ROCHESTER, N.Y. \u2014 State environmental officials this week reached a deal with the company responsible for contamination of a piece of prime real estate in Rochester\u00a0that\u2019s\u00a0finally being cleaned up.\u00a0The old oil refinery is one of hundreds of\u00a0brownfield sites across New York that are being transformed.<\/p>\n
Just south of downtown Rochester, there is a second-hand store with a purpose.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere’s a lot of stuff here,\u201d laughed Mary\u00a0DePrez, manager of Rochester\u00a0Greenovation. \u201cOur main mission is to keep usable items out of the landfill and help the community with good prices.\u201d<\/p>\n
Greenovation. The name speaks for itself. A store full of thousands of upcycled items. Things that people no longer wanted.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cIt’s a throwaway society, and we don’t like that,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s\u00a0a business that sits just a few hundred feet from one of the least\u00a0green sites in the city.\u00a0But\u00a0that\u2019s\u00a0changing.\u00a0The building next to the\u00a0Genesee\u00a0River is the most visible marker of a 33-acre site\u00a0that\u2019s\u00a0full of contaminated soil and groundwater.\u00a0Vacuum Oil Refinery closed in the 1930s, and the site has been vacant ever since.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou have an area that\u2019s polluted,\u201d she said.\u00a0\u201cIt\u2019s\u00a0been polluted for 95 years.\u201d<\/p>\n
After years of court battles and questions over who should pay for cleanup, Exxon Mobil will investigate just how contaminated the site\u00a0is, and\u00a0reimburse the state $250,000 for cleanup\u00a0that\u2019s\u00a0already happened.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd then the question was, who should pay for it?\u201d\u00a0said\u00a0Evans. \u201cAnd we believed all along that the folks that polluted it.\u201d<\/p>\n
The old refinery is one of about 670 active brownfield cleanup sites across New York. Every major city in the state, and many smaller\u00a0municipalities\u00a0have\u00a0brownfields. Hundreds more have already been cleaned up, like the former Bethlehem Steel mill near Buffalo, which is now an industrial park, and the old Tobin\u2019s First Prize plant near Albany, where apartments and a hotel are planned.\u00a0Cleanups which can take years to complete.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe want to make sure that we’re doing all the work we need to,\u201d said Tim Walsh, DEC Region 8 director.\u00a0\u201cTo make sure we understand the situation, make an assessment of what needs to be done and then work with our partners to find that right solution.\u201d<\/p>\n
In Rochester, once the refinery site is cleaned up, plans call for a park and some sort of development.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cNow, an area that was basically a wasteland for the last 95 years is now going to\u00a0connect\u00a0a neighborhood,\u201d said Evans.<\/p>\n
A neighborhood\u00a0that\u2019s\u00a0losing a contaminated eyesore \u2014 and gaining something much better.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou don’t need an abandoned building anywhere,\u201d said\u00a0DePrez.\u00a0\u201cSo\u00a0to have it nice looking, yeah, that just makes us look better, too.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"ROCHESTER, N.Y. \u2014 State environmental officials this week reached a deal with the company responsible for contamination of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":62441,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[22996,3242,9,11,10,49,51,50,12,115,4274,200],"class_list":{"0":"post-62440","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-new-york","8":"tag-app-environment","9":"tag-environment","10":"tag-new-york","11":"tag-new-york-headlines","12":"tag-new-york-news","13":"tag-new-york-state","14":"tag-new-york-state-headlines","15":"tag-new-york-state-news","16":"tag-news","17":"tag-rochester","18":"tag-seth-voorhees","19":"tag-vod"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62440","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=62440"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62440\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/62441"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=62440"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=62440"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=62440"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}