Keyport’s toxic disaster is a crisis Trenton makes — worse

New Jersey’s cleanup failures and privatization created this environmental nightmare. The state must act before it becomes a public health tragedy.

What is happening in Keyport is not simply an environmental disaster. It is a government-created environmental failure that is now threatening to become a public health tragedy.

For more than four decades, New Jersey knew about the Aeromarine Landfill and failed to clean it up properly. Now residents are raising alarms about cancer, independent testing is finding dangerous contamination outside the landfill, and the state is scrambling to investigate what should have been investigated years ago.

This did not happen because New Jersey lacked environmental laws. It happened because New Jersey weakened some laws, stopped enforcing others, dismantled oversight by the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection, and turned toxic-site cleanup into a development program.

The state weakened the Department of Environmental Protection, privatized much of the site remediation system, failed to require the proper cleanup of contaminated landfills, and eliminated much of the public participation and oversight in cleanups. Brownfield remediation increasingly became a vehicle for redevelopment rather than a requirement for permanent cleanup.

The philosophy became “pave and wave”: Pave over the contamination, wave goodbye to Department of Environmental Protection oversight, and call it economic development. That is not environmental protection. That is putting lipstick on a landfill.

47 years of looking the other way

The Aeromarine site has a long toxic history. It was once home to the Aeromarine Plane and Motor Company and later became an unlined industrial and municipal landfill. The landfill operated from 1962 until 1979, when the Department of Environmental Protection ordered it closed because of serious deficiencies. It was never properly remediated.

A 2010 assessment found dangerous contaminants, including benzene, arsenic, lead, vinyl chloride, and polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs. The landfill sits next to the Raritan Bay and Chingarora Creek, surrounded by water on three sides. The department’s current investigation is now looking at contamination moving beyond the landfill itself. Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, also known as “forever chemicals,” were found this year.

Think about that. The state ordered the landfill closed in 1979, and almost half a century later, we are still arguing about cleaning it up.

That is not a cleanup program. That is a waiting program.

And while Trenton waited, the contamination did not.

This is what happens when cleanup becomes redevelopment

New Jersey’s brownfield program was supposed to turn contaminated properties into safe, productive places. Instead, too often the priority became getting contaminated property back into the real estate market.

The question stopped being: “How do we permanently remove the contamination?”

It became: “How much contamination can we leave in place and still build something on top of it?”

That is the wrong question. Brownfield redevelopment should never mean brownfield burial.

A cap can be an appropriate remedy in some circumstances. But caps are not magic. They can fail, deteriorate, and be compromised by changing groundwater, flooding, and geology.

And when a contaminated landfill is on a tidal waterfront, vulnerable to flooding and surrounded by homes, simply covering the problem and building over it can amount to environmental accounting under Bernie Madoff’s rules: The pollution stays on the property and eventually gets out.

That is not cleanup. It is relocating the risk from a developer’s balance sheet to the public.

Privatization was supposed to improve cleanups. Instead, the department lost its power.

The Department of Environmental Protection’s Site Remediation Program once had almost 1,000 staff members in 1993 working on site cleanups. By 2004, there were roughly 600. Today, the number is around 300.

New Jersey increasingly relies on private consultants to perform site remediation work, including testing, preparing cleanup plans, overseeing remediation, and certifying sites. The privatized system was sold as a way to make cleanups faster and allow the department to concentrate on the worst sites. Instead, the department cut its own capacity while handing more responsibility to private consultants.

In many cases, developers or property owners hire consultants to test a site, write the cleanup plan, oversee the cleanup, and certify that the work is complete, all with far less direct state oversight and public involvement.

That is the fox designing the henhouse, building the henhouse, and then certifying it is safe.

The problem is obvious: You cannot privatize environmental protection and then act surprised when public oversight disappears.

When the people responsible for moving a property toward redevelopment are also responsible for determining whether the cleanup is sufficient, the public needs a strong, independent Department of Environmental Protection looking over their shoulders as the cop on the beat. Instead, New Jersey removed much of that oversight.

The result is a system designed to move a contaminated property through the pipeline for development rather than getting contamination out of the ground. That is how you get a polluters’ holiday. And Keyport is what happens when the holiday lasts 40 years.

The public was pushed out of the process

Another piece of this failure is the elimination of meaningful public participation. Toxic cleanups should not happen behind closed doors between property owners, developers, and their consultants while regulators and the public are pushed to the sidelines.

The people living next door should have a seat at the table. There should be a public process, including hearings.

Residents should have access to the testing. They should be able to challenge the science. They should know what chemicals are being tested for and where the samples were taken. And they should not have to organize their own scientific investigation just to get the government to look in their backyards.

When government reduces public oversight, it doesn’t eliminate public risk. It just eliminates the people most likely to ask the right and sometimes uncomfortable questions.

Keyport residents have been asking those questions for years. The state should have been listening.

The “no exposure pathway” argument is déjà vu all over again

The Department of Environmental Protection has said its existing data does not demonstrate a pathway connecting the landfill contamination to human exposure.

That needs to be taken seriously from a scientific standpoint, but it cannot be treated as the end of the investigation. Relying on data without understanding what is happening on the ground is like baseball managers relying only on analytics. It doesn’t always work. Just look at the Mets.

New Jersey has been here before. These are just some of the sites:

Toms River

Toms River taught us that contamination does not always travel where regulators expect it to.

For years, state and federal officials struggled to understand how contamination from the Reich Farm site was reaching people. The plume did not conveniently follow the placement of monitoring wells. Seasonal groundwater conditions helped determine where contamination traveled. Regulators also were not initially looking for one of the key chemicals that ultimately helped explain the contamination.

Pompton Lakes

Pompton Lakes taught us that groundwater contamination can become vapor intrusion, allowing toxic chemicals to migrate into homes.

Ringwood

Ringwood taught us that a site declared cleaned up can still contain enormous quantities of buried toxic waste.

Kiddie Kollege

Kiddie Kollege taught us that the government can have a contaminated property in its files while children are inside the building breathing mercury vapors.

Fenimore Landfill

The Fenimore Landfill in Roxbury taught another lesson. The landfill was reopened in an effort to close it and became a toxic nightmare after massive amounts of ground gypsum wallboard were brought onto the site.

The material generated hydrogen sulfide gas, causing illnesses among residents. The state ultimately had to take over the site.

The lesson from all of these failures is the same: The absence of a pathway on a Department of Environmental Protection spreadsheet does not mean the absence of a pathway in the real world.

A plume does not stop at a property line. Floodwater does not obey a computer model. Vapors do not wait for a permit. And toxic chemicals don’t care whether the state has checked the right box.

Keyport is a waterfront toxicity problem

This is especially important in Keyport because the landfill sits in a tidal environment. Flooding can move contaminated sediment and surface water. Rising groundwater can change how contaminants migrate. Volatile chemicals can create vapor pathways.

If the state tests only under normal, dry conditions, it may be testing the exception rather than the reality. That is why residential testing is so important.

Test the yards. Test the parks. Test the streets and low-lying areas. Test soil gas. Test groundwater beyond the landfill boundary. Test after flooding.

Test for the contaminants we know about and the contaminants we previously failed to look for. Don’t tell people there is no pathway until you have actually looked for the pathway.

This is not an argument against development. It is an argument for real cleanup. There is nothing wrong with redeveloping brownfields. The problem is when development becomes the cleanup strategy.

Economic development should follow environmental cleanup, not replace it. New Jersey cannot measure success by how quickly contaminated property gets a new owner, a new building, and a new parking lot.

The test should be whether the contamination is actually removed or permanently controlled in a way that protects people for generations. Otherwise, we are not redeveloping brownfields. We are redeveloping the excuses for leaving them contaminated.

Gov. Sherrill needs to come to Keyport

Gov. Mikie Sherrill needs to come to Keyport. She needs to see the landfill, walk the neighborhoods, meet with residents, listen to their concerns, and discuss what the state can do to help. And she needs to ask why a site known to be contaminated for decades is still being investigated as though the state discovered it yesterday.

This is where leadership and empathy matter. The governor should direct the Department of Environmental Protection to stop treating Keyport as another complicated remediation file and instead treat it as the potential public health crisis it could become.

The department should immediately evaluate whether to use its authority under the New Jersey Spill Compensation and Control Act to take direct action and compel responsible parties to clean up the site. The state should not wait for a private developer to decide what level of cleanup is economically convenient.

The cleanup standard should be based on protecting public health, not protecting the developer’s profit margin.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency needs to get involved

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Region 2 office also needs to get involved.

This is exactly why the Superfund program exists: When contamination is severe, complex, and potentially beyond the ability or willingness of the state and responsible parties to resolve it, the federal government has the authority and resources to step in.

The Environmental Protection Agency should independently evaluate the site, expand testing, conduct the necessary public health assessments, and determine whether Keyport warrants federal Superfund action. New Jersey should nominate the site for the National Priorities List.

U.S. Rep. Frank Pallone has asked for help, and our governor, U.S. senators, and the rest of New Jersey’s congressional delegation should ask Washington for help and resources.

There is nothing weak about asking for more resources to protect people’s health. What is weak is pretending we can handle a massive toxic problem with a shrinking Department of Environmental Protection, private consultants, and another round of paperwork.

Dig it up. Don’t dress it up.

The most important question now is what happens next.

If the science shows that the contaminated landfill waste can be permanently removed, remove it.

Don’t bury the problem under a parking lot. Don’t put asphalt over it and call it progress. Don’t turn a toxic landfill into a commercial park and tell residents they should be grateful for the economic development.

Remove it. Haul it away. Clean the site. Protect the people.

There may be circumstances where engineered containment is scientifically appropriate. But on a tidal, flood-prone landfill next to a residential community, New Jersey should have an extraordinarily high bar before deciding to leave contamination in place.

We should not be designing the next 40 years of monitoring when we could be eliminating the source today.

Keyport is the test

Keyport is bigger than one landfill. It is a test of whether New Jersey has learned anything from Toms River, Ringwood, Pompton Lakes, Kiddie Kollege, Fenimore, and the state’s other toxic-site failures.

Have we learned that public health has to come before redevelopment? Have we learned that the Department of Environmental Protection needs enough staff and authority to oversee cleanups? Have we learned that private remediation cannot replace public accountability? Have we learned that residents deserve a meaningful role in decisions about contamination in their own neighborhoods? And have we learned that a cap is not the same thing as a cleanup?

The answer will be measured not in press releases but in what happens in Keyport.

This is an environmental disaster that New Jersey allowed to fester for decades. Now it is threatening to become a human tragedy. The state created this mess through years of weak enforcement, inadequate oversight, privatization, and misplaced priorities. Now it has a responsibility to fix it.

Gov. Sherrill needs to show leadership and bring everyone together. The Department of Environmental Protection needs to take control, issue a Spill Act directive, and declare the site an area of immediate environmental concern. The Environmental Protection Agency needs to bring federal resources and accountability, with help from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

The public needs full access to the science. The responsible parties need to pay. And the cleanup needs to be about protecting people, not protecting redevelopment schedules.

New Jersey has spent 47 years proving what happens when we wait. We don’t have another 47 years.

Keyport does not need another excuse. It needs a real cleanup. It needs the Department of Environmental Protection to take control. And it needs the Environmental Protection Agency at the table.

No more pave and wave. No more paperwork over people. No more development before cleanup.

Clean it up. Protect the people. Hold the polluters accountable.