By Bryan Schwartzman
The work is expected to be completed in January, at which time about 150 255-gallon drums of material that may have been contaminated will be removed by truck and taken to a waste disposal facility in Utah, said Luz Span-Labado, the project manager for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
The agency announced last spring its plans to remove two truckloads of material contaminated with Strontium-90 from a sealed-off basement corridor which connects two of the campus's 15 buildings. Residents and public officials expressed outrage at several public meetings that the radioactive contamination, which the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has known about for decades, was not disclosed until this year.
The contamination can be traced back to 1964, when the St. Albans facility served as a Naval Hospital for veterans returning from the Vietnam War. A beaker containing Strontium-90 boiled over on a hot plate, contaminating the laboratory and the men's bathroom, records show.
The contamination was thought to have been cleaned up at the time, but in the early 1990s the Nuclear Regulatory Commission began revisiting old spillage sites and found radioactive contamination was still present and the area was immediately sealed.
Since the contamination was in the basement, patients and most employees were never exposed to the Strontium-90, said John Donnellan, the director of veterans affairs for the New York Harbor Healthcare System, which oversees the St. Albans hospital.
Span-Labado said she meets periodically with elected officials to update them on the cleanup efforts. She said the contractor began setting up on the site in late September and work began in early October.
She said all of the material is being stored in the drums and sealed in a storage room. The contaminated material will be taken away by truck after the work is completed and will most likely be driven out of the community in the evening hours.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the federal agency which monitors radioactive contamination sites, will inspect the grounds once the cleanup is finished.
Span-Labado said she is compiling a file of all the documents related to the case and will make it available at the Central Branch of the Queens Public Library.
We're going to open up all of the records,” she said.
