Thanks to everyone who came out on a cold Brooklyn evening to make the TAGA bus open house a huge success. We hope you learned as much as we did (even over the roar and hum of the pumps!) and had a chance to meet some of your neighbors. We’re hoping to organize a second event in March or April; stay tuned!
In case the pumps were too loud (or you weren’t able to attend), the TAGA Bus is in the neighborhood in order to monitor air quality related to excavation work for the Red Hook Facility, an underground tank that will keep up to 8 million gallons of combined sewage out of the Canal during rainstorms. The TAGA bus is looking for one chemical in particular: naphthalene. Its sensors are measuring how much of it is in the air approximately 2 times per second! We are looking forward to a presentation on the analyzed data in March.
You can find copies of the printed materials we had on-site in this Google Drive folder, including an example of the data collected by the equipment on the bus from December. Feel free to print and share. You can also watch and share this nice piece from News12 about the event!
All of these documents are available on websites hosted by the various agencies and organizations that are working on cleanup efforts in our neighborhood, along with many other resources. Below are some more details and links, as well as some ways to stay involved.
- The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Gowanus Canal Superfund website has extensive information about the Superfund cleanup effort, including video and materials from a December 2024 presentation about the excavation and odor mitigation plans.
- The NYC Department of Environmental Protection’s Gowanus Canal website has many additional resources about the tank project, including weekly construction updates (you can sign up for emails here), daily air quality data and monitoring reports, and more.
- The Gowanus Remediation Team, overseen by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, is performing the Superfund clean-up in the Canal, including dredging historic industrial contamination. Progress and monitoring of this work is posted on this website.
- We also heard many questions from attendees about New York State Department of Environmental Conservation’s soil vapor intrusion investigation in Gowanus. This program focuses on indoor air quality issues in the neighborhood, related to former industrial sites near the Gowanus Canal. More resources can be found here. The State provides testing, mitigation, and support for building owners in the area.
If you are a property owner in the Gowanus Canal Area who has not yet responded to New York State’s offer for indoor air sampling and are interested, contact DEC Project Manager Aaron Fischer (aaron.fischer@dec.ny.gov or (518) 402-9805). If you are a tenant, contact your landlord/property owner to request that the property owner comply with the State’s sampling requests.
- New York State Department of Environmental Conservation also oversees remediation on numerous sites across the neighborhood. You can access site-specific remediation plans and monitoring data here (here is a guide to navigating the website) and sign up for here for email updates on all of their work in the neighborhood.
If you were inspired to get more involved or wanted to learn more, the Community Advisory Group is here to help. We’re all volunteers who live and work in the neighborhood, and there are several ways to get involved:
- You can email us at gowanuscag@gmail.com with questions or issues you’d like the CAG to be aware of, or you can invite us to come speak with your community group or organization. (Yes, we do house calls!)
- We host monthly public meetings with the EPA to get updates on the overall Superfund project and share community concerns. The next meeting is on February 25, at 6:30pm, on Zoom.
- Much of the CAG’s work takes place in our committees, which focus on specific issues: Land Use, Water Quality and Technical, Archaeology and Historic Preservation, and Outreach (which helps plan events like these!).
You can find our full meeting calendar and other information, including how to become a member, on this site.
This information was sent by email to attendees of the What’s In The Air event and was posted by Celeste LeCompte, on behalf of the CAG Outreach Committee.