Hastings Mayor Gives Waterfront Update

The clean-up effort on the southern third is well underway: the wells, power lines and other equipment that will run the bioremediation effort to clean up the soil have been installed.

They will soon begin pumping the oxygenated and fertilized water into the ground soil where it will encourage a bloom of bacteria that will eat through the volatile chemicals still remaining the soil.  Later this quarter, soil will be delivered to the Exxon portion of the property, trees will be removed, and the soil put down as a cap and cover.  

Meanwhile, the citizen volunteer Waterfront Infrastructure Committee is well along in its work to come up with a preliminary plan for where parks, roads, and utilities will be located on the future waterfront.  This will serve to inform BP Arco’s engineering design of the cleanup, determining where certain types of fill, soil, conduits and roads can be laid during the cleanup.  

This Committee, chaired by the former mayor Lee Kinnally, will be hosting a community forum on Nov. 14 where they will walk the public through the broad-brush outlines of their thoughts on the process. More on this closer to the date.

Finally, the Village has officially requested that BP seek estimates for the cost of carrying out the remediation work necessary to render the remaining structure on the site, the huge former industrial site known as “Building 52,”, safe and in a physical state to survive another eight years for possible reuse as a parking garage or other site facility.  

(The request letter is here http://www.hastingsgov.org/Pages/HastingsNY_Documents/019A1469-000F8513)  

Once we have this cost estimate, we can take the next steps to determine the fate of 52.  If you’ve visited Dia Beacon or, for that matter, the Irvington waterfront, you know that former industrial buildings can have beautiful second lives.  This site, however, is considerably more complicated than either of those and a variety of factors will have to weighed before the fate of the building can be determined.

The process will proceed a step at a time, and the next step will be getting this understanding of what “mothballing”  Building 52 will cost.

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