Gasoline odors raise concerns near Fourth Ave cleanup site

“The smell of gasoline was so strong. You could smell it in our hallways as you walked through, even with the windows closed,” said Jennifer Spalding, principal of Sunset Park Prep, a middle school on Fourth Avenue at 40th Street.

Students were moved out of classrooms where the odor was overwhelming and into other rooms during the June 8 incident, according to Spalding.

“As people went outside for lunch breaks, people kept coming back in and saying, ‘It smells really bad, like gasoline, today,’” she said.

Directly across Fourth Avenue from Sunset Park Prep is 4001 Fourth Ave., a construction site where Brooklyn RISE Charter School plans to build a new school. The property was previously the site of a longtime gas station.

State officials initially thought four underground petroleum storage tanks were present. When excavation began to remove the tanks, 24 additional tanks were discovered in a variety of conditions. Some appeared to be damaged and possibly leaking.

On June 8, crews removed 55 truckloads of petroleum-contaminated soil from the site for off-site disposal, according to information provided by the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation. Two 550-gallon underground gasoline storage tanks were also cleaned and removed that day. DEC said both activities may have contributed to the odors experienced by community members.

“My eyes were burning. I had a headache. I was nauseous. It was terrible,” said Wendy Romero, who lives in an apartment on 41st Street overlooking the construction site.

“We had thought that the tanks had already been removed, but, I mean, we have a really nice view of the site,” Spalding explained. “So from our floors, we could see that they were pulling things out of the ground at that time.

“So we thought that that was probably the source of the smell. We had a number of staff members go out and just kind of walk around to see.”

It was clear to Spalding and her staff that the odor was coming from the construction site at 4001 Fourth Ave.

Staff at Sunset Park Prep started calling around because they were concerned about the health of students and staff. They contacted the United Federation of Teachers and Community Education Council 15. An environmental hygienist from the UFT came to the school to assess the situation.

“She came with all these Ghostbuster-looking devices, walked around and did readings and wrote things down,” Spalding said.

Spalding is still waiting for the final report.

Concerns about the construction site were not new to many people in the nearby community.

Ahmed Khalid, owner of 40th Street Deli and Grill, located across 40th Street from the construction site, told the Sunset Post that trucks, dust and noise have been constant for months. He frequently has to clean his shop and the street in front of it because of dust generated by the removal of large amounts of soil across the street.

“They’ve been using a lot of water, not enough,” Khalid said. He also confirmed smelling the gasoline odor on June 8.

Following the June 8 incident, DEC directed the site’s environmental consultant to use foam and water spray more aggressively to suppress odors. The agency said odor conditions improved after the additional measures were implemented.

Romero said she had not heard anything from officials or the developer about the construction outside her apartment window.

“Nobody really said anything about construction or came up to us to tell us they were going to work there,” she said.

On June 16, Community Board 7’s Land Use/Landmarks and Parks & Environment committees held a joint meeting with representatives of DEC and the New York State Department of Health. Both agencies are overseeing the brownfield cleanup.

The agencies were asked to present the plans for remediating the former gas station site and provide an update. The draft remedial action plan was open for public comment through July 6.

Shawn Roberts, the DEC site manager who attended the meeting virtually, explained that the remediation plan involves excavating soil to a depth of 25 feet in part of the site. It also calls for injecting alkaline-activated sodium persulfate into the groundwater to break down the remaining contamination.

Water is sprayed during excavation to suppress dust, while foam is used to control odors, Roberts said.

To protect the proposed school from potential vapor contamination, the plan calls for a system of pipes and fans beneath the foundation that would prevent residual vapors from entering the building. A separate system would extract contaminated vapors from the soil and pass them through carbon filters.

The systems would include alarms and remote monitoring to ensure they are functioning. The vapor-control system would be certified annually, and indoor air would be tested every year for as long as the system remains in operation.

Roberts also described three air-quality monitoring stations at the construction site. Two are positioned along the upwind and downwind perimeters and adjusted according to wind direction. A third is located between the excavation and neighboring residences. The stations record dust and volatile organic compound levels every 15 minutes while work is underway.

When asked whether the site would be safe for a school, Scarlett Messier-McLaughlin of the Department of Health, who also attended the meeting virtually, said, “We take this very seriously.”

Asked whether pressure from the developer could affect the process of certifying the building for occupancy, she replied, “We’re not going to sign off on the final engineering report that it is protective of public health until we have sufficient evidence to prove that it is. We just won’t sign off on it.”

Contamination of this kind is typical of longtime gas station sites, where fuel tanks were sometimes abandoned underground when regulations were lax or nonexistent.

“Right now, it is a contaminated site. We don’t have control over where the contamination is going,” said Jane O’Connell of DEC, who also attended the meeting remotely. “The purpose of the remediation is to clean up that contamination and get it out of the neighborhood as much as we can.”

“We want to end up with the safest, cleanest site possible,” O’Connell added. She also acknowledged the short-term effects of dust and truck traffic.

When CB7 member Cynthia Felix-Jeffers asked about the lack of clear communication with residents and nearby schools, O’Connell acknowledged the need for improvements.

“We’re not doing the best job of doing outreach,” she said.

Following the feedback received at the meeting, DEC said it would reissue its fact sheet about the site with a Chinese translation, supplementing the English and Spanish versions already released. Future fact sheets about the cleanup will be available in English and translated into Spanish and Chinese.

DEC also said it would begin posting monthly collections of the site’s daily work reports in its online document repository. Residents can register for email updates through DEC Delivers and find cleanup documents through the DECinfo Locator by searching for site C224412.

Spalding said she was initially opposed to the work at the former gas station site but changed her mind after speaking with the environmental hygienist who came to her school.

“Stuff is going to continue to seep into the earth and infect the community and infect the soil until something’s done about it,” Spalding said. “She was really strongly in favor of remediation continuing, and she helped me see that what’s the most benefit for the community is for that site to be remediated.”