A large illegal landfill on prime industrial real estate at the Hunts Point shoreline is one step closer to being cleaned up, The Bronx Beat has learned.
Last month, the state Department of Environmental Conservation ordered David Norkin, owner of the former Oak Point rail yard and the company that supervised months of dumping there, to pay a $10,000 fine and to submit plans to investigate how to clean up the property. Norkin's deadline is today.
"We're complying with the order," Jeffrey Buss, Norkin's lawyer said on Friday. "We have contracted an environmental firm to prepare a site investigation plan, and we're paying the fine."
The order followed Administrative Law Judge Andrew Pearlstein's ruling that Norkin's Britestarr Homes Inc. operated a landfill without a permit and without the environmental safeguards such an operation requires.
"We will be looking at the risk to people, public health, safety and the environment," said Arnold Fleming, the president of AKRF Inc., the environmental firm that will examine the site.
If the state approves its plan -- which will include digging pits, drilling bore samples into the fill, and testing seepage of rainwater for toxicity -- then AKRF could begin its assessment within a few weeks, Fleming said.
DEC lawyers John W. Nehila said the site is the second-largest illegal landfill in the city, but Buss countered that the state "probably spent seven figures prosecuting a case where there are no toxic chemicals." The judge also noted that the land is isolated from residential neighborhoods.
Norkin bought the parcel in 1988 for $3.2 million, and planned to build a factory for modular homes. Before building, he intended to fill in the property with brick, concrete, stone, soil and asphalt.
After receiving a city permit to recycle construction rubble, Oak Point Associates, a subsidiary of Britestarr, began charging contractors to dump debris. Before the city shut it down, 4,862 truckloads were emptied.
According to the company's records, it employed as many as 70 workers who removed objects such as tires and wood, which were carted to another landfill. A crusher pulverized the remaining rubble, which workers spread around the lot.
But during the early summer of 1989, when a seasonal increase in construction caused a surge in debris, the sifting process began to break down and the city took notice.
State records reveal a comprehensive surveillance plan by the city Sanitation Department. Officers with binoculars peered from unmarked cars and nearby buildings. Agents snooped from boats on the East River. A biologist trekked the shoreline with an instant camera.
Oak Point Associates, the judge found, "apparently could not resist the temptation to maximize their revenues despite their inability to process the volume of material they received." Records show that Norkin was under financial strain.
On Aug. 18, the city revoked the landfill permit, but according to a surveillance report the next day, dumping continued.
The state also alleged that Oak Point accepted more than just construction and demolition debris.
In February 1990, an inspector concluded that the site was an uncovered landfill containing "soil, metal, plastic, rags, paper, rugs, wood, broken concrete and brick and tires." Also logged were mattresses, furniture, appliances, auto parts, sections of plumbing and electrical conduit.
On two occasions, subterranean smoldering fires were noted.
But Buss contends that the state's focus on the landfill was ill-founded.
"It's hard to prove that an accumulation of rock and dirt, in an isolated, heavy manufacturing zone, poses a substantial and immediate danger to the environment," he wrote in a post-trial statement submitted to the DEC.
But though the judge ruled that the site has not been a health hazard, the dump has rendered the land unattractive. The former railyard has been rejected by at least two potential developers.
"There is a paucity of developable land in the Bronx and in New York City in general," said Tim Martin, of the Natural Resources Defense Council, which has studied studied development on the South Bronx waterfront. "But the remediation costs, if you had to clean up that site, would be staggering.
The proposed investigation will cost $100,000 to $150,000, Fleming said; full excavation and removal of the debris, if ordered by the state, could reach $8 million.