Contaminated Dirt Removed from Camden

Camden Courier-Post - August 4, 2004

Residents win fight on issue with NJ Transit

By Richard Pearsall

The contaminated dirt that NJ Transit piled into huge mounds next to a residential neighborhood here is gone, to the delight of residents who demanded its removal.

“After all the years of not winning anything,” said Robin Perkins, a member of the Eastside Civic Association, “we won this one.”

But questions remain about why a small portion of the dirt was incinerated at a special disposal facility rather than deposited in landfills. More than 4,000 tons of the dirt was taken to a facility in South Philadelphia for incineration. The cost of that incineration was $55 per ton, figures provided by NJ Transit show, far in excess of the amounts the agency paid a variety of landfills to take the bulk of the dirt. Those fees ranged as low as $2 per ton.

Janet Hines, a spokeswoman for NJ Transit, described the dirt that went to the incinerator as “no different than what went into the landfills. It had the same content at slightly different levels.”

The dirt that NJ Transit piled in East Camden – some 160,000 tons of it – was excavated during construction of the River LINE from Camden to Trenton. NJ Transit maintained the dirt, which it described as “clean fill,” posed no environmental threat. Built between 2000 and 2004 at a cost of roughly $1 billion, the line began operations in March of this year.

The dirt was dumped in East Camden as an economical way to dispose of it, NJ Transit records indicate, although the agency later described the berms as “visual barriers.”

To date, the removal has cost NJ Transit about $10 million.

Taken from a right of way used for railroading for more than 150 years, the dirt contained residues of various hazardous substances that left it unfit for residential areas and permissible in commercial areas only if capped with cleaner dirt. Among the problem substances were lead, arsenic and other heavy metals; PCBs or polychlorinated biphenyls; and various volatile organic compounds, such as benzopyrene.

NJ Transit deposited the dirt in the Pavonia Rail Yard in East Camden in mounds that stood three stories tall in some spots, stretched for blocks and rested within yards of homes and businesses. After months of newspaper articles, resident protests and finally, the intervention of state legislators, NJ Transit relented and agreed, in June 2003, to remove the berms. The process took nearly a year, but won praise from residents.

“You kept your promise,” Connie Williams, the president of the Eastside Civic Association, told Joyce Gallagher, the NJ Transit executive who worked with the residents, at a meeting in May. By then the dirt was gone. A fence was up; grass and roses were to come.

“It’s out of here,” Perkins said at the time. “That was our main issue.”

The route to removal was circuitous, with starts and stops that NJ Transit did its best to hide from public view, citing “ongoing negotiations.”

Forgoing public bidding, NJ Transit shipped the first 69,000 tons of the dirt to Interstate Materials, a transfer facility on Staten Island, at a cost of $923,000 for disposal and an additional $2.4 million to truck it up the New Jersey Turnpike. The next batch was supposed to go to a quarry in Falls Township, Pa., another deal arranged without bids but that fell through when the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection withdrew its permit. By then, the dirt had gained a bit of notoriety, prompting a number of locations, including Winslow Township, Elk Township and a disposal facility in Delaware, to turn it down. NJ Transit eventually found places for the rest of the dirt in the Salem County Landfill, two more landfills in Pennsylvania – Morgantown and Pottstown – and the Clean Earth Facility, the disposal plant in South Philadelphia. NJ Transit cited an “exigency” clause in its bylaws in explaining why it did not put more of the work out for bid. Contracts above $25,000 are supposed to be advertised and bid.