Tyrone Heppard
Aug 25, 2017 · 5 min read

Onondaga Nation skeptical of faulty lake clean up plan

The view of Onondaga Lake from the Onondaga Lake Park in Liverpool, NY Photo Credit: Tyrone Heppard

By Tyrone Heppard

Published on Truth Against the Machine March 19, 2017

Onondaga Lake, located northeast of Syracuse is an environmental disaster and this is not news. Everyone knows — perhaps nobody more than those of the Onondaga Nation living just south of it.

What’s surprising is how confident the state and the company tasked with cleaning it are that two feet of sand will make a century’s worth of pollution vanish, how even that was not done properly, and how officials failed to mention that to those most affected.

A brief history

Long before regulations and environmental laws, raw sewage and industrial waste was allowed to be dumped straight into the lake and on its shores for over 125 years.

The state Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) estimates at one point, about 20 pounds of mercury were dumped into the lake each day. Companies were also known to bury chemical byproducts in wastebeds in the nearby wetlands on shore.

The largest sources of pollution can be traced back to 1881 and the Solvay Process Co. In 1920, it merged with a few other companies and became the Allied Chemical & Dye Co., and was known as Allied Signal by the time Honeywell International, Inc. took it over in 1999.

A sacred, historic landmark

Alma Lowry is an environmental attorney in Syracuse working with members of the Onondaga Nation who live south of the lake they regard as an important piece of their history and identity.

“The lake is sacred,” she said. “It is very important to the Nation that the lake be treated with (care) … and respected.”

The lake is said to be where the Onondagas and four other nations — the Seneca, Cayuga, Mohawk, and Oneida — established “The Great Law of Peace” which united them all under the banner of the Iroquois Confederacy. It is said the founding fathers used the Iroquois as a reference when drafting an American democracy.

Recent “improvements”

In 2007, a Federal Court judge figured it was about time someone got around to taking care of the hazardous waste on Onondaga Lake and Honeywell was ordered to clean what was once referred to as the “most polluted lake in America”.

Lowry said when the DEC and Honeywell were coming up with a plan, members of the Onondaga Nation leadership called for nothing short of removing as much of the waste in and around the lake as possible.

Of course, that would’ve taken too long and cost too much. Instead another other state-sanctioned plan included dredging a total of 2.2 million cubic yards of toxic sludge from the lake and covering up anything else that was left over.

Part of the plan hyped as much as the dredging was the “capping” of the lake itself, or the attempt to cover 450 acres of the lake bed with a two-foot-thick mixture of sand and dirt to contain the contaminants left behind.

Failure to cover-up a cover-up failure

Lowry said by law, the nation is supposed to receive regular updates and about clean-up efforts at the lake from the DEC.

Through regular conference calls and updates, Lowry said obtaining information was not hard, she said, but with a huge caveat.

“We generally see documents as promised — sometime before the DEC actually has to approve them,” she said. “Other things that come up in conversations between Honeywell and the DEC, we pretty much don’t see (but) if i ask a direct question I get a direct answer. The DEC is not going out of their way on everything that’s going on on the lake.”

It would be after someone suggested she take a closer look at some documents regarding the capping process that she would see how much that was the case.

In 2016, using the Freedom of Information Law (the state’s version of the federal Freedom of Information Act) to obtain documents, the Onondaga Nation would learn Honeywell had notified the DEC that sediments in the part of the lake they were covering were softer than their tests indicated.

This would cause the sand they were dumping to send hazardous waste cascading into other parts of the lake that were clean not once, not twice, but three times between 2012 and 2014.

The DEC would later dismiss the further spread of contaminated soil by the company as a small disturbance and that the cap was otherwise doing its job.

A spokesperson for Honeywell directed questions to the DEC and the spokesperson with the DEC has not yet provided an explanation for how or why this information was not given to the Onondaga Nation sooner.

Much ado about (mostly) nothing

It’s worth noting at this point how eager area officials and others had been to declare their efforts a success.

A year after dredging was completed, in July 2015, a number of county officials decided they wanted to get on a boat, sail out about 30 yards, and jump into the lake for photo ops and to apparently prove to everyone it was fine swim in the lake (at least the northern portion) without fear since 1940 when swimming was banned. During the politicians’ pool party, one organizer was quoted as saying residents should just “have faith” about the cleanliness of the lake.

The very next day Judith Enck, former regional administrator with the federal Environmental Protection Agency, would to advise against doing something like that again. She reminded people that there were still over 60 points around the lake known to dump a mix of stormwater and sewage after it rains, that people certainly shouldn’t eat fish from the lake and that, yes, swimming from the shore is not permitted.

Not nearly good enough

The capping process has since been completed, but Lowry said she and her clients still have grave concerns.For starters, roughly 40 acres of toxic gunk still lies exposed in the lake in places where dredging couldn’t reach or where Honeywell and the DEC determined work threatened the structural integrity of a nearby railroad.

To take care of this, dumping granulated activated carbon — the same thing used to filter drinking water — into the lake is supposed to keep the toxins at bay. “It seems very odd this two-foot-thick cap was used for most of the lake, but we’re okay scattering the GAC over similarly contaminated areas, and we’ll be fine,” she said.

Lowry said what’s most frustrating, though, is how easily people can be so unfazed by the hazardous waste poisoning Onondaga Lake, or how it will impact the environment and the people most connected to it in the future. All anyone seems to care about it whether or not they can swim in it.

“They’re not talking about whether the lake bottom … will ever be clean,” she said. “They’re not talking about whether the fish are safe enough to be eaten. From an Onondaga Nation standpoint, the question is can the lake function like it used to. We don’t see that happening.”

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