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Dover adding $17,000
to dump study contract
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Published in the Asbury Park Press
By JEAN MIKLE
TOMS RIVER BUREAU
TOMS RIVER -- The cost of studying possible contamination at the old Dover Township landfill continues to rise.
The Township Committee Tuesday added $17,000 to the contract of Millburn-based consultant Dan Raviv Associates Inc., raising Raviv's contract to $513,000. In March, the committee approved a $137,000 increase to the consultant's contract.
Committeeman George E. Wittmann Jr. has said the consultant's fee has continued to rise because the state Department of Environmental Protection has required Raviv to do more work at the 33-acre landfill site, which is between Bay Avenue and Church Road.
As part of a lawsuit settlement, Union Carbide Corp. has agreed to pay half the consulting costs. The township initially hired Raviv Associates for a maximum amount of $114,000 in 1997.
Dover's insurance is expected to pay a portion of the township's costs for the landfill work.
The consultant has been working with DEP officials to determine the final location of 10 additional monitoring wells, which will be drilled at or near the landfill property. Once the wells are drilled, there will be a total of 16 monitoring wells in the area.
The DEP disagreed with the consultant's initial recommendation on the location of the new wells, so Raviv Associates was forced to do more field work, which led to additional costs, Wittmann has said.
Hazardous substances, including benzene, dichlorobenzene and chlorobenzene, were found in ground water near the landfill property in 1985. Trucker Nicholas Fernicola has said he dumped about 2,000 drums of chemical waste from Union Carbide's Bound Brook plant at the landfill in the spring of 1971.
Last year, the federal Environmental Protection Agency began a preliminary investigation of the landfill to determine if it should be placed on the Superfund list of hazardous waste sites. But in May 1998, the EPA halted its investigation and recommended that the DEP instead supervise any cleanup at the landfill.
Holiday City resident Walter Seymour Tuesday questioned the competency of Raviv Associates, noting the consultant said at Monday's meeting of the Citizens Action Committee on Childhood Cancer Cluster that contamination from the landfill was not the likely cause of well pollution in Silverton that was discovered in the late 1980s.
The DEP and EPA both linked the pollution to the landfill, but Wittmann said Raviv's report on the former dump indicates that most of the contaminants found in private wells were not found in the landfill.
One other pollutant, benzene, which was found in five wells on Silverton Road, is readily biodegradable, Raviv's report states. Benzene concentrations at the landfill did not exceed 31 parts per billion, making it unlikely that the landfill was responsible for the 1 to 11 ppb of benzene found in Silverton Road wells about a quarter-mile away, according to Raviv's report.
Source: Asbury Park Press
Published: May 13, 1999
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