Emotional Pompton Lakes Residents Bare All at a Community Event

By Andrew Herrera

“I basically had to give up [my] house,” one resident said. “I don’t even want to drive down that street anymore, it’s too painful.” Another resident mentioned that her own sister told her to stop making a fuss about the threats to health posed by the toxic groundwater. A couple described the dizzying litany of surgeries their nephew had to undergo in order to treat a rare form of cancer.

These comments were shared by participants in a recent Pompton Lakes community meeting organized by the Ramapo College Environmental Assessment class that is surveying the impacts of the pollution of Pompton Lakes caused by DuPont’s old munitions factory. We students of the class were looking to get some personal insights into how the contamination has affected residents, especially those in the Plume area of town whose groundwater has been contaminated and whose basements have been infiltrated by chemical fumes. What we got was something much more emotional than reading about pollution in Pompton Lakes.

Individual residents sat down with one student at a time; the students asked residents questions based on the type of impacts they are studying for the environmental assessment. My impact indicator is organizational, so I asked residents questions about local politics and debate over the contamination issue. The interviewees offered me some stark truths. One, for example, was the account of the woman mentioned previously, whose sister had told her to stop talking about the issue of contamination in the Plume. Of the 17 or 18 residents who came to the meeting, all seemed to agree that the town council vehemently opposed discussing the contamination at all. This is despite alarming incidents of rare diseases and cancers among residents in the Plume.

Multiple times, residents pointed to property values as the reason why. The town council, as well as residents living outside of the Plume, seem to principally fear that if the contamination becomes more widely publicized, property values for homes throughout town will drop, affecting municipal revenue and residents’ finances. The participant who had contracted the rare form of cancer recalled how he often heard property values mentioned by all sorts of people growing up as the reason why the contamination issue needed to stay away from the public eye. According to what residents hear around town, people seem to fear what will happen if DuPont is forced to pay out reparations or buy homes in the neighborhoods it polluted. Retired DuPont employees worry they’ll lose their pensions, while others believe that DuPont needs to stay in town to continue paying the property taxes that help fund public schools.

Of course, everything said needs to be taken with a grain of salt. We students were only able to hear from a small fraction of the town’s population. No one there supported DuPont or thought that the contaminated water was not a problem. Yet there are clearly plenty of people who think those things. But they don’t come out to events like this. For now, their side of the story remains in the background, less discussed in public.