Groundwater Monitoring at BASF Site

Times-Union: Never Say Dye
[Scroll down below the cotton candy story - the Rensselaer story starts at the bottom of the page.]

More work is to be done to clean an old industrial dye factory near the Hudson River in Rensselaer's Fort Crailo neighborhood, as the state Department of Environmental Conservation tries to reassure residents concerned over continuing high levels of arsenic in groundwater.

In an April 27 letter to city officials, DEC environmental engineer John Strang wrote that new wells to monitor arsenic will be installed to replace those removed from the former arsenic-tainted lagoon areas around the former BASF facility on Riverside Drive.
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"New monitoring wells will be installed in locations selected by DEC to replace those wells that were abandoned, for continued monitoring and proposed treatment of the groundwater," Strang wrote. DEC will hold a public meeting in "late 2009 or early 2010," after its sampling of river water to test contamination is finished, to discuss a cleanup plan.
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In 2000, the Germany-based BASF chemical company closed its dye-making plant, which had run for 117 years. The plant, which pioneered the use of dyes from petroleum-based coal tars, opened in 1883 as the Hudson River Aniline & Chemical Works, a descendant of a company founded in Albany in 1868.