F ederal officials have identified waterfront areas in Old Bridge and Sayreville as having been contaminated by materials they believe were dumped there long ago.
ERIC SUCAR staff An area of Old Bridge’s Laurence Harbor section was found to have elevated levels of lead and other contaminants. The lead contamination, believed to be related to the dumping of materials years ago, is located at the sea wall and nearby beach, as well as a site in Sayreville. Officials stressed there is no immediate health threat to the public. The federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was recently authorized to begin removal action at the contaminated locations, including an area in Old Bridge’s Laurence Harbor section and a jetty in Sayreville. The areas of concern are being called the Raritan Bay Slag Site.
Dan Harkay, section chief of the EPA’s remedial action branch, said the material found in both towns was dumped in both places. It could not have drifted in the water, he said, since the slag columns are too heavy, weighing several hundred pounds each.
Contamination was first detected in Laurence Harbor in 2007. At that time, the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection notified area residents of elevated levels of lead, antimony, arsenic and copper along the Laurence Harbor seawall. The 2,500-foot-long seawall makes up part of the Raritan Bay Slag Site.
Officials said lead slag from blast furnace bottoms were deposited along the beachfront there in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Sayreville Mayor Kennedy O’Brien and Old Bridge Mayor James T. Phillips called for National Lead Industries to take responsibility for the cleanup of the areas, accusing the now-defunct Sayreville-based manufacturer of dumping the lead contaminants. Representatives of National Lead could not be reached for comment.
Phillips cited a letter from 1972 in which National Lead officials informed the DEP that a local trucking company was carting their lead slag from Perth Amboy to Raritan Bay.
“When the EPA begins a remediation program, the challenge is often to figure out who was initially responsible for the contamination,” Phillips said in a press release. “There are often many parties involved; many of these parties no longer exist. We are fortunate to have this letter from National Lead, implicating this company in the contamination. So, Mayor O’Brien and I are now calling for an immediate cleanup.”
The area of concern in Sayreville consists of the western jetty at the Cheesequake Creek inlet and waterfront
area, according to the EPA’s website. The EPA evaluated the Raritan
Bay Slag Site for removal action at the request of the DEP, and the EPA received authorization to begin removal action on March 19.
The EPA’s removal assessment includes gathering historical information and available data, along with collecting soil, sediment, water, biological and waste samples from the seawall, jetty and beaches near the areas where the processing by-products were deposited.
The area of concern in Old Bridge begins just west of Margaret’s Creek and ends at the first beach in Laurence Harbor, east of the easternmost jetty.
At the jetty in Sayreville, officials said, the slag is similar in appearance to the slag on the seawall in Laurence Harbor. In addition, crushed battery casings were found on the jetty.
The state Department of Health and Senior Services evaluated samples collected by the DEP from the beach at Old Bridge Waterfront Park. Old Bridge Township installed a split rail fence around the area of concern and posted warning signs in the park along the edge of the seawall.
The EPA said the Raritan Bay Slag Site is part of a larger effort that includes Margaret’s Creek, where the DEP has previously discovered unusually high levels of lead contamination.
Elizabeth Totman, EPA spokeswoman, said the agency got involved in this matter last fall. Nick Magriples, team coordinator for the site, was part of the EPA’s assessment team that determined the areas of concern are a public health threat. Those areas do not include the adjacent Old Bridge Waterfront Park or the beach near the Cheesequake Creek inlet; it is only the area of the seawall adjacent to the park, the beach to the west of the seawall, and the western jetty near the Cheesequake Creek inlet.
Magriples said the EPA took samples in the area of the seawall and the beach near the seawall in Laurence Harbor, as well as from the jetty at Cheesequake Creek in Sayreville. He said the slag pots that were dumped there eroded over time and the Assessment Tools for the Evaluation of Risk (ASTER) and the state Department of Health and Senior Services provided them with a health consultation in recent months.
Magriples said that a high risk of neurological damage and cognitive development problems exist for children if they ingest the material found at the site. The EPA is monitoring the site and it has not approached the issue of who is the responsible party yet, as it is evaluating the site for listing on the National Priorities List. If the site is added to the list, it would then be recognized as a Superfund site.
Phillips told the Suburban that the EPA briefed him along with Sayreville Business Administrator Jeffrey Bertrand on March 11. Phillips said the federal government should use its power to make the entity that performed the dumping responsible for the cleanup.
“I know where this lead came from,” Phillips said. “The responsible party here is National Lead Industries. We have it on their letterhead. They wrote a letter in 1972 that told the DEP at the time where the slag material from their Perth Amboy operation was going. It was going to the sites along Raritan Bay.
“You don’t have to be Columbo to find out this site was contaminated by NL Industries,” Phillips said. “They admitted it. It’s on their stationery. This is not a situation here where you have an Edgeboro Landfill, where many may have contributed to the contamination.”
Concerned residents can attend the April 1 meeting of the Old Bridge Environmental Commission at 7:30 p.m. in the town’s municipal complex. EPA officials are going to brief the commission, and the public will have the opportunity to ask questions.