- Removing toxic sludge from a backyard in Ringwood.
Photo by Chapin Engineering.
As descendants of Native Americans, the underprivileged Ramapough Tribe suffered staggering rates of premature deaths, rare cancers and autoimmune diseases believed to be linked to the toxic waste dumped on their community in the 1960s and 1970s.
The Ramapough Mountain Indian Tribe are descendants of the original Lenni Lenape Indians. These Native Americans migrated into the Ramapo Mountains in the 17th Century and worked in the iron mines that opened there in the mid-1700s. They worked the mines until mining ceased in the mid-20th Century. The Ramapoughs supported themselves by supplementing what they earned by cultivating their own gardens, and hunting and fishing for food. To this day they hunt, garden, and fish, but now the land is contaminated and many are ill.
Old geological survey of the Ringwood iron mines
After an initial investigation, in 1983, the USEPA designated Upper Ringwood as one of America’s most toxic sites, placing it on the Superfund list. Ford Motor Company was found responsible and removed 7,000 cubic yards of contaminated soil. The Ford Motor Company Mahwah plant operated from
1955-1980. Ringwood Realty Corp., a former Ford Motor Company subsidiary, purchased the mine property and adjoining land from Pittsburgh Pacific Company in 1965. From 1967 until 1974, Ringwood Realty, deposited waste products for Ford Motor Company.
A decade after the site was placed on the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s National Priority List, the USEPA declared it was clean, and deleted it off the list in 1994. Despite this declaraction, massive mountains of toxic paint sludge still sat out in the open, bleeding their chemical poisons into residents’ backyards, drinking water, and school bus stops. Since Edison Wetlands Association began helping the residents, over 47,000 cubic tons of toxic lead sludge has been removed—more than six times the amount removed in the previous 30 years combined. We together have achieved the unprecedented goal of relisting Ringwood on the federal Superfund site list, opening the door to other low-income area Superfund sites where cleanups were rushed and incomplete.
Over the past seven years, Edison Wetlands Association has worked with the Ramapough community and transformed Ringwood Mines/Landfill Superfund Site from a forgotten toxic wasteland to a progressive and highly active cleanup that is a top priority of federal and state officials, regulators, municipal leaders, and the media. EWA supervised the removal of visible toxic sludge from families’ yards, where it sat for decades next to swingsets, trampolines and school bus stops, convincing the NJDEP to take over the residential cleanup from the USEPA.
Community Advisory Group
The Community Advisory Group (CAG) continues to build on our unprecedented momentum on the cleanup of this horrific toxic waste site. The Bergen Record’s Toxic Legacy Revisited series – a front-page investigation of the Ringwood saga – ran in late 2010, following an ABC Nightline feature. EWA’s advocacy led the USEPA Inspector General to form the Ringwood CAG, which Spiegel chairs and also includes our technical consultant as a member. The efforts resulted in the contaminated Ringwood State Park area adjacent to Ramapough homes being fully remediated, as well as the long-awaited investigation of 18 residential properties recently starting, enabling underprivileged residents to have their homes and yards investigated for toxic sludge dumped decades ago. In a 2010 meeting with USEPA Administrator Lisa Jackson, Spiegel joined Ramapough leader Wayne Mann and other CAG members in pushing for an expanded arsenic removal and full investigation of the St. George Pit Area since multicolored waste and freon, a toxic chemical, was found onsite and in the residents’ drinking water. USEPA later followed EWA’s and the CAG’s advice and required Ford to delineate St. George’s Pit with test trench groundwater sampling, remove all paint sludge, and remediate the area. And after touring the site with Region 2 administrator Judith Enck, the year-long fight culminated in Ford consultants being forced to fully remove arsenic, a potential carcinogen, at the most stringent standard possible. These are huge victories for the Ramapoughs, to be celebrated in the forthcoming Mann v. Ford documentary film.
The CAG will continue to hold Ford accountable for a full cleanup, strictly monitoring the test-trenching, remedial action, and investigations, while working with the community on the state sampling and cleanups of their yards. We also want to ensure these toxins in the groundwater are not entering the downstream Wanaque Reservoir, the source of drinking water for 1 million people.
