Published in the Asbury Park Press
By DON BENNETT
STAFF WRITER
TOMS RIVER So-called thermal treatment, including incineration, of contaminated soil from the Ciba Specialty Chemicals Corp. site will be a key item for discussion at a public forum tomorrow night, a federal environmental official said last night.
The official, William J. Muszynski, deputy regional administrator for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, said incineration at the Ciba site or off the site is one of the technologies under consideration to rid the soil of chemical contaminants.
Muszynski was speaking at an information session about the Ciba Superfund site.
William Smedley of Jersey Shore, Pa., part of a group that's been battling what he calls a "dirt burner" at a Superfund site in Lock Haven, Pa., said incinerator workers there told him Toms River could be their next destination.
But EPA and Ciba officials said Ciba is not close to hiring cleanup contractors.
Smedley, a leader of AIR, or Arrest the Incinerator Remediation, says the mobile rotary kiln incinerator is use in Lock Haven emits some of the chemicals from the soil as gases.
Other gases are released when the soil is excavated so it can be put into the incinerator, he said.
"I'm not even sure we're talking about a mobile rotary kiln incinerator here," said Muszynski.
Chemicals driven out of the soil as gases by heat can be captured and treated, or turned into water, carbon dioxide, inorganic oxides, or acids, David Williams, Ciba's technical director for the cleanup, said last month.
That's being done at the Pennsylvania site, too, Smedley said, but his group is not satisfied that all the contaminants are being captured.
Williams said last night the results of a feasibility study of cleanup technologies could be submitted by Ciba to the EPA in May or June.
The EPA will review the study, discuss it at more public meetings, and eventually decide what will be done to clean up the pollution sources.
Biological treatment, landfilling, and stabilization of the polluted areas are other technologies being studied.
The session tomorrow will be held 7 p.m. at the Holiday Inn on Route 37.
Source: Asbury Park Press
Published:March 24, 1999
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