ESSEX -- By the end of the summer, one of the most complicated cleanups the federal Environmental Protection Agency has ever overseen could be finished and removed from the list of the country's worst-polluted sites.
It's been a decade and a half, but residents of Glen Ridge, Bloomfield, Montclair, East Orange and West Orange will no longer live with the threat of radiation poisoning from the long-closed U.S. Radium Factory that made glow-in-the-dark watch faces.
"There was over 220,000-cubic-yards of soil which was contaminated.... We're talking about a hell of a lot of soil," said U.S. Rep. Bill Pascrell, Jr., whose 8th Congressional district includes Montclair, Glen Ridge and West Orange. "We're talking about soil in a really densely-populated area."
div class="photo-center large">
The radiation threat came from toxic soil, contaminated by radium from the factory, which used the radioactive substance in the 1920s. After workers at the factory got radiation poisoning, the building was demolished. In later years, contaminated materials from the site were used in the construction of hundreds of homes.
In 1980, when the EPA made a list of Superfund sites--the most polluted areas in the country-- the Essex county radium sites were among the first to be added to the list.
The cleanup cost about $218 million, and lasted from 1991 to 2004. The EPA paid for 90 percent of the work, and the state provided the other $22 million. Over that time, the EPA hauled away about 10,000 large dump truck loads, which had to be shipped across the country to Utah and Idaho, where the EPA paid between $100 and $600 per cubic yard to bury the waste.
The project took years, but not because of sheer volume of waste, or because the project was underfunded, according to John Frisco, manager of the Superfund remediation program in the region.
"If I'm cleaning up a landfill, I don't have to restore it," Frisco explained. "This site became much more complex because people were literally living on top of the contaminated material."
Many homes were built on soil from the factory's waste, and the cleanup often meant stabilizing a house, digging the basement out from under it and replacing six feet of dirt at the foundation level.
The work covered 355 properties, including 339 homes. Frisco said knocking down houses would have been cheaper in many cases, but mayors of the affected towns feared blight. So the EPA got into the renovation business, in a big way. They kept the houses intact, photographed them, and did their best to restore every detail, including landscaping.
"In one case, there was quite a rose garden we had to put back in," said Betsy Donovan, the project manager for the EPA.
Wayne Greenstone, the lawyer for hundreds of homeowners who sued the company that produced the radium, said that his clients videotaped the walls and foundations of their houses before the work began.
Another factor that limited the speed of the work was finding enough temporary housing for displaced residents.
"When you're working in a densely populated residential community, you can't simply say 'I'm going to rope off the town of Montclair. I'm going to move everyone out in one shot,'" Frisco said.
Superfund sites are rarely taken off the list--only one in five sites have graduated off the list since the program began. For New Jersey, which has more Superfund sites than any other state in the union, the conclusion of this project will mean 26 down, 114 to go. Three sites are also proposed for the list.
Frisco said there is still a final request for public comment on the U.S. Radium cleanup, which will mean another three or four months of outreach. When the project is complete it will also be one of the final acts in Frisco's career with the EPA, which began in 1973.
"I made a commitment to myself not to retire before the site was cleaned up, and the sites were deleted," Frisco said. "It's now become apparent that it's easier to put a site on the (Superfund list) than to take it off."