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Latest Ciba cleanup not enough, activists warn
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Published in the Ocean County Observer
By DON BENNETT
Staff Writer
TOMS RIVER -- A plan to purge the Ciba-Geigy Superfund site of toxic chemicals will not be done as well, or as quickly, as the chemical company and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency expect, if experts studying the cleanup plan for Ocean County Citizens for Clean Water are right.
The EPA feasibility study steering the cleanup of some 20 buried sources of toxic wastes "significantly underestimates," the amount of an elusive pollution source that will remain when the planned cleanup is done, William P. Eckel and Benjamin Ross of Disposal Safety Inc. of Washington, D.C. warned in a July 25 report.
They've been working with the citizens' group for the past seven years. The EPA and Ciba have been studying what to do for a decade.
The trouble is Ciba and the EPA have gone as far as science can take them in trying to rid the site of the contaminants.
Citizens' group consultants said the "studies of this site are at the frontiers of science and disagreements are inevitable. None of the disagreements put in question the basic direction of what needs to be done."
But they disagree with Ciba's estimate of how well the site will be cleaned up, and how long it will take.
The EPA prefers a plan that would cost $92.3 million to dig up 145,000 cubic yards of contaminated soil, speed up the attack of microbes on the pollutants, and once it is purged of the toxins, put it back where it came from.
Another 5,000 cubic yards of contaminated soil will be sent elsewhere for treatment.
There are nearly 32,000 drums of various wastes in a single dump. The EPA proposes sending 12,350 of them to an off-site landfill, and 19,500 others to an incinerator someplace else.
Citizens' group consultants said that plan "achieves the goal of groundwater protection about as well as any other alternative, and will meet with greater public approval" than another option, incineration.
What's at issue are non-aqueous phase liquids, chemicals in such large concentrations they do not completely dissolve in the groundwater.
They form a pool of liquid separate from the groundwater. Those less dense than water float on the water table. Those more dense than water sink through the aquifer.
It's the dense ones that trouble the consultants.
They pose a "long-term source of groundwater contamination that may ultimately prevent clean up to drinking water standards. The major problem at Ciba is (dense liquids) that consists of a mixture of chlorinated compounds with various degrees of toxicity to humans,"the consultants said.
Donna Jakubowski, a spokesperson for Ciba Speciality Chemicals, the current owner of the site, said the EPA's cleanup order will provide adjustments to the cleanup strategy if "significant deficiencies" develop.
"Ciba has confidence in the investigations done of the site," she added.
Still Peter Hibbard, president of the citizens' group, says it's unclear where some of the pools of dense pollutants are.
"We don't know where they are. We're not looking for a new search to find them," Hibbard said.
What the group wants is a condition of the EPA's ordered cleanup that will apply technology that develops to attacking the concentrated chemicals in the groundwater.
Jakubowski said she's sure that will be part of the final EPA cleanup plan.
In the meantime the groundwater treatment system that has been in use at the plant since 1996, can be altered to attack the concentrated pollutants, or the amount of biological attack on the site could be expanded, the consultants said.
Ciba has been pumping about 2.7 million gallons of water out of the ground everyday, treating it to remove toxic chemicals, and allowing it to seep back into the ground.
That tactic is designed to halt the flow of two plumes of polluted groundwater from the former dye and resins plant.
The second part of the EPA attack is to eliminate the sources of the contamination, old dumps, tainted soil from earlier waste treatment operations, and remove them.
The consultants say when the planned cleanup of those areas is done, in about eight years, "future levels of groundwater contamination will be greater than Ciba's models predict."
Published on August 8, 2000
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