The warehouse site today is empty of buildings. How much longer the uranium will remain, Roos said, is impossible to know. "We just began this whole process early this year," he said. "So we're just starting down the road."
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There, in a 1.28-acre slice of manicured lawn lined with trees and benches, EPA investigators researching the Jewett White Lead Company site last spring found traces of lead. A city Parks Department follow-up, a Department of Health spokeswoman said, found amounts of lead that were below the safe recommended limit. But the tests also found arsenic, throughout the park, in levels that exceeded the safe limit.
The park is a popular neighborhood hub and residents were concerned, but the Parks Department, spokeswoman Meghan Lalor said, "determined that there was no immediate health risk from soil in the park." Still, in work that began last spring and continued into the fall, the department capped the park's lawns and planting beds with wood chips, a layer of fabric, clean topsoil, mulch and fresh plantings.
With that, Lalor said, the Parks Department considers the matter closed. Some residents, though, are unsatisfied.
Thurman maintained that the continued presence of the tainted soil, albeit under a layer of clean soil, is troubling. "There are still children that go in that park," she said. "I had to walk over and tell the moms, ‘Tell your kids to stop digging in the dirt, because it has arsenic and lead in the soil and it's poisonous.'"
Terry Troia, a member of the board of the Port Richmond Improvement Association, a local civic group, was more optimistic, and said the city had met most of her group's expectations.
Still, she said, there are two more things she would like to see. The first is new testing to ensure that the new topsoil is clean. The second is a study to solve the enduring mystery of where the lead – and especially the arsenic – in the park came from.
"Chances are it's from another century," Troia said. "But nobody knows. It's all guesswork."
Meanwhile, at the Jewett White Lead site, two blocks away, work continues. Last summer the EPA tested more than a dozen other locations around the neighborhood, to see if contamination from the former lead factory had spread. In March, it released findings stating that while neighboring properties did have elevated lead levels, they were not related to the Jewett site's contamination. More likely, the agency found, lead found around houses in the area is from peeling paint.
This is the first of a three-part series on environmental concerns affecting Staten Island. Read Part 2 here and Part 3 here.
