Published in the Asbury Park Press
By CAROL GORGA WILLIAMS
TOMS RIVER BUREAU
TOMS RIVER -- The federal Environmental Protection Agency has postponed tonight's public discussion of the cleanup of the Ciba-Geigy Superfund site because one of its representatives is ill.
EPA spokeswoman Nina Habib Spencer said yesterday that a new date for the meeting will most likely be announced within the week.
The discussion is to include cleanup goals for the site and how those goals were determined. Also on the agenda are cleanup techniques that were considered but rejected.
The EPA still is planning to release a draft feasibility study for the cleanup by Aug. 31, Habib Spencer said.
EPA officials said the study will detail cleanup methods that experts from the now Ciba Specialty Chemicals Corp. say should be used to clean up 15 to 20 contaminated sites on the company's property, located along Route 37.
The study will also address the cleanup of about 35,000 waste-filled drums buried on the property.
Romona Pezzella, the EPA's remedial project manager for the site, has said the feasibility study is being prepared with the agency's oversight. After it is completed, the EPA will hold public comment sessions on the proposed cleanup plan.
Among the cleanup methods being considered are thermal desorption, which involves heating contaminated soils to vaporize pollutants; bioremediation, in which bacteria is used to break down pollutants; and trucking some of the material to an incinerator in another state.
Pezzella has said four or five different techniques are likely to be used to clean up Ciba's contaminated sites.
EPA officials have said repeatedly that no final decision on how to treat the waste will be made until the treatment methods have local support.
"We are months and months away from making a final decision," said Habib Spencer. "The reason we held our last meeting on thermal desorption was not to push the issue as the preferred process. It was a follow-up to our March meeting, when residents asked for more information. We want the residents to have all the facts."
Habib Spencer was responding to a concern raised by Peter C. Hibbard, president of the Ocean County Citizens for Clean Water.
Hibbard said yesterday "that every sign we're getting suggests they are moving toward incineration."
Incinerators typically operate at much higher temperatures -- between 800 and 1,600 degrees Fahrenheit -- than thermal desorption units, which heat soil at temperatures of between 500 and 1,200 degrees, Pezzella has said.
Thermal desorption was used to clean up about 15,000 cubic yards of polluted soil at the Reich Farm Superfund site off Route 9 from November 1994 until February 1995.
Although EPA officials are considering incineration for some of the pollutants found at Ciba, the materials would be taken to an off-site incinerator, Pezzella said earlier this year.
The thermal desorption units would be placed on-site. But while heat treatment could be used to remove some of the pollutants at Ciba, including the contents of some of the 35,000 drums of waste at the site, it is not appropriate for all the contaminants found there, officials said.
Thermal desorption cannot remove metals from the soil, and is not effective at removing highly concentrated waste, according to the EPA.
Hibbard is calling upon residents to show up en masse at the next meeting to protest any effort to bring incineration to the Ciba site.
Source: Asbury Park Press
Published: August 18, 1999
|
