The Passaic River’s toxic nightmare

42 years and still in DeNile, waiting for a real cleanup

After more than four decades, the Passaic River is finally getting some of the equipment needed to begin a cleanup that should have started generations ago. That is progress, but after 42 years, preparing the machinery is not the same as cleaning up the river.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and Department of Justice have proposed a $125 million settlement with Environmental Resource Holdings LLC, a corporate successor to Occidental Chemical and the companies that operated the Diamond Alkali facility in Newark. The agreement would pay for an upland processing facility and other infrastructure needed to process contaminated sediment and advance the cleanup of the lower 17 miles of the Diamond Alkali Superfund site. The proposed consent decree is subject to a 30-day public comment period.

Yes, this is a step forward. But it is a step toward the starting line, not the finish line.

After waiting this long, the EPA should not be handing out gold stars for finally buying the shovel.

I am skeptical of this latest proposal. I share the concerns raised by members of communities along the Passaic River and the site’s Community Advisory Group. Many people have been involved in this fight for decades. I have followed this nightmare for years, and Sierra Club members served on the advisory group. We have watched plans change, deadlines move, lawsuits drag on, settlements get negotiated, and polluters find new ways to slow the process.

The question is not whether this proposal is better than doing nothing. Of course it is. The question is whether it will finally produce the aggressive, comprehensive cleanup that people along the Passaic River have been promised for decades.

That is a much harder question.

This is not just a polluted river. It is a toxic legacy.

The Diamond Alkali facility in Newark manufactured pesticides and herbicides, including chemicals associated with Agent Orange during the Vietnam War. Dioxin became one of the signature contaminants of the Passaic River disaster. The EPA identifies dioxins and furans, PCBs, PAHs, pesticides, mercury, copper, and lead among the hazardous substances contaminating the site. The Diamond Alkali site was added to the federal Superfund National Priorities List in 1984.

But the tragedy extends far beyond the fence line of the old factory.

Dioxin is extraordinarily toxic and persistent. It can accumulate in living organisms and the food chain, including fish, and exposure to certain dioxins is associated with serious health effects, including cancer. The EPA identifies contaminated fish and shellfish as a major continuing pathway for human exposure in the Lower Passaic River and Newark Bay. This is why I have never accepted the idea that this is simply a dredging project.

This is about people’s health. It is about communities that have lived beside a river they could not safely use. It is about working-class urban communities carrying the burden of pollution that somebody else created.

The Diamond Alkali pollution is associated with one of the most infamous environmental disasters in New Jersey history and the broader legacy of Agent Orange and dioxin exposure suffered by Vietnam veterans and people in Vietnam. Communities exposed to persistent contaminants deserve a cleanup based on the strongest available science, not the cheapest political compromise.

It’s personal

My father’s family came from Germany in 1867 and settled on Van Buren Street between Ferry Street and Raymond Boulevard, just a block from the river. I had family in the Down Neck neighborhood or nearby, until recently.

Many of my aunts, uncles, and cousins grew up there, along with close family friends. My aunt Loraine and uncle Eddie lived just a few blocks from the Occidental/Diamond Alkali facility in Newark. Both died of liver cancer, and their son, Ed Jr., also died of cancer.

I cannot say that contamination from the Passaic River caused their deaths. However, there is a documented connection between dioxin exposure and serious health effects, including cancer and damage to the liver.

I can tell you what it means to have a toxic river and a chemical plant in the middle of a community where your family lived for generations. This is not an abstract environmental problem to me. These are the streets where my family lived. My dad used to pick up my aunt and uncle and bring them to our house because the air in their neighborhood made us feel sick.

These are communities I know and people who have been waiting far too long.

Forty-two years of waiting is a tragedy

The Passaic River has been a Superfund site since 1984. Think about that.

A child living along the river when it was designated a Superfund site could be a grandparent by now. That child could have gone to school, graduated, gotten married, raised children, and retired—and the river would still be waiting for its cleanup. That is not an environmental success story. It is an environmental failure with a very long paper trail.

The EPA’s proposal is supposed to move the project from decades of studies, litigation, and planning toward physical work. The agency says the settlement will allow construction of an upland processing facility, sediment-handling infrastructure, and other facilities needed to begin work in the river.

But notice what the agreement does: It builds the infrastructure needed to begin the cleanup. It does not mean the river has been cleaned. It does not mean all the contaminated sediment will be removed. It does not guarantee that the remaining work will be fully funded, and it does not erase the enormous gap between this agreement and the cost of comprehensive restoration.

After four decades, we should not confuse preparing to clean up the river with cleaning it.

From Superfund River to the DeNile River

For years, people have called the Passaic the Superfund River because of the toxic contamination that has poisoned its sediment and damaged surrounding communities and ecosystems.

I think there is another name that fits just as well: the DeNile River.

It is not denial that the pollution exists. Everyone knows it exists. It is denial in the form of pretending that we can continue delaying the cleanup without consequences.

The polluters have had the luxury of time. The public has had to live—and die—with the pollution.

One of the most frustrating parts of the Passaic River story has been the endless cycle of delay: Study it. Report on it. Assess it. Investigate it. Negotiate. Litigate. Settle. Reassess. Study it again. Meanwhile, the contamination remains in the river.

The longer this goes on, the more complicated the cleanup becomes—and the easier it becomes for everyone to point to that complexity as a reason for further delay. That is exactly backward. The complexity of the contamination is an argument for moving faster, not slower. Polluters should not be allowed to turn time into a cleanup strategy.

There is a cynical danger in allowing contamination to remain in a river for decades while arguing over who pays and how much. The longer contaminants remain in a dynamic river system, the more opportunities they have to move, disperse, and enter the food chain. Tidal action has already distributed contaminants throughout the Newark Bay complex, and contaminated fish have been found far beyond the river.

Waiting does not make pollution disappear. It can spread the problem while allowing the responsible parties to continue arguing over who is liable for what.

Delay leads to what polluters call “natural attenuation.” If contamination levels drop in hot spots because the dioxin has spread elsewhere, they can use that as an argument against a more extensive cleanup. That is not remediation. It is negligence.

It is environmental musical chairs, and when the music stops, the public is still sitting on toxic sediment.

EPA needs to stop negotiating as if polluters have the upper hand

The federal government has enormous authority under the Superfund law. It should use it.

Too often, the public sees government agencies spend years trying to negotiate acceptable deals with companies that have every financial incentive to minimize their responsibility. The responsible parties have lawyers, scientists, engineers, and time. I call some of their paid experts “biostitutes.”

What residents have is contaminated water and another generation waiting for the government to act. That imbalance must change.

The EPA needs to pursue the polluters aggressively and make them pay for the full cleanup. It cannot treat every settlement as a victory simply because a check gets written. A settlement is not a cleanup. A press release is not a cleanup. A processing facility is not a cleanup. And a pile of plans sitting on a shelf is definitely not a cleanup.

We have seen this movie before

I know this history firsthand. When New Jersey obtained major legal leverage against the companies responsible for contaminating the Passaic River, the state pursued substantial damages and cleanup costs. The court called for a full cleanup of all 17 miles, with costs estimated at up to $2 billion.

In 2014, the Christie administration settled with Occidental Chemical for $190 million, bringing the state’s total recovery from the Passaic River litigation to approximately $355.4 million. I strongly criticized that settlement because I believed the state had accepted far too little compared with the scale of the environmental damage and the cost of the cleanup. The settlement also became part of a larger controversy over how New Jersey used environmental settlement money. I called it blood money.

Under the 2014 Occidental agreement, $50 million was specifically dedicated to natural-resource restoration, while $140 million was diverted to plug holes in the state budget. Of the money recovered through three Passaic River litigation settlements, only approximately $67.4 million was dedicated to natural-resource restoration.

The communities that had been poisoned were victimized twice—first by the pollution and then by having money intended to address environmental damage diverted away from restoration. That fight helped lead to New Jersey’s 2017 constitutional amendment dedicating natural-resource-damage settlement money to restoring, replacing, or preserving natural resources instead of allowing it to disappear into the general budget.

The lesson should be obvious: Pollution money needs to follow the pollution. If the Passaic River was damaged, the money must go toward repairing it. We cannot settle our way out of a Superfund site.

Who pays for the rest?

The latest agreement is with Environmental Resource Holdings, which the EPA identifies as a corporate successor to Occidental Chemical Corporation and Diamond Alkali Company/Diamond Shamrock Corporation, which owned and operated the former Diamond Alkali facility.

The government says the proposed agreement is a major step because it gets the infrastructure moving. Fine. But now comes the hard part. Who pays for the rest? Who guarantees that the full cleanup will be funded? Who makes sure it is not scaled back because the next billion dollars becomes politically inconvenient? Who prevents the companies responsible from negotiating their way out of the most expensive parts of the work? And who makes sure the EPA does not once again decide that a cheaper remedy is good enough?

Those questions cannot be answered with another press conference. They must be answered with enforceable commitments.

Capping pollution is not the same as removing it

This is an issue I have raised for years. The EPA’s cleanup plans for the Lower Passaic call for a combination of dredging, sediment processing, off-site disposal, and capping. In 2016, the EPA selected a remedy for the lower 8.3 miles that called for removing approximately 3.5 million cubic yards of contaminated sediment, followed by bank-to-bank capping. The estimated cost at the time was $1.38 billion.

I have long opposed relying on capping as a substitute for comprehensively removing the most contaminated sediment. All caps will eventually fail. That is geology, especially in a tidal river. The Passaic is not a swimming pool. It is a moving, tidal river. It floods. It scours. Sediment moves. Storms are becoming more intense, and sea levels are rising. The river does not politely remain inside the lines drawn on an engineering plan. If you leave toxic material in the river and place a cap over it, you are betting that the cap will remain intact for generations. That is a hell of a bet to make with someone else’s health.

I called the EPA’s 2016 decision a “Record of Rescission” because I believed the agency was scaling back the cleanup when what we needed was genuine restoration. At the time, I argued for far more extensive dredging instead of leaving large quantities of contaminated sediment beneath caps. The EPA previously used capping at a contaminated section of the Passaic near River Mile 10.9, where problems occurred. Caps used in other waterways, including portions of the Seneca River near Syracuse, New York, and the Willamette River in Portland, Oregon, have also experienced serious problems. That history is one reason I remain concerned about relying on containment in a dynamic river system.

My position has not changed. The Hudson River demonstrated that large-scale dredging of contaminated sediment can be done. The question has never been whether New Jersey can clean up the Passaic. It is whether the government is willing to demand the same level of commitment here. Or is it because this is an environmental-justice community rather than a wealthy one? Newark should not get a second-class cleanup.

Environmental justice cannot be just a slogan

The people living along the Lower Passaic have spent generations surrounded by highways, industry, sewage plants, garbage dumps, solid-waste facilities, incinerators, power plants, toxic sites, and contaminated land and water. And now, there is even a notorious immigration detention facility.

Newark’s Ironbound neighborhood and other communities along the river have carried far more than their share of New Jersey’s environmental burden. Yet when it comes to cleanup, they have repeatedly been told to wait. Wait for the study. Wait for the lawsuit. Wait for the settlement. Wait for the design. Wait for the funding. Wait for construction. At some point, “wait” becomes another word for “no.”

New Jersey cannot tell these communities that they deserve environmental justice while leaving them beside one of the nation’s most notorious Superfund sites for more than four decades. If this were the Navesink River in Rumson, it would have been cleaned up long ago. More likely, toxic chemicals never would have been dumped there in the first place.

Chemical plants and incinerators get built in Newark and Camden—not Short Hills, Alpine, or Rumson. That is the history of environmental injustice in New Jersey.

We need to turn it back into a river

The river belongs to the public. As more people live along the Passaic, development occurs along its banks, and communities look toward the river for parks, trails, boating, fishing, and recreation, the public needs a river that is actually safe.

A Superfund site should not become New Jersey’s version of waterfront planning. You should not have to put a kayak in the water and wonder whether the bottom of the river belongs in a hazardous-waste facility.

Rivers are supposed to be public assets. The Passaic has been treated like a dumping ground for too long. We need to turn it back into a river, and this time the shovel has to keep moving.

The $125 million proposal is a start. I welcome the fact that it could finally put construction equipment on the ground and create the facilities needed for dredging. The EPA says the agreement is intended to move the project into implementation, and that is important.

But I remain deeply skeptical that another agreement, by itself, guarantees the comprehensive cleanup this river needs. Before the consent decree is finalized, the public should demand answers:

• Where is the full funding?
• What is the schedule for actual dredging?
• How much contaminated sediment will be removed?
• How much will be left behind?
• How will caps withstand floods, tides, and extreme storms?
• Who will pay when additional contamination is discovered?
• What legally enforceable requirements will ensure that the responsible parties pay for the remaining cleanup?
• How will nearby communities be protected during the dredging, transportation, and processing of contaminated sediment?

And perhaps the most important question: What happens if the money runs out before the river is clean?

We have been here before. We have seen plans, settlements, promises, and deadlines come and go. What we have not seen is a clean Passaic River. The EPA says this settlement will get “shovels in the ground.”

Good. But after 42 years, we need more than shovels in the ground and new infrastructure. We need the toxic sediment removed from the river, the polluters paying the bill, and the cleanup finished.

The Passaic River has waited long enough. The people living beside it have waited long enough. And dioxin does not care how long another government meeting takes.

It is time to stop treating cleanup as a plan and start treating it as an obligation. No more DeNile River. It is time to make it the Action River.