November 19, 2004

Contact: Ian Michaels (718) 595-6600

City to Begin Groundwater and Soil Remediation at West Side Corporation Site in Queens

Community leaders and local elected officials will join representatives from the New York City Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) and the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) to mark the beginning of a project to remove the dry cleaning agent perchloroethylene from soil and groundwater at the West Side Corporation (WSC) property, a Class 2 State Superfund site at 107-10 180 th Street in Jamaica. The project will begin in early-December.

The entire cost of the clean-up project will be approximately $11 million. WSC was a dry cleaning storage and distribution center that handled large amounts of perchloroethylene between 1969 and 1982. When the business closed it left behind a site contaminated by spills and storage tank leaks, which resulted in the seepage of chemicals into the soil and groundwater.

The initial phase of the clean-up will focus on soil remediation and will use an innovative technique called Electrical Resistance Heating to remediate the most contaminated portion of the site. This is the first time that the process will be used in New York State . Clean-up of the WSC property has been a primary focus of DEP’s Brooklyn-Queens Aquifer Study, a multi-phase project to investigate the use of groundwater from the aquifer beneath Brooklyn and Queens.