Published in the Asbury Park Press
By JEAN MIKLE
TOMS RIVER BUREAU
DOVER TOWNSHIP -- The drums are coming out at last.
More than 20 years after the Ciba-Geigy Corp. site was placed on the federal Superfund list and more than seven years after manufacturing ceased at the site, drums of waste believed to be one of the main sources of pollution there are being excavated.
The drum removal marks a significant step in the cleanup of the 1,350-acre Ciba property, where an industrial-dye and resin-making operation once employed 1,400 people. Waste leaking from the drums, many of which are in poor condition after decades underground, is considered a significant source for a plume of groundwater pollution that flows southeast from Ciba's site into the Toms River.
A pump-and-treat system pulls 2.7 million gallons of polluted groundwater from beneath the site each day, treats it to remove pollutants, then dumps the water on the northeast corner of the property. The groundwater treatment system, in place since 1996, has kept the contamination plume from expanding, but the pollution sources must be eliminated before the plume can be reduced.
That process is expected to take decades.
Sevenson Environmental Services -- the Niagara Falls, N.Y.-based contractor hired by Ciba to remove the drums -- began excavating containers from the soil on Dec. 9. Thirty-nine drums were taken out that day and 96 on Dec. 10.
Since then, work has continued, halted only for poor weather and the Christmas and New Year's holidays. About 100 drums are being removed each day, according to Romona Pezzella, the federal Environmental Protection Agency's remedial project manager for the site.
"We're just really pleased that we're actually doing the field work now," said Donna Jakubowski, a spokeswoman for Ciba Specialty Chemicals Corp., the company that now owns the property. "We're just going to do it as carefully as we can, according to EPA plans."
Ciba will pay the estimated $92 million bill to clean up the drum disposal area and nine other pollution source sites on the property, but it is the EPA that has jurisdiction over the cleanup work being performed.
An EPA official is there at least once a week, and representatives from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, who oversee the work for the EPA, are on the property every day.
Pezzella, who typically visits the Ciba property each Wednesday, said so far the drum removal process is proceeding as expected.
Air emissions, which were a major concern of the public during hearings that laid out the cleanup process, have not exceeded any of the "action levels" set by the EPA to limit the amount of airborne contaminants released during the excavation, she said.
"I think everything is going very well," she said on a recent trip to the site.
Despite bitterly cold weather, workers from Sevenson Environmental were steadily excavating drums from the unlined landfill, using heavy equipment to chip away at the PVC cover and 2-foot layer of soil that capped the dump when the disposal area was closed around 1977 or 1978.
About 32,000 to 35,000 drums were dumped in the five-acre drum disposal area, which was used for disposal of solid waste from Ciba's manufacturing activities. It operated from about 1961 to 1977. Another, lined landfill on the site contains more than 30,000 drums, but those containers are not scheduled to be removed under the Ciba cleanup plan.
Dover Township Mayor Paul C. Brush, members of the Citizens Action Committee on Childhood Cancer Cluster and many local activists have called for all drums to be removed before cleanup work is completed.
But so far, there has been no movement to modify the EPA's record of decision for the site, the binding legal document that sets forth the specifics of the cleanup plan. That docu-ment calls only for the removal of the drums in the unlined landfill, or drum disposal area.
A lawsuit filed by the township last year against Ciba seeks to intervene in the cleanup and have all the drums removed. Brush's legal team is reviewing the suit, which was champi-oned by former Mayor John F. Russo Jr. and the Township Committee as the only way to force the removal of all drums from Ciba's property.
Drums dumped at the drum disposal site from about 1961 to 1972 were crushed. Intact drums were buried there from about 1972 to 1977, according to EPA records. Iron oxide sludge from manufacturing operations was also buried there.
The main contaminants found in the drum disposal area in-clude chlorobenzene, 1,2-dichlo-robenzene, 1,2,4-trichloroben-zene and napthalene, all suspected human carcinogens.
Metal drums are carefully ex-tracted from the soil and then loaded onto roll-off trucks for transport to the "drum han-dling building," located about one-quarter mile away from the excavation site. About 40 per-cent of the drums are in such bad shape that they must be "overpacked," or loaded into larger containers, for trans-port.
Some drums are so deteriorat-ed that workers have had to peel the metal away to gain access to the contents, a pro-cess Pezzella likened to strip-ping the peel from a banana.
In the drum-handling building, workers clad in protective suits open the drums and sample their contents to determine if the materials will be labeled hazardous or non-hazardous for disposal, Pezzella said.
So far, the majority of the mate-rial has been non-hazardous, and contains mostly soil and sandy material, Pezzella said. She stressed, however, that la-beling material "non-hazard-ous," is merely a categorization to determine where the materi-al can be discarded.
"The categorization of non-haz-ardous or hazardous is really a waste disposal categorization," Pezzella said. "Non-hazardous can still have chemicals. It's not something you'd want in your backyard."
All drum contents -- whether hazardous or non-hazardous -- will be shipped off-site for dis-posal. Drum removal was ini-tially expected to take about two years to complete, but Pez-zella said last week she hopes it can be finished sooner.
Pezzella said she expects about two roll-off trucks of non-haz-ardous drums to be shipped off-site this week, the first contain-ers to be removed from the Ci-ba property since the begin-ning of excavation.
She said that determining whether waste is hazardous or non-hazardous, and what types of pollutants are in the drums, is time-consuming.
"In the initial stages of this work, the categorization in the building is the slow part of the process," Pezzella said. "It deter-mines how many drums they take out each day."
The drum contents are sampled and placed in a jar for ship-ment to an off-site laboratory for analysis. Other analyses are done on-site, but the off-site process takes five days, Pezzel-la said.
Ciba Specialty Chemicals plans to build its own lab on the property to complete the drum-content analysis that is now done off-site, Pezzella said. She said that will make the process a bit faster.
"The analysis still takes a cer-tain amount of time, but at least they will not have to pack up samples and ship them off," she said.
Ciba recently completed work on a large wooden observation deck that overlooks the drum disposal area. Interested ob-servers will be able to visit the site and view the work.
Meanwhile, updates on the dai-ly work at the site can be viewed on the Web at www.ci-ba-geigysuperfund.org. The Web site also includes daily air-monitoring data. There are six permanent monitors set up on the perimeter of the site to detect any emissions from ex-cavation and site work at Ciba.
Hand-held monitors are used at the site of excavation work, and more monitors are in the "near field," area, or about 300 feet from the pit where workers are digging up drums. Should airborne contaminants be de-tected above the action levels approved by the EPA, work will stop and workers will initi-ate pollution-control measures if necessary, Pezzella said.
So far, the action levels have not been reached during the drum-removal process, Pezzella said.
The drum removal is not the only cleanup-related work at the site. Construction has start-ed on three buildings that will be used in the bioremediation process, which will use bacter-ia at the Ciba site to break down and consume contami-nants.
About 200,000 cubic yards of polluted soil will be dug up, treated to remove contami-nants, and then returned to the ground. Pezzella said she is op-timistic that bioremediation can begin by April or May.
Soil that is dug up will spend four to six weeks in a soil-treat-ment building, where bacteria will break down the contami-nants, and then about two more months outside, on a secondary "pad," that will be used to com-plete the bioremediation pro-cess.
Bioremediation is expected to take about six years.
Published in the Asbury Park Press 1/18/04
|
