The Express-Times lay in wait to pounce on my May 4, 2007, blog posting, titled “$111 Million (Actually, $222 Million) Fraud,” in reporter Kurt Bresswein’s article, Lesson in development success steps away,” dated May 6, 2007, only two days after my blog posting of Friday, May 4, 2007.

Specifically, The Express-Times’s article responds to my allegation that “This toxic property [meaning the 1600- to 1800-acre former Bethlehem Steel Corporation property] remains an unremediated Superfund site.”

The claim of Kerry Wrobel of Lehigh Industrial Parks VII and Sands BethWorks LLC casino construction manager Frank Devlin that the contaminated former industrial site has been remediated is not true.

The “remediation” contractor, Brandenburg Industrial Service Company, a tenant of the poisonous site, has merely paved, or what it calls “capped,” the poisonous site with new and/or renovated buildings like the Riverport luxury condomiums with their impervious parking lot, Starters Pub with its paved-over parking lot, and roads like Commerce Center Boulevard, financed by $13.1 million dollars of taxpayer money from Northampton County’s   2001 $111 million ($222 million) bond.

Brandenburg Industrial Service obviously did not take into account the increased storm-water runoff these huge expanses of impervious area will create.

This runoff would generate remediation of its own, as required by state of Pennsylvania statute and Northampton County and City of Bethlehem ordinances and regulations governing storm-water runoff.

The contaminated site, located along the southern shore line of the Lehigh River, is already turning this second largest Delaware River tributary with its estuary in Easton, Pennsylvania (the other tributary being the Schulkill River with its estuary in Philadelphia) into a veritable “Love-Less  Canal.”