IN A TOWN AS SMALL
AS OURS, WHEN AN
18-YEAR-OLD DIES,
EVERYONE KNOWS.
being allowed to dump its debris
in Briarcliff, Whitney promised
the fill would contain materials acceptable for dumping, such
as concrete, rocks and soil, and
wouldn’t require approval from
New York’s Department of Environmental Conservation.
Whitney gave the school a certificate of origin for 110,000 cubic
yards of fill that they unloaded in
Briarcliff. It was enough to fill 36
Olympic swimming pools.
Dirty Fill
One summer day in 1999, Fred
Pierce, a facilities manager for the
Briarcliff school, came upon two
investigators from the state’s Department of Environmental Conservation on the school’s property.
Pierce later told his bosses that
the investigators told him that
someone had filed a complaint
HUFFINGTON
08.12.12
about Whitney, and that they
didn’t think the fill was clean.
“I told them that we had documentation stating that it was good
fill, and they basically told me
that the paper I had was no good,”
Pierce later wrote in a letter to the
assistant superintendent.
DEC cited the Briarcliff school
district for improperly accepting
and disposing of construction and
demolition debris in 2001. The
district’s current lawyer, Michael
Bogin, of Sive, Paget & Riesel,
says negotiations began with the
DEC to fix the violation that same
year. The district hired the consulting firm Leggette, Brashears
& Graham to dig test pits and
install ground water monitoring
wells on the practice field.
Bogin says the school wanted to
complete its investigation of the
fill as soon as possible, but hammering out an agreement with the
DEC can take months, so the firm
began testing with an informal goahead from the agency. Bogin says
the practice field had been seeded
SUDDEN
DEATH