Judge halts blasting at reservoir

By N. Clark Judd

A state Supreme Court judge has ordered the city to postpone blasting at the Jerome Park Reservoir at least until a Sept. 3 hearing.

Justice Betty Owen Stinson imposed a temporary restraining order that bars contractors employed by the city Department of Environmental Protection from blasting at the site, just off Goulden Avenue.

Van Cortlandt Village resident Ezra Glaser, working as a pro-bono attorney on behalf of Assemblyman Jeffrey Dinowitz, City Councilman Oliver Koppell, the Bronx Council for Environmental Quality and leaders of the citizen monitoring committee set up by the DEP, charged the DEP with deception and said it was imposing new plans without giving residents a chance to evaluate them and without an environmental review.

“Given the potential significant impact of this blasting, we want an environmental review,” Mr. Dinowitz said last night, after the hearing.

The application for a restraining order echoed concerns expressed by residents about vibration, dust and debris from blasting, as well as the impact of as many as 90 trucks a week carting debris from the reservoir.

The route chosen — from Goulden Avenue to Bedford Park West, to Jerome Avenue, then to Fordham Road and finally onto the Major Deegan Expressway — has drawn jeers because it passes Lehman College and Monroe College. It also requires trucks to travel under the elevated subway tracks, which Mr. Dinowitz believes are too low to accommodate the vehicles.

Blasting was specifically excluded in the environmental impact statement issued in 2004, which warned of vibration-sensitive equipment in the schools on the nearby “Education Mile,” including the Bronx High School of Science and Lehman College.
Court papers argue that “the DEP has no authority to make the decision to begin blasting at the Jerome Park Reservoir without a new, supplemental or amended Environmental Assessment or Review.”

At a July 15 public meeting, DEP Deputy Commissioner Anne Canty said that blasting would begin in August, and said the agency was working on an internal study of the environmental impact that confirmed DEP’s opinion that it would be less noisy and less risky than its original plan, to excavate a shaft by drilling and remove debris through a tunnel to the plant in Van Cortlandt Park.

DEP officials say that the original plan to use overgrown jackhammers called hoe rams would make more noise and take longer than blasting.

Although DEP officials initially said they wanted to start blasting in August, the city now says it always intended to wait until it completed an internal environmental review.

“DEP is currently in the process of finalizing its environmental review of proposed project changes, including the possibility of shifting from hoe ramming to blasting for rock excavation at the Jerome Park Reservoir site, and will not make any final decision regarding the use of blasting until that review is completed,” said Susan Amron, deputy chief of the environmental law division of the city’s law department, in a statement.
 

This is part of the July 31, 2008 online edition of The Riverdale Press.

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