I never pretended I was an expert, and never stated I was. About the lake...swim if you wish, but 165,000 lbs of mercury will still be in the lake after clean up.
When the
Record of Decision was released for Onondaga Lake in 2005, the Onondaga Nation had serious concerns about its adequacy. Although Sunday's article makes much of the $1 billion spent between Honeywell and Onondaga County on the lake remediation and the lake water quality improvements, it is important to remember that Honeywell's expenditure is less than half of that amount. In the 2005 Record of Decision, Honeywell's cost was estimated at $451 million, less than a quarter of the cost of the full removal of $2.157 billion. And there is a tremendous amount of mercury that will remain in Onondaga Lake. Recall that the current remedy is removing, based on 2005 estimates, about 2,653,000 cubic yards of sediments -- a large volume, surely, but it is just over one-tenth of the 20,121,000 cubic yards that would have been required to remove all of the mercury from the lake where, it is estimated that over 7 million cubic yards of sediment are contaminated with mercury. Contamination extends at least 25 feet into lake sediments in some areas.
Estimates indicate that Honeywell and its predecessor companies released as much as 165,000 pounds of mercury into Onondaga Lake -- most of which will remain after the dredging.
