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Exactly what’s going on at 40 Berry in Williamsburg, which has been the site of a large spill of what appeared to be oil, is unclear. The large property carries a city “e” designation, which means there are environmental issues associated with it and that certain “protocols” have to be followed as it’s developed. A report prepared for GL by the firm Toxics Targeting indicates a wide variety of issues in close proximity the future site of the big luxe rental building. The property was home to a trucking company and had a number of fuel storage tanks on site. (Neighbors say some tanks might have been ruptured as they were being removed.) The site is a couple of hundred feet from the Manufactured Gas Plant once known as the Williamsburgh Works, one of two such facilities in the area. (The other was on Kent Avenue at N. 12 Street.) Per the report: “The Wythe Avenue (Berry Street) Holder Station is comprised of ten parcels of land…The site is bounded by North 13th Street, North 12th Street and Wythe Avenue. The gas holder and associated buildings operated at the site from sometime between 1887 and 1905 until sometime between 1951 and 1965. The current land use for the parcels includes industrial and manufacturing.” Like most such sites in Brooklyn, the extent of the contamination and its spread is still being determined. Most manufactured gas facilities left behind a highly toxic substance known as coal tar deep underground. Coal tar can also move around underground and spread a distance from the original source. It’s unclear if it is related to the contamination that has surfaced but an email that came with the report says the “tar is a highly contaminated material made up of ‘polynuclear aromatic hydrocarbons‘ or PAHs. This material contains many of the same cancer-causing chemicals found in cigarette smoke. The uncontrolled release of these materials could be a major public health concern.”

The Toxics Targeting report lists dozens of nearby properties with environmental issues, a handful of them serious and many of a more minor nature. The Toxics Targeting reports draw data from all the environmental databases and analyze them together to show the full picture of contamination around a a site. The firm notes that it’s been doing a lot of reports on properties in the area and that it “seems like development might be robust.”