Warning: Toxins Ahead
By Mary Ann Reilly
23 June 2008
My mom taught me to always clean up after myself. "Make a mess, Mary Ann," she would say, " And it's your responsibility to clean it up."
Moms are smart that way.
Guess such pertinent advice though doesn't pass muster with big corporate dogs, like the Ford Motor Company. During the last 20 years, Ford has been unable to properly clean up the illegal dumping of toxins it did in a neighborhood in Ringwood, NJ.
This 500-acre site, located in a residential community, was used by the Ford Company to dump toxic paint sludge from its Mahwah plant from 1967 through 1971. In 2008, there are homes located less than 300 feet from the photographs I took of the contaminated soil that remains on site as of Monday, June 23, 2008. According to New Jersey State Senator Kevin O'Toole, "Ford is beginning to demobilize its cleanup crews." I was on site tonight. It looks pretty much abandoned.
In talking with families who live on top of this toxic mess, they indicated that the uncovered contaminated soil blows through their property. I walked a little less than 300 feet from a residential neighborhood through some woods to take the photograph of the uncovered soil. There is also debris from the site scattered throughout the woods.
The federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) made the Ringwood Mines a Superfund site in 1983, then deleted it in 1994, and then realized after citizens protested that there was more sludge that had not been removed and was seeping literally into the lives of the people who live there.
Bickering among Ford, EPA and town officials as to who was responsible for the mess took up the next several years and finally, in 2004, the removal of an additional 8,600 tons of sludge began.
Meanwhile, the families in this neighborhood live with extraordinary uncertainty, increased incidents of cancer, asthma, rashes, and bronchitis.
Can't the EPA do something? How does a company (and its shareholders) turn its back on the mess it created? One neighbor told me he just hopes each day someone will come and take the contaminated soil away.
Doesn't look like anyone is planning to show up anytime soon.
And so on these early days of summer as the Ford Company washes its hands of its complicity, the young children who live in close proximity to this Superfund site ride their bikes like kids do across the United States, play on the dusty roads, and tramp through woods, sometimes barefooted, and splash through creeks. Their future seems precarious, at best. As Senator Kevin O'Toole recently commented: "Kids are playing in contaminated paint sludge and this is obviously a real medical problem. There seems to be a huge cover-up and it is very frustrating."
As I was getting ready to leave the site, I asked Joe (a pseudonym), "What's that strange bird cage? I've seen them at each site."
Joe, who has lived in the area for many years, explained that the company charged with clean up, Arcadis, used to keep a mechanism that tested air quality so that the workers could vacate the area if the air became too polluted.
"When they left, they took the monitors with them," explained Joe.
So I retraced my steps and visited all of the different sites that comprise the Ringwood Mines Superfund.
Guess What?
All empty cages.
Clean air? Not on a windy day by Joe's.
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