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| Paint sludge in Ringwood stream (photo/Jan Barry) |
More than 25 years after a US Environmental Protection
Agency official stated that all hazardous contaminants that could be found had
been removed from a Ford Motor Company dump site in Ringwood, NJ, the federal
agency is again delaying a decision on what to do about tens of thousands of
tons of tainted soil that are still in the residential neighborhood next to a
state park and New Jersey’s largest reservoir.
In a recent news release, the EPA announced it’s extending
the public comment period for Ford’s latest cleanup plan for the Ringwood Mines
Superfund site until Feb. 5. Nearly a year ago, top agency officials “reassured
about two dozen Upper Ringwood residents …
that the cleanup of the 500-acre Superfund site in their community is a
priority,” The Record of North Jersey reported.
A quarter-century ago, in 1988, an EPA official assured
residents at a public hearing that the waste site had been cleaned up by Ford
contractors who excavated material at four locations near several homes. Some
more material was removed a couple years later and the EPA closed the case,
even though more toxic paint sludge was subsequently found in a residential
backyard. But an outcry by residents and an investigation by The Record in 2005
found evidence of far-more extensive contamination, which the EPA had not
required Ford to account for or remove.
As The Record noted in an October 2005 editorial, “the
federal government, which declared Ringwood a Superfund site, has allowed Ford
to get away with shoddy cleanups time and time again. … How could Ford get away
with this for so long when the foul-smelling sludge was literally under the
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's nose? Both Ford and the feds must be
held accountable. It is long past time for a federal criminal investigation
into the sludge dumping and puny cleanup efforts.”
But, as The Record reported in December 2010, despite a
request by NJ Environmental Protection Commissioner Bradley Campbell for a
criminal investigation, “No charges were ever filed by the U.S. attorney [Chris Christie, elected New Jersey’s governor in
2009]. The state Department of Environmental Protection never pressed a case
against Ford for the pollution that reached Ringwood State Park.”
Pressed by a residents’ lawsuit, visits to the site by US
Senator Frank Lautenberg and other federal elected officials, and six years of
directives by EPA to undertake more testing and excavation, “Ford contractors
removed more than 47,000 tons of paint sludge and tainted soil,” The Record
noted in 2010.
At issue now is what to do about more than 200,000 tons of
debris laced with lead, arsenic, benzene and other hazardous chemicals that was
dumped into two iron mine shafts and a landfill near several homes and streams
feeding the Wanaque Reservoir.
Ford is seeking EPA approval to leave most of the toxic
waste in place and cover it with an earthen cap. That would approximate the
conditions at the two mines and the landfill in 1988, when the EPA assured
residents that there was nothing more to worry about.
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