Tamsin Hollo and Jennifer Rawlison are not only leaders of the Newburgh Clean Water Project, they are also part of the Restoration Advisory Board, or RAB. The board started in 2017, a year after it was discovered that Forever Chemicals, also known as PFAS, had contaminated Washington Lake, a source of water for the nearby city of Newburgh. The contamination came from firefighting foam used at Stewart Air National Guard Base.
The Restoration Advisory Board is made up of different stakeholders, including the Department of Defense and members of the local community. It meets four times a year to review the federal government's cleanup of the site.
Rawlison says they were surprised by the recent news reported by USA Today that cleanup at hundreds of military US bases, including twenty in New York, will be delayed. In Newburgh, the cleanup of the Superfund site is reported to be delayed for two decades.
“We had just had a RAB meeting on July 22nd. We met with the contractors and the people who were overseeing everything involved with the timeline and getting funding to get the timeline to continue. And we really looked like we were at a pivotal moment where we were gonna be moving out of all of the investigation and then having some solid plans in action. And then it was literally on the 26th that we as RAB members were reading about in the news article, this plan or announcement for a 21-year delay. So that really tells you that even when you're in the process and you're at a table that kind of is limited, but is one of the only ways in which to have I guess not insider information, but just you're getting it directly from their mouth. And then all of a sudden rugs are swept out from underneath you,” Rawlison said.
“Please tell me more about that,” WAMC’s Elias Guerra asked. “What your reaction was to learning this news that it's gonna be maybe like two more decades tacked onto in terms of the cleanup?”
“I think devastating and frustrating go hand in hand because you can't feel one without the other at this point. I'm frustrated because I just don't understand a hundred percent what's going on. And devastating because at the end of the day, it means at this point, likely my grandchildren will be living it if we're living here. They'll be around and fighting this fight,” Rawlison replied.
Hollo says aside from being frustrating, the delayed cleanup also makes it harder for the public to ask for specific accountability from their leaders.
“So I feel like parties have tried to give us the information that they have, but it seems very unclear. And one of the byproducts of being unclear is that it sort of defangs community groups like ours because we're just in a state of unknowing. So we don't know what to write our legislators and our senators for. We don't we don't know how to respond. All we know is that for a generation we have to live with uncertainty about whether our watershed is going to continue to have these very toxic chemicals in it that produce cancers, and low birth weight, and low fertility and prevent vaccines from being efficacious. Because that stuff, whether we're drinking the water or not, it's still in our soil,” Hollo said.
Today, Newburg uses the Catskill Aqueduct as its main source of water and Washington Lake serves as a backup. Hollo and Rawlison say the RAB has largely focused on interim measures for cleanup. But these interim measures, like a water filter installed by the DOD, often gets overwhelmed, allowing thousands of gallons of contaminated water into the local watershed.
“It fails usually 40 to 80% of the time because it gets overwhelmed. So because there's a small weir and it gets breached. That's success in their eyes. Because again, that tricky word is ‘interim’, which means, ‘well, it's not permanent, so just be patient’. But it's been the one of the only solutions they've had for the last 10 years,” Rawlison said.
Rawlison says although Newburg does have some of the best drinking water in New York that comes from the Catskill Aqueduct, Newburghers like her would like to have a choice in the matter.
“Ultimately our position is because, you know, unfortunately there are municipalities and others that have referred to Washington Lake, which is our original drinking water source, they refer to it as the former reservoir for the city of Newburgh. And we really want to push back on that because at the end of the day, we need to reclaim our autonomy in that,” Rawlison said. “It should be our decision whether we choose to return to our Washington Lake source. And it in order to do that, there has to be remediation fully. And that includes the watershed. And it's kind of odd that that concept doesn't exist for the larger neighborly groups out there.”
“Can I ask what are your future steps?” Guerra asked. “What are you planning to do in terms of how you are going to address the DOD and your steps that you foresee moving forward?”
“Well, first things we've been working on our waterworks processional procession through the community. This is our second year. We've been working with processional arts workshop to build with the community different large puppets made out of cardboard and paper and such. Our first year was really just to celebrate clean water and all things good. This year there's more of a narrative to the storyline of the City of Newburgh and the water and contamination issues. So Sophia and Alex, who are the artists with Paul, designed a serpentine nemesis, a PFAS nemesis, which is this very large military plane head. We have some PFAS chains,” Rawlison explained.
The Newburgh Clean Water Project's second Waterworks parade will start Saturday at noon at the Ritz Theater.
The Department of Defense and officials from the Stewart Air National Guard Base did not respond to WAMC's request for comment.
