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by Melinda Tuhus
Professor Gaboury (Gabe) Benoit has been a valuable resource for the Six Lakes Park Coalition, reviewing testing done by the Olin Corporation on the soils and water of the Six Lakes property. He is a nationally recognized expert on environmental chemistry and the impacts of land development on water quality.
We thought it would be fun to learn more about how he became interested in this critical issue for public health, so we sat down via Zoom shortly after his retirement from the Yale School of the Environment to learn more.
“I’ve always liked the outdoors and science,” Gabe says. Referring back to the late 1960s, when Ohio’s Cuyahoga River was catching fire, he recalls, “It was clear even back then that there was a lot of need – pollution and harms happening to the environment… It was something I was pretty good at, and it fulfilled my interest in spending a lot of time outdoors, because I do a lot of field work.” Gabe was interested in water, in particular. “There’s a great quote that says, ‘If there’s magic on this planet, it’s contained in water.’ I’ve always been drawn to water in its various guises, as a recreational resource but also as the circulatory system of the environment.”
Gabe received his bachelor’s degree from Yale’s Department of Geology and Geophysics (1978), where he studied environmental chemistry, and went on to earn his PhD in that field from the M.I.T.-Woods Hole joint program. He started teaching environmental chemistry at Yale School of the Environment (then Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies) in 1991 and founded Yale’s Center for Coastal and Watershed Systems in 1992, acting as its faculty director for 10 years. He was also faculty director of Yale’s Hixon Center for Urban Ecology.
Gabe has recently focused some of his work on studying green infrastructure, such as the 270 bioswales that have been installed around the City of New Haven to absorb urban run-off, which is full of pollutants. “They capture runoff and direct it into the subsurface,” he explains. “It offers a no-energy, no-cost environmental cleansing capacity, if you can get it to flow down through soils before flowing into a receiving body of water.”
Gabe retired June 30 from Yale and immediately took on the role of interim director of Environment & Human Health, Inc. (EHHI), where he’s served on the board for the past ten years. The nonprofit has put out many scientific reports written for the general public on the impact on human health of plastics, synthetic turf, outdoor wood furnaces, lawn care pesticides and cell phones, to name a few topics.
Gabe sees a clear through-line between EHHI and Six Lakes. “If Six Lakes were to become a recreational system, we’d certainly be concerned about human health,” he says. “That’s why all this testing is being done, to find out what harmful chemicals are there and what possible exposure there could be, hoping the exposure would not be a problem and people could use the site for recreation.”
As for his work with Six Lakes, so far Gabe has looked at three different reports from Olin on the company’s extensive environmental testing, which has been done in phases. “It has collected soils and well waters and tested them for a bunch of contaminants they were concerned about, from many sites around the property. My role is to look at where they had sampled, what they had measured, and if that was adequate to characterize the site.” Each round of testing informs subsequent rounds, Gabe explains. “I think it’s more effective and efficient to do it this way.” He adds that he’s excited to dig into the latest report, due this fall, in which surface water test results will be shared for the first time.
Asked to summarize his conclusions about the testing at Six Lakes, Gabe says, “Quite honestly, I was impressed by how thoroughly [Olin’s consultant, WSP] did the testing analysis. It was the right samples, the right locations, and they used the proper techniques. Everything I saw was exactly the way I would have done it.”
“It’s complicated,” he adds. “There were different uses on different patches, so naturally different substances were added to different locations. There was a history of some efforts to clean things up, so in some locations they pulled up a lot of soil and carted it off, but not in other parts."
Water from Six Lakes flows into Lake Whitney, a drinking water supply reservoir, but so far, Gabe doesn’t have reservations about drinking water safety. “The Regional Water Authority does lots and lots of testing, plus, the treatment center for Lake Whitney is state of the art,” he notes.
The need for testing and remediation of pollutants at Six Lakes was put on the back burner and ignored for decades after the 1986 consent order between Olin and the CT Department of Energy and Environmental Protection (DEEP). Now, thanks in great part to Six Lakes Park Coalition members and supporters, the process has finally been rebooted. So, how important is the current testing at Six Lakes?
“The property is potentially a wonderful recreational resource,” Gabe says. He acknowledges that many are frustrated by the slow pace of "iterative sampling and analysis," which will eventually lead to the creation of a cleanup plan, but he also sees the flip side: “It’s important that we do this, and that we do it right." |
