6/2/2023 0 Comments Toms river![]() ![]() “I wouldn't stand here tonight in front of a place that I still say that I am from if I didn't personally believe in the settlement the DEP is proposing,” he said. Sean Moriarty, a deputy commissioner with the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection, grew up next to the Ciba-Geigy plant he and his friends would hop the fence and play in the plant's woods, much to the dismay of his mother, a cancer nurse at the local hospital. “The public is not going to want to use this for passive recreation,” added resident Phil Solomon. "Why potentially cause other people to be harmed, exposed, injured and possibly killed? That land is off-limits now people don't want to go back there.” “Why not just re-wild the area?” asked Summer Bardier, whose uncle worked at the plant and would sweat the color of the dye he was working when he came home on hot days. As longtime environmental activist Peter Hibbard put it, “It was like they had a golden ticket to pollute.”Īnd during a hearing Monday that lasted nearly six hours, several residents said the site is too toxic - chemically and symbolically - to ever be used for anything again. In addition to a widespread feeling that the settlement fails to punish BASF for the conduct of Ciba-Geigy (something it is not designed to do), many residents still voice deep distrust not only of the company but of government as well, citing decades of neglect and lax oversight that allowed Ciba-Geigy to dump chemicals and dyes into the Toms River and directly onto the ground for years with impunity. If two emotional public hearings are any indication, most residents of Toms River, an upscale Jersey Shore community about 55 miles (89 kilometers) north of Atlantic City, want the state to scrap the deal and start over. Under a proposed settlement with New Jersey environmental regulators, BASF would carry out nine environmental projects including restoring wetlands and grassy areas creating walking trails, boardwalks and an elevated viewing platform preserving woodlands and building an environmental education center at a cost of about $30 million. It was one of the nation's worst toxic waste sites, was added to the federal Superfund cleanup list, and still has a vast plume of chemically contaminated groundwater beneath it.īut state officials and the current owner of the site, German-based BASF Corp., think the fenced-off land, with some restoration work, could once again be fit for the public. (AP) - The former Ciba-Geigy chemical plant poisoned the ground and water in Toms River, New Jersey, where the rate of childhood cancer cases rose significantly in the 1980s and 1990s.
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