Source: http://www.northjersey.com, February 11, 2015
By: James M. O’Neill
In an acknowledgment that the Hackensack River remains seriously polluted with a century of industrial waste, the federal government will consider adding the river to the federal Superfund list, a program reserved for the country’s most contaminated sites.
Despite recent improvements in the river’s health, research indicates that the sediment in the river is highly polluted with mercury, cancer-causing PCBs and other toxic chemicals. Seventeen miles of the river, from the Oradell Dam to Newark Bay, could potentially become part of the Superfund site.
The federal Environmental Protection Agency confirmed Wednesday that it had decided to study whether to add the river to the program after being petitioned this week by the non-profit Hackensack Riverkeeper.
“It wasn’t easy to convince me to take this route, especially since we’ve been the chief cheerleader for the river and done everything we could to celebrate the river and get people more involved in it,” said Bill Sheehan, executive director of the Hackensack Riverkeeper. “But the sediment is still horribly contaminated, and if we’re really going to give the river back to the people it belongs to, we need to get the sediment cleaned up.”
New Jersey already has 114 Superfund sites, the most of any state. Superfund status for the 17-mile stretch of the river would prompt a multiyear investigation into both the extent of contamination and which companies would be responsible for cleanup costs, followed by more study to determine the best cleanup plan, which could include dredging and capping contaminated sediment.
“Once listed, it’s a slow train, but it brings in strong legal powers of the EPA to require potentially responsible parties to pay for cleanup and cooperate,” said Christopher Len, an attorney for the Riverkeeper. “It may take a long time, but all the cars get moving.”
EPA spokesman Elias Rodriguez confirmed that the agency has had recent discussions with both the Riverkeeper and the state Department of Environmental Protection on how best to clean up the Hackensack. The EPA will complete the study within a year. Rodriguez said it was premature to speculate about whether the river would ultimately be added to the Superfund program.
DEP spokesman Larry Hajna said the agencies have been discussing several possibilities for proceeding with a cleanup of the lower Hackensack and its tributaries. One would be to expand cleanup at existing contaminated sites along the river to portions of the riverbed itself. Another option being explored is a bank-to-bank approach for the Hackensack under the Superfund program.
The lower Hackensack and its tributaries, which form the fragile ecosystem known as the Meadowlands, is suffering from a legacy of pollution from factories and other industries that have operated along the shoreline during the past century. There are six Superfund sites in area, along with dozens of old industrial sites and closed landfills the DEP has declared contaminated and in need of cleanup.
“If you look at all the sites plotted on a map, it would look like the map had measles with so many red spots on it,” Len said.
“The contamination in the Hackensack isn’t the result of one or two companies, but probably hundreds,” he said.
In fact, some 180 entities have been identified as possibly responsible for the pollution in just one of the Hackensack’s tributaries, Berry’s Creek.
Victoria Streitfeld, a spokeswoman with Honeywell, which has inherited responsibility for cleanup of one of three Superfund sites that have contaminated the creek, said that making the lower Hackensack a Superfund site “would involve numerous additional parties including private parties, municipalities and other public entities.”
Mercury levels in the creek, which meanders through Carlstadt, East Rutherford, Lyndhurst, Moonachie, Rutherford, Teterboro and Wood-Ridge, are among the highest ever recorded in a freshwater ecosystem in the United States. The creek also contains dangerous levels of cancer-causing PCBs and other contaminants.
Though Berry’s Creek is not a Superfund site, the EPA has spent $40 million since 2008 studying how the tidal action in Berry’s Creek moves sediment through the wetlands to help officials choose the best cleanup plan. A final cleanup plan won’t be ready until 2018.
Although cleanups are under way or completed at the six Superfund sites and dozens of other contaminated sites along the Hackensack and its tributaries, for the most part a cleanup of the riverbed has never occurred.
The river and its tributaries present a myriad of health risks. Swimming is banned by the state because of the danger of ingesting harmful bacteria, mainly from sewage overflows and stormwater runoff. The EPA and DEP have long worried about the health effects for people who fish and crab in the Hackensack and its tributaries. The state maintains bans on eating fish or crabs caught in the Hackensack because of high levels of mercury that build up in their tissue.
Mercury affects the nervous system and causes impaired vision, motor-skill damage, seizures and even death. The PCBs in the water can impair the endocrine system and immune function, and cause early cell death, developmental abnormalities, reduced reproduction and increased mortality. Other contaminants in the river system include lead, arsenic, chromium, benzene and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons.
Other rivers in the region are already on the Superfund list. The Hudson River is the nation’s largest Superfund site, stretching from Manhattan 200 miles north to Fort Edward, N.Y., where 2.5 million cubic yards of river sediment laced with PCBs has been removed so far in a major dredging cleanup. The PCBs came from two General Electric facilities.
A 17-mile stretch of the Passaic River, from Garfield to Newark Bay, is also a Superfund site. The EPA announced a $1.7 billion plan last spring to dredge the river’s lower eight miles from bank to bank — removing enough ­contaminated sediment to fill MetLife Stadium twice. Other contaminated sediment would be capped.
Although the Hackensack has been getting cleaner on its own — and therefore growing in popularity as a place to kayak, canoe and fish — there are still very visible signs that its sediment remains laced with high levels of contaminants. Oysters placed in the river by researchers at various locations to help filter out contamination died or developed deformities during a study that ended in 2011. Simply put, the river was too toxic even for the oysters, which were supposed to help remove the contamination.
In addition, research conducted by Rutgers’ Judith Weiss over the past decade has showed that the mercury and PCBs in the Hackensack’s sediment are still so high that crabs and bluefish exhibit extremely odd behavior, making it hard for them to catch prey.
Adult blue claw crabs become so lethargic they can’t capture moving prey, and settle instead for eating the sediment itself. And baby bluefish — known for strong appetites — were smaller in the Hackensack than in cleaner waters and had strikingly empty stomachs. The bluefish were less able to stay in formation when swimming in a school, a behavior their peers in cleaner waters use to protect themselves from prey.
One of the challenges of cleaning up the Passaic and the Hackensack is that they are tidal, so contamination dumped in one spot can be sloshed up and down the length of the river many times over, spreading the damage.
“Are there environmental impairments in the Hackensack? I believe there are,” said Beth Ravit, the Rutgers University professor in charge of the study on the use of oysters to clean up the river. “Do they rise to meet the criteria for Superfund status? I think it will depend on where you sample. If you find mercury and dioxin hot spots, the answer is yes. There are a lot of these hot spots in the Passaic, and I assume they will find the Hackensack is similar.”
Debbie Mans, with the New York/New Jersey Baykeeper, said she supports the effort to give the Hackensack Superfund status. “So far, the agencies have focused on cleaning up land-based sites in the region, but they’ve largely neglected to clean up the contamination in the river,” she said.

Sheehan said he had a dim view of Superfund because in the past it took the EPA so long to actually clean up many sites. But the agency’s work recently to develop cleanup plans for the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn and the lower Passaic gave him more confidence the program could work for the Hackensack.
“The EPA is scientifically prepared to take this on and get it done in a timely fashion,” Sheehan said. “And it wouldn’t leave us subject to the whims of state government.”
Sheehan said he wanted to get the process started now because he has high regard for the EPA’s current regional administrator, Judith Enck.
“She listens and directs her staff to act,” he said. “She’s had a different style than some of the other administrators over the years. She wants to get stuff done on her watch.”