Green groups find fault with Edison cleanup plan

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New Jersey
COURIER NEWS
Green groups find fault with Edison cleanup plan
By Jerry Barca
March 7, 2004

EDISON -- Local environmental groups and a congressman are disagreeing
with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' plan to continue cleanup efforts
at the former Raritan Arsenal site.

"One way or another, we're not going to tolerate the delays anymore,"
said Bob Spiegel, executive director of the Edison Wetlands Association.

Members of the Raritan Riverkeepers and the New York-New Jersey
Baykeepers, along with former Edison Councilwoman Jane Tousman, joined
Spiegel Thursday in criticizing the corps at a sparsely attended press
conference outside the municipal building.

"We continue to have monitoring and investigation, and this stuff needs
to be removed," said Rep. Frank Pallone, D-Long Branch, earlier Thursday
in a phone call from Washington, D.C.

The environmental groups and Pallone want the corps to quicken the
cleanup pace, remove contaminated water from the ground, treat it and
release it back into the environment. The environmental groups also want
to monitor the health of people who work in buildings atop the polluted
area.

Corps officials call the digging plan impractical because some of the
contaminants are 30 feet deep in the earth. They say the health checks
are unnecessary because the risk fails to warrant them. The
pump-and-treat method is less effective than injecting the soil with a
pollutant-neutralizing chemical. They also say lack of funding slows the
process.

The project receives money through the Formerly Used Defense Sites
program, which gets funding from the Department of Defense. The
government has already spent $60 million cleaning up the mess the
military created. James Moore, corps project manager for the arsenal,
admits finance is an issue in the clean up process.

"Our budget comes from the same budget that funds bullets and bombs, and
lately we've been spending a lot of money on bullets and bombs," Moore
said earlier this week.

This article can be viewed at:
http://www.c-n.com/news/c-n/story/0,2111,920694,00.html

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