Smashed Toilet Phone Web Server Behold my smashed Samsung a70 smartphone. It's seen better days but it's serving up this nice webpage for your enjoyment Don't feel bad for this beat-up phone. Sure it's been smashed, then later dropped in a toilet before sitting for over a year in a bag of rice; whatever, that just adds character to the phone, right? Life Signs Our story begins after that year in a bag of rice when I found it by accident in the garage, and decided to see if there were any signs of life. After a long sit on the charger I was pleased to see that indeed there were life signs, and the readings were strong! Once charged back up to full, the phone booted up as if it were brand-new in the box! That's where the fun stopped however, as it immediately became clear that the touchscreen no longer functioned, and thus its days as a portable phone were long over. You would not be foolish to think this should be the end of the story; how are you supposed to do anything with a device you can't control? It may seem counter-intuitive but actually Android devices have pretty good mouse and keyboard support; most now even support external monitors. It stems from a desire to make the smartphone the center of your computing life. The thinking from these big tech corps is that if your phone can do everything, why even both with a desktop in the first place. That logic is debatable depending on your needs, but it helps in this case so I'll take it! The Plan I've long been interested in the possibilities for old phones that have outlived their 'portable phone' days. It might be because I remember when computers ran at 8 MHZ with 640 KB of RAM, and could do all sorts of fun things. These 'old' phones by comparison are hundreds of times more powerful than those old computers, and have all sorts of sensors and networking abilities built-in. Surely they can serve a need other than food for the recycler. While I have some neat ideas for remote control and other IoT applications, a web server is kind of like the "Hello World" of repurposing hardware. If you can get it to talk to other machines, all the other features can be bolted on afterwards. Technology Auditions The most critical part of any project, is the technology selection stage. You need to select a solid foundation for your project, that you won't regret later on. These days there are a dizzying amount of options, but surely an Android based web server isn't common, and will have fewer options. That thought didn't age well. It seems I'm not the only one looking at hobby or even commercial applications for web servers on Android phones, as there are a surprising number of options. Aside from native Java or Kotlin, there are apps built with Apache and PHP built-in; just upload your scripts and start serving. You can also get a linux command line with Termux, and install any environment you're used to. Hardware First Let's take a break from the software side, and sort out hardware first instead. Normally this is just a big a challenge as software, but since the phone isn't modular there's actually less to worry about here. The phone's WiFi works just fine but we need wired ethernet for reliability. We also want power, as the phone battery isn't going to run forever. Here's what I came up with. The USB-C hub provides power to the phone, while also supporting peripherals like the pictured USB ethernet adapter. With the other hub slots we could potentially add USB storage, cameras, printers, etc. With some careful networking setup, the phone will switch seamlessly between WiFi and ethernet (keeping the same IP address). If it's unplugged the battery takes over as normal; it's got built-in redundancy! About That Battery Undoubtedly at least one of the readers of this story will raise alarms at the prospect of keeping a lithium battery on full charge all of the time. It's a fire hazard! It can explode! I have a fair bit of experience with charging batteries of many types, and with confidence I can say that these concerns are largely overblown. Any appropriately designed battery charging system will stop charging the battery once it's fully charged. It's very easy for a charging circuit to detect when a lithium ion battery is fully charged (especially compared to NiMH), so there's little (not nothing, but little) to go wrong. Sure if the battery is already damaged that could be a problem, but then it would have been a problem anyway. There's also some suggestions out there that leaving a lithium ion battery fully charged will degrade its max capacity over time; I haven't seen any evidence of that in practice, but in our case we don't really care much about that anyway. If you're interested in some more basic facts about batteries, check out my Battery Basics article. Back to Software The first software option was an app with an AMPP stack (Apache, MySQL, PHP). It was ultra easy to setup and load files, and it just worked. If all you want is something casual, then this is probably the way to go. There were some issues with this approach, with the biggest being reliability. The app is solid but as with most apps, it will crash or get closed by android eventually. I needed something that could restart itself if it ever crashed. There's also the point about hardware I made earlier; I wanted control over the hardware in the phone (ie bluetooth, camera, SMS), and I wasn't going to get that from PHP on android. I finally decide upon a far more custom solution, built with Cordova and a variety of native plugins. For the web server I used a plugin that wraps the NanoHttpd Java web server library. This approach gives me complete control over the request-response flow, while allowing me to build hardware interactions into my responses. Anyone want to send SMS remotely over a web interface? How It's Going I've been running this setup for over a year at time of writing, and it's exceeded all my expectations. Maybe if you're reading this it's exceeded your expectations as well, since that smashed toilet phone served up this content! The app crashes or is closed around once per week, but the alarm plugin in the app on 2 minute intervals reboots the app if it's not already running. In between the reboots the web server is snappy and versatile. I have written a whole range of hardware integrations (ie Bluetooth, SMS, UART to USB Serial), and can remote control them from anywhere. Currently I'm using Cloudflare as a proxy, but that's mostly to be on the safe side; I have a second phone I use for development, and I'm able to access it directly, with router port forwarding, or with my local linux proxy. Cloudflare also takes care of the SSL certificate for me, but I have a working prototype of an ACME client for Let's Encrypt certificates, so I may even switch to my own certs at some point. Future Goals I really want to see how far I can take this, and plan to try to replace most or all of my personal and development services with an equivalent that runs on this server. I've recently completed an FTP server and client, which should allow me to move much of my development work off of my linux box. I've got some basics for SMTP which allows me to send email, but having my own SMTP server would be even cooler! I plan to open-source everything but the caveat as I see it is that it must be hosted on Git that is hosted by the phone. I've created a project I'm calling Qik to put everything under. If you're curious about how things are going, the Qik page sums everything up. If you interested in the web server portion, the Qik Node page is dedicated to the web server.
from hookswitch to grave 2026-06-14 Through decades of consolidation, reorganization, and divestiture, AT&T left a famously complicated corporate history. One of the greatest enterprises in American history, arguably the greatest enterprise, AT&T has often rivaled the federal government in the size of its budget and workforce. One of the reasons, as we well know today, was monopolization and its close relative vertical integration. AT&T was the telephone system, or at least aspired to be, and for decades the meaning of "Universal Service" was that the service was designed, built, and operated by AT&T—universally. While AT&T's tangled origins are fertile ground for the historian, they also obscure many of the early stories of telephone history. Much of the work of the early independent telephone industry has been lost in the voluminous achievements of AT&T. Even very basic facts become obscure. For example, who invented the telephone? Well, we all know the answer: Alexander Graham Bell. We have mostly forgotten that, at the time, this was a hotly contested question. One of the most prominent alternate claimants to the title was a man named Elisha Gray, today immortalized as the "Gray" in electrical distributor "Graybar," but better known in his time as an inventor of telegraph and telephone equipment. Gray contracted prototyping of some of his inventions to an upstart manufacturer and de facto Western Union spinoff, founded by Enos M. Barton (the "bar" in Graybar) and George Shawk. Impressed by Barton's operation, and at odds with Shawk on its future direction, Gray put together the money to buy out Shawk and became half-owner of the company that would reincorporate, in 1872, as Western Electric (WE). It is ironic, of course, that a man who might fairly be called one of the top enemies of Bell helped to found the company that would become one of the most important parts of the Bell System. It's not a coincidence: Gray's involvement in WE included plans to manufacture his own telephone design, for which he had filed a provisional patent. Like many of the late 20th century's telephone inventors, Gray's greatest challenge in commercializing his invention was not technical but legal. His provisional patent on a telephone transmitter, substantially similar to the one invented by Bell and possibly older, led Western Union to take take part ownership in WE to advance their own plan to compete with AT&T as a telephone company. That set off a protracted legal battle, whose end result included the termination of Gray's patent claim and Western Union's abandonment of telephony. AT&T was not the kind of company to leave things to chance, though, and least of all when it came to competition. In 1881, AT&T acquired WE. From that point on, WE was no longer a competitor, it was a core part of the Bell System: the manufacturing and supply arm of AT&T. A few decades later, WE had become the primary maker, and often sole supplier, of every piece of equipment used in the Bell telephone network. Everything from telephones to cables to central office switches were made at WE's various works. What few components WE didn't make, it sourced, through an expansive purchasing arm that negotiated orders on the behalf of the entire AT&T family. In 1925, WE had become so dedicated to the Bell System that its remaining non-telephone business, mostly local distributorships, was spun out into a separate company (Graybar). From that point forward, the Bell System was not only WE's sole shareholder but its sole customer as well. As part of the 1925 reorganization, WE's research and development arm became a new organization, jointly owned by WE and its patron AT&T: Bell Laboratories. This new organization consolidated AT&T's expanding basic science efforts with WE's manufacturing expertise, setting the stage for decades of equipment that was conceived, designed, manufactured, and used within the AT&T empire. Bell operating companies got everything they needed, from tools to the telephones themselves, via requisition to their local WE supply warehouse. Such were the needs of the growing telephone system that WE started manufacturing telephone cable in 1925, quickly became the world's largest manufacturer of wire and cable, and likely held that title continuously until the turn-down of much of its manufacturing capacity in the late 1970s. AT&T was the nation's largest private employer for much of this period, and WE accounted for about 1/6th of that workforce. Until the Carterfone decision and, for the most part, until the divestiture of AT&T in 1984, telephones were born at Western Electric. All of the phones leased by Bell Operating Companies, ranging from the classic WE 500 to explosion-proof phones for coal mine applications, were made at WE facilities like the Indianapolis Works. There were nearly 10,000 employees there, making 35,000 phones a day—and Indianapolis was not remarkable. It was just one plant of many. AT&T built its empire through innovation, but also through domination. The acquisition of WE was one of its biggest steps towards complete integration, a goal that WE would pursue through the middle of the 20th century. For example, when the Morton Salt empire indirectly led to the Teletype Corporation and the development of commercial teletypewriter networks, they bought it. Teletype was a WE company from 1930 to its end. Telephones were not only born at WE; they went there to die. During the 1920s, telephones were expensive instruments that required regular maintenance. Besides the commercial advantage, which would become more significant in later years, this aspect of telephones encouraged a full service lease model. Customers leased their phones from their telephone company in part because (prior to Carterfone) they had to, in part because the arrangement made the telephone company responsible for the phone's care. At the same time, Bell Operating Companies carefully controlled their expenses by reusing equipment as much as possible. So, when a customer signed up for telephone service, they were issued a phone. When they canceled service, or had trouble with the phone, or quite simply wanted a phone that was a different color (or an upgrade to a Trimline or a Princess), the telephone company took the phone back. It would join hundreds of other phones on a trip to the nearest WE Service Center. The same truck would likely make the return journey loaded with phones ready for customers: the service center refurbished them. Millions of telephones come back to Bell System service centers each year, many with their housings, handsets, and other molded plastic components bruised and battered. Some can be put back in shape by buffing, solvent polishing, or painting. Others wind up in piles. (Q1) The scale of WE's phone refurbishing program was remarkable. Huge workshops of WE employees inspected, cleaned, repaired, and tested each phone. Refurbished units visited a test desk for a thorough electrical checkout before they received the service center's stamp or label that they had been remanufactured for use. In the Mountain States and west, WE service centers were found in Denver, Phoenix, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle. By the 1960s, Portland and Salt Lake City had joined. Of course, despite the best efforts of all of WE's horses and all of WE's men, not all telephones can be put back together again. Much of the equipment returned to WE could not be satisfactorily refurbished. Besides, it wasn't just phones that telephone companies returned to WE, it was everything. Upgrading a crossbar exchange to an ESS? The ESS came from Western Electric, and the crossbar exchange went back to them. WE supplied telephone poles to the operating companies, and at the end of their life it took them back. Western Electric has manufactured millions of telephones, millions of miles of wire and cable, tens of thousands of manual and dial switching units, and the thousand-and-one other kinds of apparatus that go into the plant of the Bell System. It has purchased from thousands of other manufacturers the great variety of supplies that are used by the Bell System. (Q2) The majority of that output—at least what wasn't still in service during WE's decline—went back to WE for disposal, as well. That included the wire: from simple drop wires to heavy multipair cables, old wiring was routinely cut into sections and shipped back to WE—specifically, to the WE Salvage Works on Staten Island. In 1883, as the component elements of a telephone industry were swirling around New York and accreting by gravity into the shape of the Bell System, Benjamin Lowenstein arrived from Germany. Settling in New York City, he took up a business that he must have learned back in Europe: metal refining. Within a year of his arrival, the B. Lowenstein & Bro. company was smelting scrap metal from a shop in Manhattan (the brother, Moses Lowenstein, was a constant second fiddle in Benjamin's ventures until he sold his share and retired to go his own way in 1900). Lowenstein had a way of maneuvering his metals businesses into the path of technological progress. His first such success was lead, or rather an alloy of lead with tin and antimony. This specialized alloy was eutectic, meaning that it melted and solidified at a single, well-defined temperature, and a low one at that. These were exactly the requirements for feeding the newly-invented Merganthaler hot-metal typesetting machines, later known as Linotype—much as the metal came to be known as Linotype alloy. By 1890, B. Lowenstein & Bro. was the major supplier of feedstock for hot-metal typesetting in the US. Linotype metal brought in a lot of money, enough that Lowenstein looked to expand. New York City was already dense enough that it was hard to find a site for a large industrial operation. Instead, Lowenstein found land in the southern end of Staten Island, near the town of Tottenville. There, he founded the Tottenville Copper Company, Tottenville Copper grew quickly, well positioned for the new demand for copper brought about by the electrical revolution. During the 1900s, Lowenstein rebranded B. Lowenstein & Bro. as the Nassau Smelting and Refining Company and moved to consolidate it with Tottenville Copper. In 1914, as the US entered the First World War, Nassau Smelting and Refining was noted as one of four companies responsible for 90% of the country's copper exports. It's said that war is good for business, and it certainly was for Lowenstein. The war brought a pressing need for copper, and the Tottenville plant was pressed into military service. This part of the company's history is, unfortunately, well-documented due to a scandal all too familiar to our present times: on March 27th, 1918, police officers seconded to Naval Intelligence raided the Tottenville copper plant and arrested sixteen laborers—Germans and Austrians, many of them crew members of German merchant ships who had become trapped in the United States by wartime turmoil. In finding productive employment, a way to support themselves, they had made the critical mistake of taking jobs that supported the war effort. The intelligence officers spent most of the day at the plant in Tottenville, which employs about 500 workers. Practically all of them were questioned, but most of them were found to be either native Americans or naturalized citizens. The sixteen who were unable to show either that they had registered or had obtained zone permits were placed under arrest at the plant. (Q3) Because of its role in supplying copper components of artillery shells, the Tottenville smelter was considered a munitions plant, and was thus off limits to any enemy aliens who did not possess a specific movement permit issued under police supervision. A few of the sixteen arrested had not registered as enemy aliens, but most had registered and had the wrong work permit. The newspapers do not suggest that these sixteen had committed any offense other than a lapse in paperwork, but they were nonetheless "turned over to Federal Authorities for internment." The authorities were also, reportedly, investigating an allegation that a manager at the plant had made "seditious remarks." These included criticism of the Liberty Bonds used to fund the war effort, and a suggestion that American forces in France would not prevail. Fortunately for the plant manager, he was able to produce paperwork proving his citizenship, and officers deemed the evidence of his "seditious" opinions to be insufficient for charges. If the war brought good fortune to Lowenstein, peace took it away. The end of steady military contracts complicated the finances of Nassau Smelting and Refining, requiring a retooling of the plant towards other products in the difficult context of the post-war recession. A major fire at the plant, in 1923, racked up a huge repair bill and cut into production. There were personal problems, too: in the mid-1920s, Lowenstein divorced, starting a bitter multi-year legal battle over custody of his children—a question ultimately resolved in his favor, but not without the involvement of the appellate courts and an axe-wielding deputy sheriff. The financial condition of his company continued to decline as the country slid into the Great Depression. Lowenstein must have been looking for an exit. By this time, Nassau Smelting and Refining was consolidated into a 45-acre property on Staten Island straddling Mill Creek, just south of State Route 440 and between Arthur Kill Road and Page Avenue. There were two primary operations: the "red metals" complex which processed copper, and the "white metals" complex for lead and tin. Both ran primarily on reclaimed scrap, refining it into ingots ready for reuse. Conveniently, these were two categories of metals in great demand to the Bell System: copper, for wiring, and lead and tin, extensively used to coat cables and splices and as key ingredients in solder. The post-war period brought not only general economic decline, but also an increase in metals prices, stressing AT&T's supply chain. Western Electric turned its mind towards consolidation. Given the Nassau plant's proximity to WE's headquarters in New York City and plants throughout the region, WE must have already done quite a bit of business with Lowenstein's company. In 1931, they bought it. Likely because Nassau Smelting and Refining was already a well-established business, WE left it to operate as an independent subsidiary, alongside the Teletype Corporation (which was acquired at nearly the same time) and, later, the Sandia Corporation in Albuquerque—the three independent subsidiaries of Western Electric through the 1980s. By the 1940s, Nassau Smelting and Refining was processing thousands of tons of scrap each year. Most of this was disused telephone equipment and cable that had been broken down at other WE plants and then delivered to Staten Island for smelting. WE reported that about 3/5 of the nonferrous metal content of this scrap was returned to WE as high quality metal stock for manufacturing use. In the mid-1950s, Nassau Smelting and Refining provided about 16% of the Bell System's copper supply and 20% of its lead. During the Second World War, when copper became exceptionally scarce, the Nassau works provided a critical in-house metal recycling capability that not only supplied the military as a contractor but also allowed AT&T a reliable source of metal for its wartime telephone projects. During several such periods of disruption in the metal market, Nassau Smelting and Refining provided most of AT&T's supply. For AT&T, vertically integrating metal smelting thus had two key advantages: cost savings from owning its own supplier, and a degree of protection from the whims of the market. "Nassau Smelting and Refining Company is a further extension of Western Electric's constant effort to do its Bell System job better and more economically" (Q2). A 1946 newspaper article, announcing an open house at the plant with tours open to the public, gives a sense of the scale of the operation. Each day, an average of five railroad cars of scrap arrived at the plant. Stripping machines separated lead sheathing from telephone cables "like a child would peel a banana" before the remains were fed into the furnaces—enough oil to heat a house for a year kept each furnace at 2,000 degrees for one day. Lead was transferred from furnaces to kettles, 30 tons at a time, and poured into ingot molds. Much of the lead then went to the plant's on-site solder mill. Each of the presses there formed enough rosin-core solder to reach "from Tottenville to St. George [at the far end of Staten Island] and back," each day. During the mid-century, WE expanded the Nassau company's remit beyond just nonferrous metals. Nassau Smelting and Refining became WE's general broker of scrap and secondary materials, brokering cinders from telephone company power plants as a soil amendment, and iridium recovered from telephone relay contact points as a precious metal. As a subsidiary, rather than a mere component of Western Electric, Nassau was somewhat more independent of AT&T than the rest of WE. The metal operation wasn't restricted to the telephone industry, and both purchased scrap on the open market and sold metals to any buyer. Nassau was one of two bidders, for example, on an enormous post-war Naval copper supply contract. Metal refining is not a clean operation. In 1947, Nassau faced charges of "smoke annoyance" and "noxious conditions" that might have led to a criminal prosecution, were the case not forestalled the company's agreement to install a $350,000 bag house to filter furnace emissions. By this time, Nassau was called one of the nation's largest "above-ground mines." Metal recycling, while economical nearly from the beginning of metallurgy, received a surge of interest in a post-war nation that keenly remembered the shortages of the previous decade. Unlike our modern association between recycling and environmental protection, in the 1940s it was styled mostly as a new form of extractive industry: "The Nassau Smelting and Refining Company... mines the vast Bell network for valuable metals.... in 1948,.. Nassau reclaimed more copper than was produced in six of the nation's 14 major-producing states. And of 22 major lead-producing states, only four produced more than was reclaimed by Nassau." The president of Nassau at the time, William Scheuch, described "American homes, factories, and cities" as the "mines upon which modern industry depends." He noted as well that, by that time, rubber, plastics, rope, and "scores of other materials" had fallen under Nassau's responsibility. "So thrifty are Nassau's experts that even floor sweepings are cooked by incandescent heat to reclaim the last drop of metal content" (Q4). Later that year, Nassau hosted a delegation of European metallurgists discussing techniques for recycling aluminum, then a major focus of Nassau's research department. //beg// In 1956, the Staten Island Advance ran a puff piece on Nassau's production (162 million pounds of scrap converted into 138 million pounds of saleable metal in 1955) immediately next to the headline "Smog Growing Problem." In 1958, the same newspaper carried an editorial by Nassau's new president, Arthur Fegel, under the headline "Nassau Battles Air Pollution." In some ways, the piece is a celebration of the company's 75th anniversary, but the headline betrays an underlying political struggle. "Just as good families are good neighbors,.. an industrial concern like Nassau devotes much attention to being a good citizen in its own neighborhood" (Q5). This was the preface to an announcement, at the end of the article, that Nassau was about to build a new furnace that would burn the insulation off of wire. The exhaust, he promised, would be "clean as a whistle." In the early 1960s, Nassau underwent a wave of expansion, including new office and warehouse facilities on the north side of the property. The plant had become one of the major employers of Staten Island, with a payroll including "12 fathers and their 14 sons." The Staten Island Railroad operated a train station for the plant's employees, called Nassau, and expanded it in the early 1970s. The plant was one of their largest freight customers as well, with an industrial siding just off of the station. In 1971, the Deputy Commissioner of the New York Department of Air Resources paid a visit, or rather a "sniff," in part to confirm that Nassau had complied with an order to stop burning lead away in furnaces. "In terms of other smelters in New York City, it is fairly clean; but that doesn't mean it is in compliance with all the standards" (Q6). The 1970s were, for the Bell System, the beginning of the end. An upstart subsidiary of the Southern Pacific Railroad waged an intense legal battle against AT&T's monopoly, won the right to compete on long-distance service, and renamed itself to Sprint before merging with principal AT&T competitor GTE. Corning demonstrated a new communications technology based on light trapped in glass fibers; by 1980 the manufacturing technique for these new cables had become refined enough that they presented a lower-cost option compared to AT&T's coaxial and microwave network (Bell Laboratory's alternate plan for the future of communications, long-distance microwave waveguide, was stillborn). At the same time, the American environmental movement hit its stride. The Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency; each of these steps imposed new requirements on an aging metal plant that had long been considered a major polluter. Wastewater from metal separation processes, a slurry of heavy metals and petrochemicals and God only knows what else, was redirected from Mill Creek to the site's first water treatment plant in 1973. That plant separated the contaminants into a dried sludge, which for years was simply piled up under the approach ramp of the Page Avenue bridge. Later, this sludge was processed to extract precious metals, but that modest revenue didn't make up for the capital investment. It wasn't a good time to be an expensive part of Western Electric: facing declining revenues, labor unrest, and the weakening state of its sole benefactor AT&T, WE entered the late 1970s as a company in decline. WE started backing away from its integrated salvage operation: sometime in the late 1970s, the remaining metal recycling operations at Nassau were contracted to a company called C&D Recycling, which assumed management of part of the Nassau plant. Copper smelting operations at Nassau ended in 1981, beginning a multi-year decommissioning and demolition process for the Red Metals complex. The main copper processing building was razed by 1985, but in the mean time, the entire Bell System had met a worse fate: divestiture. Antitrust lawsuits against AT&T, brewing throughout the 1970s, leading to a 1982 settlement agreement that required the dismantling of the Bell System over the following years. On the first day of 1984, the Bell Operating Companies became independent corporations, over 2/3rds of AT&T gone overnight. Western Electric went along with them: one of the key findings of the antitrust case was that AT&T had built and maintained a monopoly through vertical integration so extensive that it deprived their competition of equipment and supplies. AT&T was able to partially mitigate the unwinding of their vertical integration: by agreeing to completely divest the operating companies, it won terms on which Western Electric could remain an AT&T company, under a new name. AT&T had agreed to end use of the trademarks most associated with their nationwide monopoly, including not just "Bell System" itself but the Western Electric name and logo. WE was reorganized, with some divisions meeting other fates, but most of the company became AT&T Technologies. As part of the settlement, AT&T had gotten relief on various restrictions imposed on them by previous antitrust cases, including a key prohibition on Western Electric marketing general-purpose computers. While there was some initial optimism that that small victory would allow the new AT&T Technologies to take on the likes of IBM, it didn't work out that way. A series of poor decisions, several fundamental missteps, and no doubt some plain bad luck had Western Electric, and its close partner Bell Laboratories, on the downhill. Post-divestiture, Nassau Smelting and Refining took on a new identity: AT&T Nassau Metals. As part of the settlement agreement, Bell Operating Companies could no longer be required to purchase equipment and supplies from WE. The Bell telephone market was suddenly open to competitive manufacturers such as the Canadian company Northern Electric (later Nortel), itself a fragment of Western Electric that had broken away when a 1950s antitrust case led to a settlement agreement that WE would divest its foreign operations. On top of the Carterfone decision and divestiture making consumer telephones a competitive market, WE found its business seriously undermined. The 1980s saw closure of many of WE's largest plants, Nassau not excepted. The White Metals complex at Nassau continued longer, shutting down in 1991 with demolition starting in 1996. The last manufacturing operations at AT&T Nassau Metals, by then limited only to electroplating, ended in 2001. Nassau had actually outlived its parent, WE, which was renamed to Lucent Technologies and made independent in 1996. By that time, AT&T Nassau Metals had been renamed to simply the Nassau Metals Corporation, and existed primarily to manage the closure and remediation of the Tottenville site. All of the original, 1930s-era manufacturing buildings were found south of Mill Creek and had been demolished by 2000. The newer 1960s era buildings, an office building and a warehouse north of Mill Creek, were leased to a developer who found various commercial tenants. Most of the site remained abandoned in its post-demolition state for the next twenty years, though: a formidable environmental recovery was required before reuse. The Nassau Metals site was investigated by the EPA for inclusion on the National Priorities List as a superfund site during the 1990s, but was ultimately not nominated. The main reason was simple: the Potentially Responsible Party was the Nassau Metals Corporation, a subsidiary of AT&T, a company that was still very much alive. With some cajoling by environmental authorities, AT&T agreed to avoid the federal CERCLA process by entering the New York Department of Environmental Conservation's Voluntary Cleanup Program (VCP). Many environmental authorities offer something like the VCP: one of the reasons that contaminated industrial sites, often called brownfields, tend to stay that way is the uncertainty and liability involved in environmental contamination. Real estate developers are understandably hesitant to commit to a property that may require an enormously expensive remediation in the future. The VCP provides an alternative: when a company participates in the VCP, they develop a comprehensive plan for site remediation—at their expense—that is mutually agreed with and supervised by the Department of Environmental Conservation. In exchange for the land owner completing the approved remediation plan, the Department of Environmental Conservation makes a binding agreement not to impose further requirements in the future. In other words, it's a legal arrangement to settle on what level of cleanup is "good enough," so that future owners of the property are protected from expensive surprises. For remediation purposes, the Nassau site was divided into three Operable Units. The largest, OU1, includes the primary industrial area where both the Red Metals and White Metals facilities had been located. From a 1991 Site Investigation Report to the 2011 Final Engineering Report, remediation contractors identified extensive contamination of the soil throughout the site, and downstream on Mill Creek, with lead and other heavy metals. It was found, for example, that a substantial portion of OU1 was built on artificial infill of a former wetland. The fill material, in line with standard practice in the 1930s, is best described as "assorted trash." Everything from construction debris to domestic garbage to old telephones had been piled up and compacted, and then factory buildings put on top of it all. Every time there was a storm, Mill Creek surged against its south bank and washed some of it away, downstream, into Arthur Kill. Particulate contamination from these materials could be identified out into the ocean. During the 2000s, contractors dredged Mill Creek and parts of Arthur Kill, temporarily dammed Mill Creek to facilitate further excavation, stabilized the banks of Mill Creek by geotechnical methods, developed new wetland areas on other parts of Arthur Kill at a 3:1 ratio to the area permanently disturbed by the site, replanted vegetation, and cleaned out storm sewers that had been contaminated by runoff from Nassau. These were all secondary efforts, though, in comparison to the largest remediation activity. The majority of the site, on both sides of Mill Creek, were covered with an engineered barrier of soil, stone, geosynthetic clay liner, and asphalt, intended to ensure that the contaminated soil will remain on site. It is simply too large of a volume to practically be removed, and even if it was, the degree of the contamination is so severe that it would be difficult to find a facility licensed to dispose of it. We tend to think of nuclear waste in the most severe terms, a contaminant that we can never be rid of, pretending that this is somehow an unusual outcome. The reality is much worse: permanent on-site entombment is one of the most common fates of industrial contamination, and there are tens of thousa
They hide everywhere. No longer!