State environmental officials have detected elevated levels of highly toxic mercury in the Phantasie Creek floodplain surrounding a stream running past the Robert R. Graves Elementary School in Port Ewen. The contamination resulted from a Town of Esopus flood mitigation project that disturbed the soil of a nearby state Superfund site where an explosives factory once stood.

The town, sanctioned by the state Department of Environmental Conservation on May 21, threatened with fines of $37,500 per day and ordered to take precautions, has worked with the agency to stabilize the soil and installed a temporary length of plastic fencing between the stream and the school. Via email, the DEC told Kingston Wire “the measures already taken are sufficient to protect public health and the environment” but that they will “continue to closely monitor” the situation.

The 350-acre Hercules Inc./Dyno-Nobel Superfund site is in Ulster Park just over a mile from where Graves Elementary sits in a bowl-shaped landscape overlooked by the surrounding highlands. As described by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, “To the east, northeast, and southeast of the site are wetlands that drain to several unnamed tributaries of the Phantasie Creek. These tributaries flow northward into Rondout Creek, which then flows into the Hudson north of Port Ewen.”

Dyno-Nobel, now part of Australia-based global giant Incitec Pivot Limited, dates back to 1865 and the work of Swedish chemist Alfred Nobel, inventor of dynamite and for whom, ironically, the famous peace prize is named. The company manufactured commercial explosives and related equipment on the site from 1912 until 2010.

The site's remediation process took years to formulate and implementation has been ongoing, with the DEC and EPA both conducting assessments of the area over that time. It was not until 2019 that a complete cleanup plan was finalized. In October 2023, the DEC reported “potential areas of contamination with levels of metals in the stream and floodplain soil above the State’s protective standards.”

The flood mitigation work that disturbed a portion of the site was authorized by the Esopus Town Board on March 7 of this year. It was work long sought, to deal with regular and significant flooding of town streets, and had been approved by the DEC in June 2023 with this caveat: “ ... please be aware that there is a state-regulated wetland to the south of Clay Road. The checkzone extends to about Clay Road. If you are down south of Clay Road and the soil is wet, then that is probably regulated wetland.”

The issue was raised by Ulster Park resident Jo Mead, a former Marist College senior accountant, now retired who, as she tells it, found a packet of photographs of the mitigation work on her doorstep in May. Mead raised a ruckus on Facebook and in outreach to a wide range of public officials, and tipped off Kingston Wire.

Setting aside the question of why it's taken 14 years for the site to be thoroughly cleaned, there is the matter of who dropped the ball in the current affair.

“This was maintenance of our stormwater easements, and, you know, we had checked the boxes on our side,” Esopus Town Supervisor Danielle Freer told Kingston Wire. “We still believe, from our highway department to our [stormwater management] coordinator, to our contractor, Vieira Landworks and Trucking, that we were buttoned up and we did what we needed to do.”

Freer described herself as “livid ... The town has been speaking to Dyno and the DEC about the cleanup for over six years. From a town perspective, I cannot even believe this is still a topic.”

DEC, for its part, told us via email “The town of Esopus advised DEC the project involved only the removal of woody debris from the stream, which does not typically require a permit. However, DEC determined a permit was necessary given the scale of the disturbance.”

Dyno-Nobel's successor company, ultimately responsible for the clean-up and its costs, has failed to reply to our request for comment.