COPAKE — A major state road through Columbia County reopened Friday, more than seven weeks after a section closed due to a crash between a tanker truck carrying gasoline and a car.
The crash, at the intersection of state Route 23 and county Route 7 in eastern Columbia County, killed the car’s occupants, Janet K. Piwowarski, 76, and her husband, John Piwowarski, 78. The tanker truck rolled onto the yard of a vacant church, ruptured and spilled thousands of gallons of gasoline into the ground and a tributary of the Taghkanic Creek.
The state’s Departments of Environmental Conservation and Transportation worked for weeks to clean up the area, excavating the yards of the church and nearby properties, placing floats on the tributary to strain gasoline out of the water and digging up Route 23. Both lanes of the road were closed for the remediation, with drivers redirected on a two-mile detour on local roads that bypassed three local businesses — a pizzeria, a grocer and a restaurant — who took a financial hit from the closure…