Approximately 100 people attended the EPA meeting at the fairgrounds on 7/8/2010. There were several members of the DEC, EPA, and Honeywell on hand to answer direct questions about every conceivable topic, some highly technical and some not, but all relative to the to the recent EPA human health study of the Waste bed 13 sediment disposal system.

The meeting was very informative and provided a unique ability to directly question the engineers of the system and the people who wrote the HHRA. Some have more than 20 years or experience working with and designing systems exactly like the one proposed for the Onondaga Lake Project. The power point presentation may be made available to the public soon but there were a couple points of note that seemed interesting enough to pass along, even without the presentation to reference.

The most interesting is that the main determining reason for removing the sediment from the lake is not because of a direct human contact risk, but rather because chemicals like mercury and PCB’s “bio-accumulate” in the food chain. This means the higher up the food chain one goes, the higher the concentration would be (i.e. if guppies eat some mercury and can’t rid it, a larger fish eats 100 of those guppies and their mercury content, and then that fish is consumed by an even bigger fish which is then consumed by a human, the human eats the cumulative mercury content of all those fish). Therefore, you have to remove the PCB’s, mercury, etc, from the food chain in order to mitigate that ultimate risk to humans. The actual concentration numbers of toxins in the sediment is surprisingly low, but it’s the potential for accumulation in the food chain that is dangerous. For example, the levels of PCB’s in the lake are about 0.53 parts per million, compared to the 1.00 part per million considered acceptable for residential soil or the roughly the same odds as being struck by lightning.

If you were to breathe in everything at the waste bed for 350 days AND come in contact with the sediment for 45 days straight, the odds go up to about 7 in one million; roughly equivalent to being killed in a dog attack or asteroid impact.

The actual risk to individuals in the area is exponentially less as neighborhoods and parks were farther away from the testing boundaries. This led the EPA to decide that NO adverse effects would be expected from the entombment of sediment at the Waste Bed 13 location.

To put it in perspective your children are and water are almost 100% likely to have chemicals from fertilizer and pesticides in their systems from lawn applications. The danger of exposure from waste bed 13 borders on zero. Now that is something to get concerened about.

(“By-products of the insecticide chlorpyrifos were found in 93 percent of urine samples taken from children ages three to 13” – “Studies of major rivers and streams have documented that 100 percent of all surface water samples contained one or more pesticides at detectable levels.” ) reference

The DEC representatives did say that they are currently in negotiation to close the additional waste bed sites in Camillus and that they had no plans to bring any other sediment to the area from the lake or otherwise, except some being considered from the Willis Avenue area. This sediment would only come if the Waste Bed 13 project was still pumping sediment at the time they are ready to move the sediment from the Willis Avenue area and there is no further information available on that as the project is in it’s early stages.

Monitoring of the waste bed system will be nearly live, internet based, and accessible to the public.

They also indicated that because of the previous 40 years of waste in the area, building residences/schools on the site will never happen however, once the waste beds are capped the repurposing of the land as ball fields, hiking trails, a bird sanctuary, or other type of recreation area is likely and encouraged.

For more information please see:

New York State DEC/Department of Health Freqently asked questions regarding wastebed 13.
Human Health Risk Assessment
Town Engineers response to the HHRA.