The famous church where Al Capone once got married and 20 other sites near Brooklyn’s toxic Gowanus Canal are in need of a thorough cleanup after dangerously unsafe air tests, The Washington Post has learned.
The state Department of Environmental Conservation found in late April that carcinogenic vapors were leaking from contaminated soil into the basement and rectory. St. Mary Star of the Sea Church in Carroll Gardens.
“Only God knows where this is coming from,” sighed Father Guy Massey, the church’s pastor. “We are doing the best we can right now, but this is a big shock.”
The only saving grace was that the air was clean in the 173-year-old chapel where Mass was held. Brooklyn-born Capone married his wife, May, in 1918 and went on to dominate Chicago’s gangster world. So did the inspection results of the private school next door, which rented space from the church.
The state is secretly surveying about 100 blocks around the canal, where thousands of people live and work, in September to determine how much property is contaminated, The Washington Post reported last week.
upon The department on Thursday inspected 131 of the 626 properties it targeted during the ongoing first phase and found that 21 had concentrations of hazardous chemicals in the air that exceeded “acceptable” levels.
The DEC declined to identify the location of the positive tests or the site that released the toxic material, but Court Street Church was identified in a letter sent Tuesday to parents of students at the school. Brooklyn International School.
Joe Santos, the school’s superintendent, told parents he had been told the school was “clean,” but that “high levels” of the carcinogenic dry-cleaning chemical tetrachloroethylene had been found in parts of the adjacent rectory and church.
The rectory, about three blocks from the canal at the corner of Court and Lequer Streets, no longer houses a priest.
But the building is regularly used by church employees, who will be temporarily relocated until the Environmental Protection Agency takes steps to vent contaminants underground and remove harmful fumes, Massey said.
The bishop added that the church plans to inform parishioners about the ongoing cleaning efforts during Mass this weekend.
Seth Hillinger of the advocacy group Voice of Gowanus He called the findings “deeply disturbing” because they prove the same underground pollution that plagues the east side of the canal also reaches the bustling Court Street shopping district on the west side, popular with mothers with strollers and foodies.
“When I heard that, [the neighborhood of] “Gowanus is contaminated, but knowing that it’s in the Carroll Gardens area, which is now full of children and young families, it’s a different situation,” he said.
The DEC launched an investigation in September after facing public backlash for taking nearly two years to warn the public about reports that contaminated soil had leaked into a popular shuffleboard club and released about 22 times the amount considered safe of carcinogenic vapors.
The Royal Palms Shuffleboard Club on Union Street in Gowanus is currently considered “safe” by DEC standards, but a nearby building, whose information the DEC refuses to disclose, had airborne concentrations of trichloroethylene (TCE), an industrial solvent linked to cancer and Parkinson’s disease, that were 450 times the permitted level, the DEC said. The test I took last year.
Many other buildings near the canal are former manufacturing plants that saturated the soil with toxic coal tar.
Over the past century, much of the coal tar that longtime residents call “black mayonnaise” has seeped into the canal, which is one of the most polluted waterways in the United States and the subject of a massive federal Superfund cleanup effort.
Environmentalists believe coal tar and other toxic substances are migrating underground through waterways that connect to the canal.
Walter Hung, head of an environmental database company based in Ithaca, New York. Targeting toxic substances, He said he believes the 21 buildings that tested positive only represent a “small fraction” of the areas along the canal that are affected by toxic fumes, adding that the DEC’s testing system is “flawed” because it only tests “a few” parts of each building, rather than the entire structure.
He also slammed the DEC for historically refusing to release many of its findings, adding that such a lack of transparency “endangers public health” because “countless people” have been “kept in the dark” and exposed to harmful fumes for years, if not decades.
A DEC spokesperson said that once all testing data has been collected and verified, it will be shared with property owners and tenants, and the state will then release a report summarizing its findings, but will not release the names of locations where the air was found to be unsafe to protect people’s privacy.
He could not immediately provide a timeline for the project.
