If you live above the Meeker Avenue Plume, the federal Superfund site under parts of Greenpoint and East Williamsburg, the EPA will test the air inside your home for free and keep your name out of it. A major obstacle to that cleanup, per North Brooklyn News, is not the chemistry. It is property owners who do not want the contamination confirmed.
The plume is a stretch of groundwater and soil contaminated with chlorinated solvents left by old industry, added to the federal Superfund list in March 2022. The danger to people living above it is vapor intrusion: the toxic chemicals rise as gas through cracks and slabs into the buildings on top. The EPA’s finalized remedy installs sub-slab depressurization systems and seals those cracks to push the vapor back out.
To know which buildings need it, the agency has to get inside and test, and that is where it stalls. As one local breakdown put it, the cleanup faces an obstacle: owners who hesitate to accept the free testing because a confirmed contamination result could tank a property’s value in a neighborhood where real estate is the whole game. In hot Greenpoint and East Williamsburg, not knowing is worth money.
That is the collision: a public-health offer that costs residents nothing, blocked by a market that punishes the truth. And the window is narrow. The indoor-air testing can only be done in winter, so an owner who slow-walks one season pushes the whole thing back roughly a year, leaving the tenants upstairs breathing in the meantime.
The community has organized against exactly that drift. MAPCAG, the community advisory group of neighbors and local businesses, exists to keep residents in the loop and to lean on the process, and it stresses that the EPA’s testing is offered anonymously, which is meant to get tenants and owners past the fear of being identified.
If you rent or own over the plume, the move is to take the free anonymous test before the winter window closes, not after. MAPCAG holds public meetings at the Swinging Sixties Older Adult Center at 211 Ainslie Street, including an upcoming June 10 session, and the EPA’s site for the Meeker Avenue Plume is where the testing request and the cleanup status live. The landlord’s property value is not your lungs.
Featured image: MAPCAG
