Source: The Record, Hackensack, NJ, November 25, 2012
Posted on: http://envfpn.advisen.com
Superstorm Sandy inundated hundreds of homes in Moonachie and Little Ferry with dirty floodwater and caused one of the largest sewage spills in North Jersey history.
While the environmental damage brought about by the superstorm is significant, it could have been much worse: Officials said Sandy did not cause any major disruption at the region’s worst toxic sites, even the ones that were in the path of the storm’s record tidal surge.
“The integrity of the sites doesn’t seem to be compromised,” said Larry Hajna, a spokesman for the state Department of Environmental Protection. “We were out on the ground with the [U.S. Environmental Protection Agency] right after the storm, and everything we checked out seems to be fine.”
In a heavily developed region dotted with toxic sites — 2,835 in Bergen County and 1,394 in Passaic County — flooding tends to bring a barrage of pollution within close proximity to residents. Superfund sites — the worst toxic sites in the United States — present the biggest because they contain deadlier pollution.
Despite the powerful storm surge, federal environmental officials said contamination did not seep from 11 active Superfund sites in Bergen and Passaic that are in various stages of cleanup.
But in the storm’s aftermath, testing has been done at only one Superfund site in New Jersey. And while some outside of government agree that there may not be an immediate public health threat, they are skeptical that pollution stayed in place considering that toxic substances have often migrated from some sites under normal conditions. For instance, mercury has trickled from the Ventron/Velsicol site in Wood-Ridge into Berry’s Creek for decades. Likewise, coal tar and arsenic have leached from the Quanta Resources Superfund site in Edgewater into the Hudson River.
Gil Hawkins of the Hudson River Fisherman’s Association thinks Sandy could only have worsened the problem at Quanta.
“I’m worried most about what’s flushed into the river from there,” said Hawkins, who has spent years advocating a full excavation of pollution from Quanta. “You have an enormous amount of runoff coming into the river from everywhere like parking lots … and places like the upland portion of Quanta.”
A record tidal surge like the 11.9-foot wall of seawater that was pushed into New York Harbor and up the Hudson, Hackensack and Passaic rivers was bound to spread pollution, experts said.
It was the surge that crashed into the Passaic Valley Sewerage Commission causing so much damage and a loss of power that at least 4 billion gallons of raw or only partially treated sewage have poured into the region’s waters. The surge also slammed into a Motiva oil tank facility in Woodbridge causing 277,000 gallons of diesel fuel to spill into the Arthur Kill, the waterway that separates New Jersey and Staten Island.
If a storm as rough as Sandy caused that much damage to those structures, it also likely churned up the dioxin, PCBs and other contaminants on the Passaic River floor said Alan Blumberg, a professor at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, who specializes in forecasting tidal surges in the region.
“What makes a storm like this all the more worse is all the pollution a tidal surge can move around in a place like the Passaic River,” he said. “There are no marshes, no wetlands to contain the water. It has nowhere to go but up the river and that is where the pollution is.”
But the EPA said that a portion of the Passaic in Newark that contains high levels of dioxin was not damaged, nor was an area of the river in Lyndhurst where dioxin-laden mudflats sit next to Riverside County Park. The park flooded during Sandy, and the EPA may test the park for dioxin just as it did following flooding from Hurricane Irene last year. Councilman Richard DiLascio doesn’t think there should be any concern.
“The flooding was much the same as last year, and the testing on the fields did not turn up any high levels,” he said.
Areas secured
The EPA said that it secured all of its Superfund sites in New York and New Jersey prior to Sandy’s arrival late last month. All 105 of sites that are in the process of being cleaned up by EPA contractors have been assessed and do not pose an immediate threat to public health or the environment, said Elias Rodriguez, an EPA spokesman.
These include Berry’s Creek, Ventron/Velsicol, Scientific Chemical Processing and Universal Oil Products sites, all in the Meadowlands, one of the worst-hit areas of North Jersey where dozens of tide gates, berms and other anti-flooding devices were swept over with the tidal surge.
“We do not believe that any sites were impacted in ways that would pose a threat to nearby communities,” Rodriguez said.
Hackensack Riverkeeper Bill Sheehan said that much of the pollution at Ventron/Velsicol in Wood-Ridge, Scientific Chemical Processing in Carlstadt and Universal Oil Products in East Rutherford had already been contained on site by workers over the years. If pollution did spread, he said it would likely have been at Berry’s Creek, which has some of the highest concentrations of mercury in the nation and has no natural defense against a tidal surge.
The EPA didn’t take samples around Berry’s Creek, but it did test the area around two waterways in New York that are also Superfund sites — the Newtown Creek in Queens and the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn — that were. No chemicals rose to the agency’s level of concern in those areas, which were also inundated by the storm surge.
Sheehan said there were clear distinctions between the New York sites and Berry’s Creek.
“The big difference is the density of the residential population,” Sheehan said. “There is less of a threat to public health than a place like the Gowanus Canal [in Brooklyn] which overflowed into people’s homes.”
So far the EPA has sampled only one New Jersey site, the Raritan Bay Slag superfund site in Laurence Harbor. One of four samples showed high levels of lead on a beach that is closed to the public. The agency said it will take additional samples to get a more detailed picture of how the material might have shifted.