Hurley may participate in a pilot program to rid the leachate from the former landfill of PFOS and PFOA. Supervisor Mike Boms said the DEC feels the level of forever chemicals will not raise the level in the effluent coming out of Kingston’s wastewater treatment plant, which stopped taking the leachate out of concern for PFOS and PFOA.
Boms has been speaking with Mark Koester of Koester Associates, which specializes in wastewater treatment equipment. Koester wants to do a pilot program involving a trailer with equipment to clean out the leachate.
“They’ve got the PFAS, they’ve got the PFOAs, they’ve got the 1,4-Dioxane, and therefore our leachate is a little cleaner in such a way that now we can actually deliver it to Kingston’s wastewater treatment center,” Boms said. “The best part about this is it’s going to be free. We just have to make arrangements now with Kingston’s wastewater treatment plant and with UCRRA to come and pick up the leachate.”
As a biologist, Boms said he knew the dangers of PFOS. Funds may be available for the remediation from litigation. “We are going to try to get some of that settlement to help clean out our landfill. So that’s something that’s in the works coming down,” he said.
The process of filtering out PFOS and PFOA is called nanofractionation.
“What they do, basically, is they pump the leachate into a bubbly solution that will separate out the carbon, separate out the hydrogen, which is carbon dioxide and water, and then also have little amounts of fluoride come through there,” Boms explained.
The towns of Esopus and Rhinebeck use Hudson River water for drinking.
Boms was confident that Hurley will receive a $1.325-million state Superfund grant to study a cleanup solution.
Councilmember Gregory Simpson, an organic chemist by profession, worries the threshold for PFOS will be lowered within the next year. The state and federal limit before action is mandated, will be lowered from ten parts per trillion to four parts per trillion.
“And every time there’s a lowering of these kinds of minimum standards, the costs of analysis tends to go up. So we are really, really pressed now to find some kind of logical solution that can help with this problem. This is one solution. There are other solutions that we could possibly consider,” Simpson said. The town needed state and county support “to get those things done properly.”
The town has been scrambling to find a treatment facility to accept the leachate. A New Jersey facility Boms located would cost $10,000 per load with trucking costs and disposal fees.
Former town supervisor Melinda McKnight has said the town could save a lot of money if it repaired the series of pipes that channel rainwater runoff away from the landfill. The broken pipes have caused rainwater to mix with the leachate and be gathered by the leachate collection system. The town is spending money to have rainwater and snow melt treated along with the leachate, she said.
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