Uh—I mean, those consultants are the engineers, architects and scientists who designed it, optimized it and made sure none of the 100 billion dollars worth of surrounding real estate and infrastructure collapsed. So yeah—that can be pretty expensive to knock out, but call me crazy—it’s worth it.

Do people think we just go out and start digging a big hole underneath 2nd Avenue?

Ok—What’s dumb about these type articles to me is that their assessment is essentially all qualitative. “Too expensive and won’t actually affect traffic.” Is the boiled down theme.

But this project had to undergo multiple Environmental Impact Statements (EIS) which included detailed traffic analyses by experts—Which concluded it would. Having worked on EISs—I tend to trust the individuals who model the traffic conditions for a living over the journalist shooting for extra clicks with a grabby title about how it won’t work based on their back of the envelope calcs.

100%. It’s that Tina Fey style, 1 joke per 15 seconds of screen time pace. It’s hilarious. And the music is catchy as hell.

Agreed. But to be clear—the project was shut down for one day for CAMP issues. This long term shutdown is unrelated.

Understood.

Just to be clear, as a part of redevelopment under the Brownfield Program the Site is required to develop an environmental remediation plan with review/approval and oversight from both the Department of Environmental Conservation and Department of Health. This includes the Community Air Monitoring Plan which institutes the continuous air quality monitoring requirements for the Site. Additionally, the Brownfield program requires periods of community review and comment on all these workplans. They send out notices to all neighbors, community boards, schools, elected officials in the area and send them notification that these plans are up for review.

All this is not in defense of the remediation quality at this Site or dismissing their complaints—but rather to say, this is not being done completely in the dark. There is mandatory government oversight of key agencies and community involvement in this process.

100%. Langan is like a report mill.

I don’t have enough info to say whether there is negligence on the part of Langan in this instance. Temporary work shutdowns from CAMP happen on jobs. Which it sounds like you know. Especially when you are working with potential mercury vapor—which is a lot higher stakes than typical CAMP monitoring analyses. I haven’t read the RAWP but I assume the threshold levels are very low.

Interesting. It’s a former chemical factory now a parking lot. It’s being cleaned up as a part of the Brownfield Program and they are complaining about the VOC mitigation not being up to snuff. Might be true—but they also want to halt development, which will stall completely remediation, prolong vapor exposure and importantly—keep the Site an environmentally contaminated one.

Maybe I’m biased since cleaning up these Sites is what I do for a living—but the complaints made about the environmental cleanup feel a bit disingenuous and put forward with alterior motives.