12 years ago, the Environmental Protection Agency put a plan in place to clean up the water supply in Hopewell Junction. Now, that plan has been significantly scaled back. The EPA says it's because existing cleanup has been effective. But, residents of the Dutchess County hamlet feel left behind.
Anne Kover, who lives on Creamery Road, still remembers the conversation more than two decades ago when the EPA first told her family about the contaminated ground water.
“My mother was here and she calls me up, she's crying," Kover said. "She goes, ‘they're telling us we can't use our water. We can't do this. We can't do that.’ Suddenly, we have to worry about getting bottled water. And I had little kids ... And then you feel guilt because the water was contaminated. My daughter had a neurological disorder, and I would make her formula using water and powder. Did I cause it?”
In the 1970s, Hopewell Junction was home to sheet metal and machining fabrication by Hopewell Precision Inc.
According to a legal filing from the Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York, the company dumped paint and chemical solvents into the ground for decades, contaminating groundwater a mile and a half away with trichloroethylene or TCE, including 66 private drinking wells.
In 2005, the EPA declared Hopewell Junction a Superfund site, spurring a more than $23 million cleanup plan that included installing water filtration systems in 41 homes and construction of a new water supply system in 2021.
Last month the EPA announced it was scaling its cleanup efforts way back. The EPA said the new plan, which is about 10 times cheaper at $2.5 million does not include bioremediation because the contamination concentrations have generally declined over time through natural processes.
The EPA said over the past two decades, contamination levels of TCE have dropped significantly in the Superfund site, and therefore bioremediation, where microorganisms in the ground break down TCE using oxygen is no longer necessary. Instead, the new plan relies on monitoring groundwater and protecting the existing water supply. It also calls for handing responsibility of continued monitoring to the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, but residents aren't satisfied.
“Before this gets done, and you guys decide that you know it's going to be naturally taken care of, I want my house retested. I want my house retested.”
Deborah Hall has been leading the charge in Hopewell Junction for around two decades, pushing and prodding the Environmental Protection Agency, and even Congress.
Hall said after almost two decades of close contact with the EPA, the difference recently has been stark.
"I used to be able to communicate with them, and they would give me information," Hall said. "And this EPA seems very, very different. I can't say I don't think they care, but I think that the aim is to just get rid of us.”
The EPA has cut thousands of staff since 2025, which the EPA admitted was their plan.
EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin defended the administration in a statement.
"Under President Trump's leadership, EPA has taken a close look at our operations to ensure the agency is better equipped than ever to deliver on our core mission of protecting human health and the environment while powering the great American comeback," he said.
Carlos Vega, an EPA spokesperson sent a statement to WAMC defending the new cleanup plan at Hopewell Junction.
"The original bioremediation was put on hold during the construction of the alternate water supply and vapor intrusion investigation and mitigation work," Vega said. "During that time, groundwater monitoring continued and indicated that contaminant concentrations were decreasing through natural processes."
Vega also said the EPA has been transparent about its plans, coordinating with the Town of East Fishkill to promote a recent virtual meeting about the plan in the Southern Dutchess News.
At the meeting, the EPA said TCE groundwater levels at five-of-six monitoring sites are still above the EPA's safe drinking water standards of five micrograms per liter and will reach safe levels by 2071.
Residents like Kover are unsatisfied that the EPA is scaling back their plans.
“They can say they're done, but are they done? Because here's the deal: I have the air mitigation system still on my house," she said. "I have two EPA wells on my property.”
For his part, Hopewell Precision President Richard Skeen blamed contamination on prior ownership.
"The people who work at Hopewell Precision now, and who were there when the Superfund action took place were children when this took place," he said. "We weren't working there, we couldn't have been working there."
Skeen said they are good neighbors and don't want the ground to be contaminated. Meanwhile, the New York State's Department of Environmental Conservation and the town of East Fishkill did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Kover said residents are the ones dealing with the mess, and that the public needs to understand what she and others in Hopewell Junction endured.
“This fight to even get the EPA to come in took 17 years, and while that doesn't seem like a big deal for those of us who lived through that, 17 years was a big chunk of our lives, and it was a very hard chunk of our lives," she said.
