by David Wheeler, author of Wild New Jersey: Nature Adventures in the Garden State.

When a state park is established, most of us rightfully assume that preservation will last forever. But in Ringwood, New Jersey, a suburban community nestled into the rugged mountains just 40 minutes northwest of New York City, Ford Motor Company is attempting to take over part of Ringwood State Park.

The community of Upper Ringwood, made up mostly of Ramapough Mountain Indians, has been living off the land for generations—catching fish, hunting game, and growing vegetables. But Ford’s irresponsible dumping in the 1960s and early 1970s has forever changed this community. Ford’s toxic dumping tells a story of disease, premature death, and a way of life forever altered by pollution.

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Members of the EPA Removal Action Branch addressed the crowd at the Aug. 2 Community Advisory Group (CAG) meeting about the cleanup and decontamination stages of Upper Ringwood properties, which would be done in a four-month window this year.

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A petition is circulating on the Internet calling for a stop to Ford Motor Company’s lobbying efforts to take back parts of Ringwood State Park, specifically the Peter’s Mine Pit Area in Upper Ringwood.

The corporate giant unloaded paint sludge from its now-defunct Mahwah plant in the 1960s and 1970s. This toxicity was blamed for a host of illnesses and subsequent deaths impacting Upper Ringwood residents.

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Federal environmental experts urged dozens of Upper Ringwood residents Tuesday to have their homes and properties tested for dioxin and lead, sounding yet another warning of the dangers of living on a Superfund site.
Chief Dwayne C. Perry addressing the audience during Tuesday’s meeting of the Ringwood Community Advisory Group to discuss more testing in Upper Ringwood at the Superfund site.

Experts from the Environmental Protection Agency, which is overseeing the cleanup of the 500-acre site, offered to conduct the testing and remove any contamination, a task some residents said should have been done decades ago.

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Photo credit: The Record

The federal Environmental Protection Agency is offering to test homes and properties in Upper Ringwood’s Superfund area for dioxin, lead and other contaminants, officials confirmed Monday.

Dioxin, which can cause cancer, was found elevated in dust in some attics, lawyers for residents revealed in “Mann v. Ford,” an HBO documentary that premiered last month. The film, more than five years in the making, chronicles the community’s fight against the Ford Motor Co., which dumped tons of industrial waste in the area more than 40 years ago.

However, the data obtained by experts working on behalf of residents were never released to federal or state regulators for investigation, officials said Monday.

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Credit: 1450 WCTC Radio

While many issues remain unresolved at the 500-acre Superfund site, the release of the film comes at a critical juncture in determining the final cleanup, which will affect generations to come, filmmaker Maro Chermayeff said the day after the film’s premiere.

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The film chronicles the decades’ long plight of the Ramapough Mountain Indians fight against the Ford Motor Company. Living in the hills and forests of northern New Jersey, less than 40 miles from midtown Manhattan,for hundreds of years, the close knit, economically disadvantaged community’s way of life has been threatened since the late 1960s, when Ford, which had a plant in nearby Mahwah, bought their land and began dumping toxic waste in the woods and abandoned iron mines surrounding their homes.

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The persistence of this kind of talk provided the subtext for a story that I wrote last year about the Ramapoughs—specifically, about the death of a tribe member, Emil Mann, at the hands of a park ranger, in the woods behind Stag Hill, and about an environmental lawsuit that several hundred others had brought against Ford Motor Company, for dumping toxic paint sludge. (There used to be a Ford plant in Mahwah—the largest automobile plant in North America. Most of the dumping took place just west of Mahwah, in and around some defunct iron mines for which Ramapough families had long provided much of the labor.) The lawsuit, and the tragic story behind it, is now the subject of a feature-length documentary, “Mann v. Ford,” which will début on H.B.O. tonight at 9 P.M.

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