The first and only documentary on the Dewey Loeffel Landfill Superfund site in Rensselaer County will be screened at the Berkshire Atheneum in Pittsfield, Massachusetts at 6:30 tonight. Titled “Love Canal X 2 — A Landfill Dilemma in Nassau, NY,” the film explores the ongoing impact of toxic waste dumped in the community of around 4,500 in the 1950s and 1960s.
Ahead of the screening, filmmaker Barbara Reina told WAMC that her goal is to shed light on an underdiscussed environmental crisis that’s continually expanding.
REINA: This has been going on for longer than I've been alive. It's been going on for over 60 years, where this site on Mead Road has twice the toxins of Love Canal, 46,000 tons of toxins that were dumped between about 1952 and 1968. That cleanup continues, and it's spread to Little Thunder Brook, it's spread to Nassau Lake, and, more recently, a staging site where Dewey Loeffel used to live on State Route 203 and Sweets Crossings [Road] has become a state Superfund site.
WAMC: So, what are your key takeaways from this work that you've done, all of this research? What do you want people to know about what needs to happen with this situation?
First of all, there's just the cleanup itself. Everything is still there. There's still been a lot of conversation about what to do about it. And also, people living around Mead Road, where the federal site is, are still on wells. There have residential wells for their drinking water. People who live around Nassau Lake, which the state says you can't fish in Nassau Lake and eat the fish out of Nassau Lake, people living around the lake get their water from residential wells. People around the state Superfund site at Sweets Crossings and Route 203, they have residential wells. And so, these historic toxins -- PCBs, volatile organic compounds, as well as 1,4-Dioxane that they've found more recently -- They call them historic toxins, and they're all still there in the bedrock, in the sediment, and so those dangers are still there for people.
Talk to me about what you learned from the community while you were doing research and field work about this. How do people feel in Nassau about this situation?
The people in Nassau are really wonderful. They're also very jaded. They're tired. They've been going through this for a long time. The town supervisor has really been very heroic in the way that he is on top of this situation. And many of the people who could really talk to the situation have died, either from various cancers, diseases, or natural causes. Nassau is beautiful, Rensselaer County is beautiful, and yet there's this toxic legacy that just hangs over it where you can't swim in the lake and you can't fish in the lake. It's a beautiful picture that you can look at, but you can't jump into it the way that you'd like to.
Now, as far as looking ahead, where do you see the future of this conversation?
The conversation continues. What I see in terms of this is that in other places, they may have a very robust grassroots organization that really speaks for the people with lawyers and specialists and lobbyists that say, this is what we want. Nassau and Rensselaer County doesn't seem to have that, and so they have conversations with the EPA through the community advisory group meetings, and EPA talks with the responsible party, but they don't have that really robust grassroots organization that speaks for people and what they want.
What was the most surprising part of working on this story? What struck you as a ‘wow’ moment that brought it all home for you?
I think just how big and how complex and how long this has gone on for. That is one thing that local officials, that people have said, is this has gone on for so long.
Now, obviously, for people in this part of the world, as the title references, in the Northeast, they’re no stranger to this kind of environmental disaster business. I mean, I'm talking to you from Berkshire County, where you're going to be presenting the film this week, which has a long history with pollution and unresolved questions about contaminants and toxins in the soil. How does this fit into a broader story about how we handle the most pernicious waste for the Northeast?
It does speak to that, because when I've asked the EPA, how do you do this? How do you handle this? And they have a water filtration plant [that] filters the toxins, for example, for Dewey Loeffel, and then sends it down to Valatie Kill. It seems like they do things the same way. And so, things move rather slowly. The thing is that climate change is moving things much more quickly. There was a problem with Little Thunder Brook during 2021 when we had that historic flooding, and it washed away the work that the EPA did on Little Thunder Brook. And so that could be kind of a sign of things to come as climate change, and particularly in the Northeast, as flooding affects these areas, it's moving these historic PCBs or historic toxins that are just in the sediment and in the soil to other places.
Anything about this I've not thought to ask you that you want to make sure folks understand?
I'm a journalist. I'm not a lawyer, I'm not an activist, but I just want people to have a clear understanding and a visual understanding of what this complex situation is, so that the next generation knows what's there. I mean, that was the problem with the original Love Canal, right? They built on top of a toxic site they didn't know was there, and people got ill and people got sick. And when you see the drone sights overhead over Mead Road, it just looks beautiful- But we need to know what's underneath there, and we need to know what to do about it.
