Healing the Lower Passaic: Diamond Alkali Superfund Cleanup Update
Great Swamp Watershed Association HQ 568 Tempe Wick Rd, Morristown, NJ, United StatesDavid Kluesner, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Region 2 team leader for community affairs, returns to provide an update on plans for the remediation of hazardous pollution along the last eight miles of the Passaic River. A continental breakfast will be served beginning at 8 a.m. Background On April 11, 2014 — within 48 hours of David’s last appearance at a GSWA Breakfast Briefing — EPA Region 2 Administrator Judith Enck held a press conference announcing the Agency’s draft plan for addressing contamination along the Lower Passaic. Stretching eight miles from Belleville to Newark Bay, this section of river forms part of the Diamond Alkali Superfund site centered around Newark’s Ironbound district. For more than 30 years in mid-20th century, Diamond Alkali and other chemical manufacturers used the Passaic River near Lister Avenue in Newark as a dumping ground for hazardous waste products such as PCBs, dioxins, pesticides, and mercury. Embedded in layers of river sediment, tides and currents quickly began spreading these dangerous substances up and down the Passaic from Dundee Dam in Garfield to the river mouth on Newark Bay. As local chemical manufacturers came and went, an environmental disaster brewed beneath Passaic waters and inside the Ironbound. […]
