Ringwood Residents Take EPA to Task ; Demand New Firm for Superfund Cleanup

By BARBARA WILLIAMS and ALEX NUSSBAUM, STAFF WRITERs

RINGWOOD – Ringwood residents confronted federal officials Thursday, demanding a new contractor be brought in to clean up Ford’s former Superfund site.

About 75 polite but skeptical residents peppered U.S. Environmental Protection Agency officials for hours at Ryerson Middle School about orange-tinted streams, the accuracy of well monitoring and whether Ford could be trusted after four failed attempts to clean up the Upper Ringwood site.

“Having Ford do the cleanup is like having the fox watching the henhouse,” said Tom Anastasio, a former resident whose mother still lives in the borough’s Erskine Lakes section. “Get rid of them. Isn’t this the fifth time they’re up there? They’re not doing the job.”

The residents didn’t seem to have much more faith in Arcadis, Ford’s cleanup contractor – or in the EPA.

“You had a responsibility to say this area is clean, and you came there and you said it was clean – and it wasn’t,” said Barbara Meyerson, a Skyline Lakes resident.

During the meeting, which was called by borough officials to allay fears that contamination had spread, EPA officials said they had no evidence that waters beyond the cleanup site in the Ringwood mines area had been contaminated.

“The data we’ve collected tell us it’s not moving off the site,” said Joe Gowers, the agency’s manager for the cleanup.

Gowers nevertheless acknowledged the area wouldn’t be clean anytime soon.

“You’re not looking at months,” he said. “You’re looking at years.”

A Ford spokesman defended the company at the meeting.

“Dialogue is good,” Jon Holt said. “We’re here to listen to the people’s concerns.”

He said Ford looked forward to working with a community advisory panel being formed to watch over the cleanup.

Borough officials requested the informational meeting after The Record’s “Toxic Legacy” special report in October. The series showed paint sludge containing lead, arsenic, PCBs and other poisons, as well as other waste, remains on the Upper Ringwood site, even after Ford and the EPA conducted four partial cleanups of dumping by Ford contractors during 1967-71.

In just the current cleanup, more than 10,000 tons of leftover waste have been removed, with more areas scheduled for investigation and cleanup, and two mine shafts yet unexplored.

Mayor Wenke Taule said she has received phone calls and spoken with residents worried about their property values, and water and air quality. Taule also has met recently with members of the local real estate industry, who must abide by disclosure rules concerning contamination in an area where a house is for sale.

“Just like in all communities, when people hear about something in their town, originally they were frantic,” Taule said. “But then it dies down, and they learn the facts.”

Taule sent out a townwide flier notifying residents of the meeting and detailing some key information. She pointed out that the closest municipal well is nearly two miles away, and tests of water in public wells have not shown evidence of contamination.

The sludge is spread over approximately 100 acres, “a small fraction of Ringwood’s 18,000 acres,” she wrote in the flier. And the area is “underlain by thick bedrock, a natural geological formation that inhibits the spread of groundwater contamination.”

Area streams feed into the nearby Wanaque Reservoir, but water officials say the water is safe.

Once an active mining site, the area is now home to a close-knit neighborhood of about 400 people, many of whom are Ramapough Mountain Indians. They have long complained of serious illnesses and early deaths, and assert the wastes are to blame. No connection has been made between the contamination and the illnesses, but health officials said this summer the residents have elevated cancer levels.

Only 48 homes stand in the isolated neighborhood off Margaret King Avenue, and those houses rarely, if ever, are put up for sale. Usually a home is passed from one family member to another or sold among friends. Because of its isolation, happenings in the Upper Ringwood neighborhood do not normally affect other areas of Ringwood, and real estate agents say house values outside the neighborhood have not been affected by the contamination threat.

Orly Steinberg, a Coldwell Banker Realtor, said the meeting with Taule provided valuable insight into what the real-estate community needed to disclose to prospective buyers. For instance, people seeking a house within a mile of the contamination must be informed it is there.

“This is a concern, but it’s in an isolated part of town, and it’s not affecting the rest of the town,” Steinberg said. “Some people’s perception when they read the front page of the newspaper is to think the sky is falling. But then they learn the facts and everyone calms down.”

Steinberg said “four or five sales did fall through from buyers out of Ringwood” but it has not affected house values in Ringwood.

Rich Ranft, an Erskine Lakes resident, said the controversy hardly seemed to be hurting property values.

“Ringwood is a big town … and Lake Erskine is still pristine compared to the rest of the world,” Ranft said. “Are you kidding me? The new housing in Ringwood starts at about $800,000. I wish it would drive down values.

“It’s gone out of control. Shacks are selling for $400,000, $500,000.”

At the other end of town, around lower Ringwood’s Skyline Lake, homeowners were more skeptical. They are watching to see what Ford and the government do. Neighbors are upset, said Jim Martocci, president of the lake’s property owners association.

“The feeling is somebody dropped the ball somewhere,” he said.

Media coverage of the botched cleanups has put Ringwood on the map, albeit with a dubious distinction. At his job in Hillside, Martocci said, everyone has heard of the borough now.

He acknowledged it was bad publicity, but agreed that it hasn’t seemed to slow home sales, or worry neighbors much.

Skyline Lake has its own pollution problems. The gasoline additive MTBE recently was discovered in the wells of several dozen homes.

But the properties were connected to the town water supply, and the episode didn’t seem to scare off any buyers, Martocci said.

“But everything does have a ripple effect,” he concluded about the Ringwood mines cleanup. “If people get the sense that it’s not being taken care of, and [there is] an increased sense of pollution, it could have an effect on the whole community. The people in Upper Ringwood are definitely concerned,” Martocci said. “Everybody else, I think it’s wait and see.”

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E-mail: williamsb@northjersey.com and nussbaum@northjersey.com