The EPA has decided to expedite the design work for cleanup of the upper 9 miles of the Passaic River to the Dundee Dam so the actual cleanup can be conducted simultaneously with work on the lower 8 mile section to Newark Bay, officials said at a public meeting this week.
One of the potentially responsible parties for the site, the Texas-based Occidental Chemical Corporation, must develop an engineering plan for the river's cleanup.
The federal Environmental Protection Agency hosted a community meeting on the cleanup of the upper 9 miles this week in Garfield, where Mayor Richard Rigoglioso spoke on the impact of the restoration project on the community.
“I grew up in Garfield, my parents and grandparents swam in the river, fished in the river, ate in the river,” said Rigoglioso. “Maybe the swimming will come back one day, and it’s important that this starts."
"The progress is starting to happen,” he said.
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The Passaic is one of the nation's most polluted bodies of water for 17 miles from the dam to Newark Bay, and the lower portion has been designated a Superfund site. Because it connects to the bay, the lower portion of the river is tidal, so pollutants can be swept up and down the river over time.
In the early 1980’s the EPA and the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection began an emergency cleanup after discovering dioxin-contaminated soil at the former Diamond Alkali manufacturing facility in Newark. Dioxin was dumped in the river in the 1960s as a byproduct of making Agent Orange, the defoliant the U.S. used during the Vietnam War.
Occidental inherited the liability of the former Diamond Alkali plant.
The site was added to the Superfund program in 1984 before the EPA expanded the study to address the 17-mile lower Passaic River, from the Dundee Dam between Garfield and the City of Passaic, down to Newark Bay.
In 2007, the EPA signed an agreement with a group of potentially responsible parties to complete a study of the riverbed, and sediment with “very high levels of dioxin contamination from the Passaic River” was dredged according to the EPA.
In the riverbed, a silty material exists that the contamination sticks to. Around mile eight of the 17-mile area, there is a change in the levels of the silty material, with lower area of the river containing a larger amount.
Due to this, the river is split into two sections for the project, an upper 9-mile section and a lower 8.3-mile area. The EPA approved the final engineering design work for the lower section in May, which was also developed by Occidental.
There are eight contaminants of concern in the lower 8 miles, while in the upper 9 miles the target contaminants are dioxin and polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs.
More: NJ has the most Superfund sites in the country. What to know if you live near one
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Approximately 2.5 million cubic yards of sediment will be dredged from the lower section of the river, and a cap will be installed to isolate remaining contaminated sediment from the rest of the ecosystem. The project is estimated to take 11 years.
Expedited design of cleanup for upper 9 miles of Passaic
The EPA entered the design phase of the upper 9 miles to stay on par with the lower portion of the project. “We wanted to catch up, we want to go into the river at the same time, so we decided to expedite and do the entire river at the same time,” said Remedial Project Manager Diane Salkie.
The plan, considered an interim plan as further investigation continues, includes the upper 9 being dredged, capped, or both before the EPA removes water from the sediment and disposes it at off-site licensed disposal facilities.
The design for the upper 9 miles will take three to four years to create, while the lower eight will aim to start in that time, according to the EPA. The 2.5 million cubic yards of sediment in the lower eight will take eight years to clean up, while the 387,000 cubic yards of the upper nine will take three years.
The project is estimated to cost $2 billion, with $440 million allocated to the upper 9 miles and $1.4 billion for the lower 8 miles. The remedial design for the lower 8 miles is paid for, while the funds for the upper 9 miles are still being secured.
“Superfund has a policy that is the polluter pays — we negotiate with the polluters to do the work," said Salkie. "These negotiations have become complicated.” In 2022, the EPA and U.S. Department of Justice announced a proposed consent decree requiring 85 potentially responsible parties to pay a combined $150 million dollars to support the cleanup work.
Mapping upper 9 miles of Passaic River to Dundee Dam has begun
Mapping the upper 9 miles of the river has started. “We are compiling and reviewing the existing data on the river, and we identify additional data needs," said Stephen McBay, an EPA spokesman. "Key components of that are existing condition, shoreline types, structures on the river, nature of bridges, and other information.”
The EPA hopes to start sediment sampling this fall, by next spring at the latest. The EPA still needs to find a party to do the work to confirm a start date.
Once sampling is completed, the EPA expects to find peculiar things in the river while dredging. “Pretty much an inevitability that there will be cars and other things," McBay said. "There’s going to be a car or two with relative certainty.”
The cleanup should not impact people’s health. Once the river cleanup have been completed, it will still be many years before the contamination in fish and crabs have decreased to levels for them to be considered safe to eat, according to the EPA.
“It’s been known to happen that city rivers can come back," Salkie said. "It just takes time, money, and effort."
"We all have an end goal of being able to use the river again and to go down and visit the river, maybe even go out and kayak on it,” said Salkie.
This article originally appeared on NorthJersey.com: Why the EPA expedited the design of cleanup plan for a polluted part of Passaic River
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