At Some Superfund Sites, Toxic Legacies Linger

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/20/nyregion/nyregionspecial2/20Rsuperfund.html?_r=3&pagewanted=1&ref=nyregionspecial2&oref=slogin


EXPOSURE The former location of a Cornell Dubilier Electronics plant in South Plainfield, N.J., where the E.P.A. began cleanup in 1997 but says the work will not be completed until 2034.



THERE was nothing unspoiled about the woods that Robert Spiegel trudged through recently on a single-minded quest for wrongs against nature.

The woods off Horseshoe Road here in Middlesex County are still tainted by human intrusions from decades ago. They are the target of a Superfund project — a lengthy federal cleanup of a former chemical-processing plant that Mr. Spiegel, executive director of the Edison Wetlands Association, said was inadequately financed and too prolonged.

Like many Superfund sites in New Jersey and elsewhere in the New York City area, it has an intriguing history that is hard to trace — mobsters reportedly owned one business here before abandoning it abruptly years ago. In 1981 a brush fire exposed 70 drums containing silver cyanide and other dangerous chemicals.

This 12-acre site is among the 114 hazardous waste sites in New Jersey on the Environmental Protection Agency’s National Priorities List, which includes about 1,200 sites nationwide that the agency has determined present a “significant risk to human health or the environment.”

On Long Island, 26 hazardous waste sites are on the National Priorities List; 15 in Nassau County and 11 in Suffolk, including the former Roosevelt Field in Garden City, where Charles Lindbergh took off for his historic trans-Atlantic flight in 1927. In Connecticut, 14 sites are on the list, including 3 each in New Haven and Windham Counties and 2 each in Fairfield and Hartford Counties.

The federal Superfund program to clean up the most dangerous hazardous waste sites began in 1980 after 22,000 tons of toxic waste were discovered dumped in the Love Canal neighborhood of Niagara Falls, N.Y. Billions of dollars have been spent since then completing the cleanup of more than 1,000 sites nationwide, but money for the program has been harder to come by since a Superfund tax levied against industries generating pollution, which helped pay for cleanups, expired in 1995.

“Government and private industry have been historically indifferent to environmental consequences, and this generation is paying for it,” said Richard Amper, the executive director of the Long Island Pine Barrens Society, an environmental group. “And this generation needs to clean it up.”

But the Environmental Protection Agency’s task is not easy, even though it has hard-working, well-trained staff members, said Ella Filippone, a longtime environmentalist who is executive director of the Passaic River Coalition in New Jersey. Business owners and politicians sometimes raise objections to cleanups that the agency is obligated to examine even though that is time-consuming, she said.