[CPEO-BIF] Upper Ringwood (NJ) Ford Motor waste

[Lenny Siegel <lennysiegel@gmail.com>]

Decades After a Plant Closes, Waste Remains

By RON STODGHILL
New York Times
July 29, 2007


In the summer of 2005, around the time that residents of Upper Ringwood, 
N.J., began to wonder whether the skin rashes, nose bleeds and 
bronchitis that plagued their community were more than bad luck, the 
Ford Motor Company and the Environmental Protection Agency made a 
request: the automaker and the regulator wanted access to the yards 
around two families’ homes to remove waste that had been dumped in the 
area. Ford boasts in its ads that “It’s Easy Being Green,” but residents 
feared the request suggested something not so easy at all. From the 
mid-1950s to the late 1970s, Ford operated an assembly plant in northern 
New Jersey, in nearby Mahwah, that cranked out millions of passenger 
cars. Ford closed the plant in 1980, after dumping what the E.P.A. 
describes as thousands of tons of paint sludge and other waste in Upper 
Ringwood, a community of about 350 working-class residents located in 
the foothills of the Ramapo Mountains.

A few years later, the Environmental Protection Agency identified Upper 
Ringwood for priority cleanup under its Superfund program. Ford, deemed 
responsible for the pollution, spent the next five years assessing and 
removing sludge from a 500-acre site that included 50 homes. Satisfied 
with Ford’s cleanup, the E.P.A. dropped Upper Ringwood as a Superfund 
site in 1994, having determined, according to a public notice, that “no 
further cleanup by responsible parties is appropriate” and that “the 
current risk posed by the site is within an acceptable range.”

...

For the entire article, see
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/29/business/yourmoney/29spill.html?ei=5070&en=3313472e712970a0&ex=1186372800&adxnnl=1&emc=eta1&adxnnlx=1185736068-/61w41dRnfA/b8GTGCCzGg

--


Lenny Siegel
Director, Center for Public Environmental Oversight
c/o PSC, 278-A Hope St., Mountain View, CA 94041
Voice: 650/961-8918 or 650/969-1545
Fax: 650/961-8918
<lsiegel@cpeo.org>
http://www.cpeo.org


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