ot just wanted to post an example of how companies worked in the old days.. i hope old days.
Superfund cleanup - live and close-up
In Toms River, the public can view the removal of drums of chemical waste.
By Jacqueline L. Urgo
Inquirer Staff Writer
TOMS RIVER, N.J. - From a 20-foot pit of deep-orange earth on the sprawling Ciba-Geigy Chemical Corp. grounds, 35,000 rusted drums containing chemical waste are being pulled out one by one.
This is a 1,350-acre Superfund site - one of about 150 in New Jersey that are considered by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to be priority for cleanup.
Here, electronic monitors measuring air quality abound, and two dozen workers are covered head-to-toe in breathing masks and white Tyvek suits because they are not sure what will come out of the ground.
But this place, once home to the largest and most revered employer in Ocean County, is probably the most high-profile of all the sites on the New Jersey list.
For the first time in the history of Superfund cleanups in the region, the public has a front-row seat for the drum-remediation process, which began in January.
It is an EPA-ordered cleanup that is expected to take more than eight years and cost Ciba Specialty Chemicals, formerly Ciba-Geigy, more than $94 million, officials said.
"We've had sections of other sites open in the past, but we have gone out of our way to make this one accessible because Ciba has always been such a huge part of the community and we felt it was needed to tell the full story here," said Romona Pezzella, EPA Region 2 site manager, who is overseeing the project.
It is a story that has had a lot of twists and turns but has always been at the forefront of whatever has gone on in the Toms River section of Dover Township, according to Township Commissioner Len Colica.
"For a long time, Ciba-Geigy was a giant in this community," said Colica, who volunteers on the township's environmental commission. "Just about everybody had some relationship to it in some way, whether they worked for the company or some member of their family did or they just lived near it."
Colica said just what would become of the Ciba property once the cleanup was finished was now a concern for local officials because it is the largest open tract of land left in Dover Township.
On what was once a rural site, the company formerly known as Toms River Chemical began in 1952 to produce dyes, epoxy resins and specialty chemicals used in the manufacture of clothing and household textiles.
The company buried solid and liquid wastes from the manufacturing process on the site, which are suspected of causing extensive soil and groundwater contamination on the property and in the wells of homes in the surrounding neighborhoods that grew up around the plant over the years.
Toms River Chemical was merged into Ciba-Geigy Chemical Corp. in the 1970s, and by then, the factory employed more than 4,000 workers - many of them residents of the Toms River area, where the population hovered then at around 10,000 people.
But in the 1980s, Ciba scaled back its production operations, and hundreds were laid off. And as the area's relationship with - and dependency on - Ciba cooled, the state Department of Environmental Protection discovered that the company had for years been burying drums of chemical wastes on 20 acres at the plant.
By the early 1990s, some residents were trying to link a high incidence of childhood cancers with Ciba and other companies that had been operating in Toms River.
In the mid-1990s, operations ceased at Ciba. In 2001, Ciba, along with Union Carbide Corp. and United Water Resources - without admitting fault - settled a $13.27 million lawsuit brought by some of the families of the affected children.
While statisticians have found other areas of the country with anomalous data, Toms River has ultimately become one of the few substantiated "cancer clusters" in the nation. The findings of a five-year study released in 2001 by the federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry found that prenatal exposure to polluted air and water in Toms River was associated with unusually high levels of leukemia in girls.
Ciba officials would not comment on the study or the lawsuit, saying only that no link between the chemical giant and the cancer cluster had ever been proved.
But Shelley Lynnworth, whose son died of brain cancer at age 18, cannot help but wonder whether the contamination at Ciba had something to do with her son's death.
The Lynnworth family used to live on Cardinal Drive, the closest neighborhood street to the area of the plant where the drums were buried.
Seventeen years after Randy Scott Lynnworth's death, his mother returned recently to see the remediation in progress.
"It was just as I thought it would be," Shelley Lynnworth said. "Just deteriorated drums that once held dangerous chemicals."
Lynnworth was among those who recently climbed to the top of a primitive, open-air two-story platform that has been built several hundred yards away from the giant pit where the rusty chemical barrels are being removed.
From the decades of decay, some of the drums literally fell apart at the seams as a crane delivered them to workers standing on the edge of the pit. Many onlookers were surprised that the drums were not oozing liquids but seemed to contain nothing more than clumps of dirt or chunks of mud, the EPA's Pezzella said.
Pezzella explained that might be because the drums never actually contained pure liquid chemicals, but instead were used to dispose of solids that had built up on machinery used in the production of the chemicals.
Additional viewing areas are expected to be opened on the property so the public may see how the approximately 150,000 cubic yards of contaminated soil found inside the drums and in the pit will be cleaned, or bioremediated.
Construction of the huge bioremediation facility is expected to be completed in April.
Nearby, a groundwater-treatment facility - built in 1996 at the start of the cleanup - is treating water on the site found to contain volatile organics created from the decades of chemical manufacturing. The system prevents untreated water from seeping into the groundwater, the nearby wetlands or the Toms River.
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Contact staff writer Jacqueline L. Urgo at 609-823-9629 or jurgo@phillynews.com |
