Source: Star-Ledger (NJ), March 14, 2015
Posted on: http://envfpn.advisen.com
Newark officials announced Friday that the city has filed a lawsuit in federal court alleging that E.I. du Pont de Nemours and Co. left the Ironbound section of the city contaminated with toxic chemicals for decades and never cleaned it up.
In a statement, the city said that DuPont Co. and other companies profited from a former pigment factory in the Ironbound while contaminating the land and water near the site.
According to the city, the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection ordered DuPont to clean up the site more than 30 years ago. But since then, the city claims, the corporation has done little to remediate the contamination, which includes hexavalent chromium, lead and arsenic.
Now, the property is an empty “14-acre wasteland,” the city said in a statement.
A spokesman for the state DEP declined to comment on pending litigation.
“After 30 years of broken promises, DuPont Co. and the other corporations who polluted this property have done nearly nothing to clean it up,” Mayor Ras Baraka said.
Dupont said in a statement that the site did not pose a risk to Newark residents, and the company was committed to cleaning it up.
“Regardless of the complaint, DuPont is committed to complete the final cleanup of the site, as required by NJDEP regulations and guidance, with field work beginning in 2015 and completion scheduled in early 2016,” said Don Turner, a company spokesman.
But, Turner said, the lawsuit could hold up future development plans for the site.
The other companies the city is suing include the Cookson Co. Inc. and Heubach, two firms that like DuPont produced paint pigment at the site. Representatives for Cookson and Heubach could not immediately be reached for comment.
The city filed one lawsuit in federal court under the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act statute to force the companies to clean up the contamination, the statement said.
In a separate lawsuit, filed in state court, Newark is asking the court to order DuPont, Heubach and Cookson to pay the city millions of dollars to make up for the tax revenue it did not collect on the property, the statement said.