The Finger Lakes Region has an extensive history with heavy metals—particularly lead and mercury—in its water. There is considerable historical background for the presence of heavy metals in water; since the time of the Romans, lead pipes have been used to transport water, as they are watertight, easily malleable, and plentiful. Jumping to the mid-19th century, Isaiah Rogers built the first hotel with indoor plumbing in the Tremont Hotel, Boston. In the aftermath of this breakthrough, indoor plumbing became more and more common in the United States. Lead pipes were increasingly used in plumbing, with more than 70 percent of cities with populations over 30,000 using lead in plumbing. Despite increasing concerns over lead exposure, no effort was made to ban or limit the use of lead in pipes until the 1920s. This was in part due to an extremely effective marketing campaign by the industry promoting the use of lead pipes. The Lead Industries Association (LIA) heavily emphasized the use of lead over other materials, publishing books, journals, and pamphlets. Lead usage in pipes was not banned until 1986, and the effects are still being felt today. Ten to twenty percent of lead consumed by children comes from lead pipes, and in 2015, this was found to be a problem at IHS as well.
Lead pipes caused the water fountains to be closed in Ithaca City Schools in late 2015. Tests found lead at concentrations of 15 ppb (parts per billion) and higher, the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) required action level. As a result, the school district worked with LaBella Engineering to come up with solutions. So far, changing the plumbing and adding filtering have been discussed. Another proposed solution was adding anti-corrosive chemicals to pipes, but this plan was not approved because the long-term effects of these chemicals are unknown. For the past three years, water towers have been used while a more long-term solution is put in place.
Another source of lead in Ithaca water is the former Ithaca Gun Factory. Ithaca Gun produced millions of guns in its century lifespan, and every gun was test fired. The lead test bullets were haphazardly thrown out, eventually making their way into the nearby Ithaca Falls. In 2000, the EPA found that soil near the Ithaca Falls and Six Mile Creek, part of Ithaca’s watershed, contained 136,000 ppm of lead. From 2002 to 2004, the EPA spent $4.8 million removing 6,000 tons of lead-contaminated soil from the Ithaca Falls. It is believed that enough lead was removed from the area so that it is not harmful, but certain areas likely still have unsafe concentrations of lead.
Another Upstate New York environmental disaster was Lake Onondaga. The lake, situated just northwest of Syracuse, covers roughly 4.6 square miles, and was at one point classified as the most polluted lake in the United States. The lake was polluted extensively due to municipal sewage waste and industrial pollution for more that a century. The industrial pollution came from the many industries on and around the lake itself that practiced unsafe waste disposal for decades. While the lake suffers from a number of industrial pollutants, such as creosotes, pesticides, and PHAs and other organic compounds, the ones with the most negative effects are the lake’s heavy metals. Mostly mercury, but also lead and cobalt, were introduced to the lake during the mid-20th century by industries such as Allied-Signal, Inc., a predecessor of Honeywell International, which processed mercury cells and, at its peak, was dumping 20 pounds of mercury a day into the lake. After several decades of dumping, the lake accumulated an estimated 165,000 pounds of mercury. The heavy metals were the primary cause for the Onondaga Lake being deemed unsafe for swimming, in 1940, and for fishing, in 1972. In the early 1970’s, industries were forced to halt the dumping of the heavy metals into the lake by the Clean Water Act. Since this time, most of the heavy metals have settled to the bottom of the lake and become embedded in the sediment. Estimates place the amount of mercury-polluted sediment at 7 million cubic yards.
Since the 1970s and the Clean Water Act, significant efforts have been made to clean up the lake and rid it of heavy metals. The first steps taken directly towards dealing with the heavy metals came when the State of New York brought a suit against Allied-Signal, Inc. in 1989. The goal of the lawsuit was to oblige the company to help clean up all of the metals it and its predecessors had released into the lake, and pay for the damage caused to the natural environment. However, it took more than 20 years before this was ever acted upon since decisive legal action was not taken until 2012.
In the summer of 2012, dredging of the mercury-polluted sediment at the bottom of Lake Onondaga began. It involved dredging the sediment from the lake bottom hydraulically, and then piping it to Camillus, NY, where it would be placed in a sediment consolidation facility. The dredging continued from 2012 until November of 2014, by which point it had removed 2.2 million cubic yards of contaminated sediment at the cost of many millions of dollars. In addition to dredging, nearly 3 million cubic yards of capping were placed on the bottom of the lake with the purpose of preventing the further release of the contaminants from undredged sediment into the water. Other actions taken during the cleanup included the decontamination of the former mercury cell processing site and the construction of a subterranean ground wall with the goal of preventing polluted groundwater from entering the lake.
While the cleanup of the lake was partially effective and a good start, it left many problems either only partially solved, or not solved at all. For instance, the dredging that was done between 2012 and 2014 not only removed less than a third of the mercury-contaminated sediment, but also did little to address the nearly 18 million more cubic yards of sediment that is contaminated with other pollutants. Another issue with the cleanup springs from the variability of the effectiveness of capping. Capping, while very useful in the short term, is eventually breached or simply fails over time due to environmental factors, making it an unreliable form of containment in the long term. Finally, even with all of the dredging and capping that has been applied to the lake, large swathes of lake bottom still contain exposed and heavy metal-contaminated sediment. In the case of mercury polluted sediment, this will continue to methylate in the water and further damage the wildlife of the area.
Given the many problems still plaguing Lake Onondaga, it is evident that the cleanup of the lake must continue and be expanded. Originally, the cleanup was given a budget of $451 million which has proven to be vastly insufficient. Estimates by the Onondaga Nation, which is deeply engaged in the cleanup of the lake, place the price of a truly effective cleanup at $2.16 billion. While it is unlikely that this project will be awarded such funds anytime in the near future, a number of steps can still be taken to help. One of the most potent approaches has been community awareness, lobbying, and cooperation with cleanup efforts. Such initiative has been, and should continue to be, a core element of the cleanup.