Agreement to clean up gas sites in Brooklyn and Nassau County

After (Google Earth)

Before (Virtual Earth)

Agreement to clean up gas sites in Brooklyn and Nassau County

I worked on the archaeology of one in Saratoga Springs, NY. "After and Before" from on-line public aerial photos. The brick gas-holder is now on the US National Register of Historic Places thanks to local participation. Gas-holders floated on vertical rails though inside of a brick tower with water in the tank below ground to seal the gas in. They stored the manufactured "coal gas" and as "city gas" lit the public and private lights of Saratoga Springs, manufactured across Excelsior Ave. from "Old Red Spring". The EPA mandated clean-up site was on a geologic fault with an underground concrete drainage tunnel under it, robot video-taped as a suspect, by the company also working on the US Navy facilities in Connecticut. The Niagara Mohawk electric utility yard was also on the border of two geological zones, the Adirondack and the Taconic regions. The rectangular underground drain may have drained into nearby Lake Loughberry. It looks like they dug up the much of site leaving the early electrical generating plant and moved the brick circular gas-holder once used as a garage away to empty its toxic potential. Most of the "historic" coal tar was once probably removed and spread in unknown locations I was told until a use was found for it. Holy cow, was it! It began the chemical revolution in the 1870s, and from it, aspirin, fabric dyes, synthetics, etc., were created from it, primarily in Germany at first to great profit. There had been a number of other cylinders and tanks, one a twin of the surviving gas-holder, the ruins of which we re-located and mapped in a cesium magnetometer survey in the then active yard next to a large regional natural gas line. Other tanks and manufacturing remains, some all metal, had been scrapped but survived in the ground. Historically it was also next to a rail line and one of the maps show a transition to "coal oil" storage perhaps resulting from the "cooking" of coal for the "city gas". Nearby to the north, near Wilton, former President Ulysses S. Grant passed away after completing his memoirs. The site, Mount MacGregor, is on a correctional facility grounds

"Agreement to clean up gas sites in Brooklyn and Nassau County"