Biohazard and Crime Scene Remediation in Cementon, NY

Cementon is a hamlet in the Town of Catskill in Greene County, New York, on the west bank of the Hudson River, in an area also known by the older village name of Smith's Landing.

Cementon took its name from the Portland cement industry: three Portland cement factories were built north of Smith's Landing, and their product was used to build infrastructure from Albany to New York City and beyond.

One of the plants was built by the German firm Alsen'sche Portland Cement Fabriken, and the small company hamlet of Alsen grew up between that factory and the Hudson River; the Alsen School, built in 1907, operated until 1953, when only a single student still attended.

In 1974 the Power Authority of the State of New York proposed the Greene County Nuclear Power Plant, a single 1,212-megawatt reactor, for a site at Cementon about five miles south of Catskill on the western shore of the Hudson.

Residents organized through the Cementon Civic Association to fight the nuclear plant, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission staff recommended denying the permit because of the site's socioeconomic and visual impacts, and the proposal was canceled in 1979, not long after the Three Mile Island accident.

The proposed plant would have stood in the middle of the celebrated view south from Olana, the home of Hudson River School painter Frederic Edwin Church across the river, and testimony in the licensing hearings declared Olana a national treasure.

The cement era in Cementon effectively ended when Holcim mothballed its Catskill cement plant in June 2011, leaving the factory abandoned.

Greene County's Cementon Rebirth Plan is now studying six parcels totaling roughly 1,700 acres of the old cement lands for redevelopment, backed by a $400,000 award from New York State's FAST NY program.