acted, despite warnings, it was too late and the damage was done to our children and the environment.
