GUILDERLAND — “I wish Pete Buttner could be here,” said Ted Ausfeld, the day before he and Charles Rielly received awards from the Army Corps of Engineers.

The two received Commander’s Certificates of Appreciation for their efforts, which spanned more than three decades, to see the toxins at the site of the old Army depot in Guilderland Center remediated. The site is now home to the Northeastern Industrial Park.

Ausfeld was referring to the late Peter Buttner, an environmentalist who was one of the original leaders of the fight, but who dropped out after suffering a stroke.

On Wednesday, Ausfeld and Rielly received Commander’s Certificates of Appreciation signed by Colonel Caldwell, commander of the New York District of the United States Army Corps of Engineers. The certificates were handed to the men by Gregory J. Goepfert of the Army Corps, who became project manager of the cleanup 15 years ago.

Both men’s awards say, in part, that their “vigilant approach served to facilitate clean-up actions at areas of concern, completion of detailed remedial investigations, closure of a landfill, and remediation of a residential, school and industrial park property.”

Ausfeld’s certificate adds that he suggested streamlining the administrative process by combining the closeout of areas of concern and this helped to avoid unnecessary effort and cost. He also worked with the media to highlight progress on cleanup efforts, which made it easier to secure funding.

Rielly said he made pointed suggestions to ensure that remedial investigations considered every facet of the safety of students using the nearby Guilderland school district’s sports fields, which resulted in a magnetometer study showing that no hazards remained. Rielly also suggested that vibrational impacts from a working railroad nearby be considered in the design of the landfill cap and cover system, ensuring its future integrity.

“It’s not just us,” Ausfeld told The Enterprise. “It’s all the people who attended the meetings back then.”

Both men are retired. Ausfeld ran the town of Guilderland’s water treatment plant, and Rielly was a teacher in the Schenectady City School District.

Ausfeld said he recently looked over the minutes of the first meeting of the advisory board. “There were 27 or 28 people who attended that meeting,” he said.

The site was set up as a depot in 1941 to serve as a storage center for the military during World War II. The Army buried waste on the site, some of it hazardous.

The Army Corps’s work in the area is far from done, Ausfeld said. There is a lot of vacant land in the Northeast Industrial Park, and a permanent warning is needed to alert anyone who may want to build within the park or in the immediate area to the possible presence of toxins in the ground.

“The Army Corps is not going to be done for a long time. But they made a good clean effort,” Ausfeld said.

Besides the toxins that may remain in the land, other ongoing concerns are the Black Creek and the Watervliet Reservoir. The Black Creek surrounds the industrial park and then feeds the reservoir, Ausfeld said. There is always the potential for a problem, he said, if there were a spill or accident, since stormwater drainage goes straight into the Black Creek.

The Watervliet Reservoir is the source of Guilderland’s drinking water.

At some point, Ausfeld said, the city of Watervliet or the town of Guilderland “or whoever decides to take on the complicated problem of the reservoir” will need to do core testing of the mud at the bottom of the reservoir. “Someday they’re going to need to clean the reservoir, which they should have done already. It’s going to have to happen within our lifetimes,” Ausfeld said.

Ausfeld has left all of his “important papers” with the Guilderland Public Library so that someone else can more efficiently look at the reservoir, for instance, and see what has already been done.

Corrected on June 13, 2017, to change the spelling of Charles Rielly's last name.