Friday, July 3, 2015

Army Corps to clean up Fort Totten spot

From the Queens Chronicle:

The U.S. Coast Guard doesn’t use its 9.6 acres at Fort Totten anymore, but the government will be cleaning it up.

Gregory Goepfert, project manager for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, announced plans for removing lead-contaminated soil during a meeting Tuesday in Bayside.

The area is near the northern part of the fort between the ballfields and the old fortifications.

“We would like to go ahead and clean up the soil that has been impacted and replace it with clean material,” Goepfert said.

The 20,000-square-foot site would be refilled with clean soil from elsewhere. The endeavor will cost about $200,000.

Goepfert said the plan was preferable to alternatives like doing nothing, just fencing it off to the public or covering it with a landfill cap, but that would require additional maintenance in the future.

The Army Corps determined that it is the only one of five areas they tested at the fort that requires remediation.

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

Fort Totten is getting better and better but still needs improvements. It was very close to being lost to developers but now it will be enjoyed by park goers for years to come.

Anonymous said...

Thanks to Sal Candela, we can all enjoy the July 1st fireworks at Fort Totten. They were awesome! I'm going back next year!
https://vimeo.com/132447548

Anonymous said...

Weren't they supposed to have done that twenty years ago?

Ms. Tsouris said...

Fort Totten should be an historic restoration like Strawberry Banke in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. It could be a national park instead of a locally administered park.

Anonymous said...

20 years ago? Probably. Probably should have been done 40 years ago. All depends on when Congress supplies the funding. There is a long list of old military base clean up projects, nationwide.

Anonymous said...

Remove the contaminated soil: great. But will that soil end up as fill for a residential (or any other) project?

Anonymous said...

THey should also clean up all the haz mats in the buildings they left behind

Anonymous said...

Daisy cutters would clean Totten and Flushing Speedport