Cost Snags Onondaga Lake Clean Up : New York: Everyone agrees that the 5-mile-long stew of mercury, ammonia, phosphorous, PCBs, benzene and cyanide can be purified. But the $1-billion price tag has agencies and firms diving for cover.

The scars of more than a century’s worth of industrial and municipal dumping in Onondaga Lake can be healed and one of the nation’s most polluted lakes can be restored to a thriving waterway.

Everyone agrees about that.

Scientists and engineers have developed a strategy to bring fishing and swimming back to the 5-mile-long lake on Syracuse’s northern border. They even believe that salmon can flourish again in the lake by the end of the century.

The bigger question--and the one that continues to slow the lake’s restoration--is who will pay the more than $1 billion bill for the cleanup.

While politicians and businessmen fence over liability questions with state and federal environmental officials, pollution of the lake continues.

“We are still in the denial stage,” said Tim Mulvey, executive director of the Onondaga Lake Management Conference, which was created by Congress in 1990 to design and implement a cleanup plan. “But it’s time to recognize that the longer we wait, the more expensive the solutions become.”

Onondaga Lake holds a special place in central New York’s history.

The great Indian chief Hiawatha once canoed on the lake. It was the birthplace of the Iroquois Indian confederacy. The salt springs that once flowed along the shore attracted European settlers in the early 1700s and gave rise to the salt industry that spawned the city of Syracuse.

Before the turn of the century, Onondaga Lake supported a bustling sport fishery and was the home of elegant resorts, bathing beaches and an amusement park.

The lake’s decline began after 1884 when the Solvay Process Co., later to become Allied-Signal Corp., started producing soda ash on the south shore. By 1901, ice harvesting was prohibited because of industrial pollution from Solvay Process. Later corporate polluters included Crucible Specialty Metals, Bristol Myers and the Carrier Corp., officials said.

The lake’s deterioration was hastened by sewage flowing into it. Swimming was banned in 1940. Thirty years later, fishing was banned after the discovery of dangerous levels of mercury in the fish.

Today, lake waters are a toxic stew of mercury, ammonia, phosphorous, PCBs, benzene, cyanide and other pollutants.

During a survey of the lake bottom last year for the management conference, a researcher also reported finding a virtual junkyard of abandoned cars, sunken barges, discarded tires and rims and broken dishes. Only five kinds of plants were found growing in the lake’s contaminated sediment.

There has been some progress on the lake’s restoration, but it is minimal considering the time, effort and funds ($7.7 million) already spent.

A diversion channel has been dug to reduce the flow of some sediments into the lake, and scientists have reintroduced several species of aquatic plants.

Congress has appropriated an additional $3.9 million this year to continue planning the cleanup and operate the lake conference.

Mulvey and biologist Steve Effler of the Upstate Freshwater Institute, one of the leading experts on Onondaga Lake, agree that the dumping of treated and raw sewage into the lake must be addressed first.

The county’s sewage treatment plant generates nearly 60% of the phosphorous that contaminates the lake and more than 90% of the ammonia.

And, about 50 times a year, experts say rainstorms cause sewers to overflow, sending untreated human wastes into the lake. Each time, bacteria counts exceed state health code limits.

“Before we can talk about cleaning up the lake, we have to stop polluting it,” Mulvey said.

The management conference favors diverting the effluent into the nearby Seneca River through a combination of new and existing pump stations and pipelines. Because of its current, the river is better able to disperse the effluent, scientists say.

Such a solution could cost between $522 million and $857 million, officials estimate.

A 1989 federal court consent judgment makes Onondaga County ultimately liable for bringing discharges into compliance with state and federal water pollution standards, according to Doug Ward, the state’s chief environmental litigator in the case.

Cleanup of the mercury and other industrial pollutants in Onondaga Lake and along its shore is being addressed in a separate consent decree and several administrative consent orders worked out with Allied.

But Onondaga County Executive Nicholas Pirro has opposed the plan and advocated a go-slow approach while seeking guarantees that the state and federal governments will shoulder at least 75% of the costs.

Pirro said the county alone simply cannot afford to pay for the options proposed by the management conference.

“If we are spending this kind of money cleaning up the lake, it certainly is not going to be available for those other programs,” Pirro said. “I have a difficult time deciding to put fish over children.”

The county’s stance has irritated Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-N.Y.), who sponsored the creation of the management conference.

“There is a leakage of reality in Onondaga County when they think someone else will pay,” he recently told the New York Times. “I will do what I can, but the county will have to pay for the cleanup principally on its own. The time for grants is gone.”

Onondaga Lake Facts

* Onondaga Lake is along the northern end of Syracuse in Upstate New York.

* It covers 4.6 square miles and receives water from a land area of 248 square miles, located almost entirely in Onondaga County.

* It has a mean depth of 35 feet and a maximum depth of 63 feet.

* Known contaminants include ammonia, mercury, phosphorous, PCBs, chlorinated benzenes, petroleum products, salts and pathogenic organisms.

* Swimming has been banned since 1940.

* In 1970, it was closed to fishing because of mercury contamination. In 1986, the lake was reopened to fishing on a “catch and release” basis with a health advisory warning against eating fish from the lake.

Source: Associated Press