Ramapo River Watershed Conference Presents News Updates

Ramapo College students present report on DuPont contamination
in Pompton Lakes  (photo: Geoff Welch) 

By Eileen McCafferty

The Trustees Pavilion at Ramapo College hosted roughly three dozen people for the afternoon session of the Ramapo River Watershed Conference on April 13. Everyone was there to discuss several issues in relation to pollution, cleanup, and current news about the Ramapo River watershed.

Following a presentation by two Bergen Record reporters on their “Toxic Secrets” investigative report on DuPont pollution in Pompton Lakes, Pompton Lakes native Jefferson Harman Lasala talked about his involvement with community groups affected by contamination from the former Dupont explosives manufacturing plant. He was followed by a panel of four students from Professor Michael Edelstein’s 2018 Environmental Studies capstone class, who highlighted their research on the Dupont case. A third presenter was Professor Chuck Stead, who spoke about his efforts to clean up the Torne Valley of paint sludge dumped by Ford Motor Company.

Jefferson Harman Lasala spoke about being a lifelong Pompton Lake citizen who was forced to move due to concerns about DuPont’s contamination and the decline in price on the house that his grandfather left him and his brothers. Since the house is over an area of contaminated groundwater, they had to sell the house for a fraction of what its normal market price would have been. Lasala stated he is part of two groups that bring the community together in efforts to combat the pollution issues that DuPont has caused to their town.

Lasala highlighted that Pompton Lakes residents have been fighting for years to get the contamination cleaned up. He stressed that the DuPont contamination is the poster child for issues like this nationwide. Dupont has 169 other contaminated sites in the nation. Even if the pollution is in one area, he noted, we are not aware of who else might be getting affected downstream.

Michael Edelstein’s capstone classes create a consulting firm to assist clients on environmental issues. This year’s class created the Turtle Clan Consulting Firm and their research was broken into three phases: an assessment of the history of the cleanup and those affected, comparing Dupont to similar cases in the area, and indicator impacts with a focus on the social, ecological, and physical impacts.

For the social part of the research, the students met with members of the Pompton Lakes community to hear their stories first hand. Many citizens have cancer or some form of severe ailment, the citizens cannot afford lawyers to take on the numerous Dupont lawyers, and their homes are becoming devalued due to hazardous volatile organic chemicals in the groundwater under their neighborhood.

Ecological studies showed the chemicals destroy the local flora and fauna, in addition to affecting local residents. The students found that plants are more susceptible to VOC poisoning from vapor than from groundwater. The students also found that a New Jersey health department study found men in the community had high levels of Non-Hodgkin lymphoma and women had high levels of kidney cancer.

The physical indicator presentation talked about how climate and energy are being affected as well. The students found that in Pompton Lake with vapor mitigation systems installed by DuPont or other contractors in the basements of affected homes, 1,131 kWh of energy was being consumed annually per home. In three hundred and thirty five homes, nearly 400,000 kWh was being consumed per year. Pompton Lakes is utilizing 12% more energy than it should be using just because of the vapor mitigation systems installed in the homes. Furthermore, the student research found that this process sends the toxic vapor into the air around the houses.

Professor Chuck Stead then took the podium and spoke of his efforts to have Torne Valley’s paint sludge issue eradicated. Ford Motor Company had contractors dump paint tainted with lead and chemical solvents from their factory in Mahwah into the area, which is near public water supply wells along the Ramapo River in Hillburn, New York. Several areas of buried paint sludge found and mapped out by Professor Stead and Ramapo College students have been excavated by Ford contractors in recent years.

Describing a recent visit to an area of buried paint sludge along Torne Brook that two of his students found, Professor Stead said the smell of the paint is a “sweet industrial aroma.” The crew of Ford contractors who went out with him said that the paint must have been “scattered around by someone” because they weren’t finding concentrated areas of paint sludge. Professor Stead insisted they keep looking. He was not convinced they had found the end of the contamination. Sure enough, they found the buried “flow” of paint. What looked like a rocky boulder was broken open and a mass of red paint poured out.

Not far away, near an Orange and Rockland Utility transformer site, Professor Stead found more lead paint sludge and industrial trash sticking out of the ground. He said the Ford contractors plan to start a cleanup of that area in June.