Just beyond the towering Anheuser-Busch Brewery, whose iconic eagle placard has overlooked Newark Liberty International Airport and bustling Routes 1&9 for two decades, there lies a nondescript lot that has waited even longer to be removed of its harmful chemicals.

The water beneath roughly four-acre plot of land wedged between a junkyard, warehouses and railroad tracks is toxic — a lasting legacy from a previous life as the home of the White Chemical Corporation. In May 1990, the chemical company was raided by law enforcement authorities searching for hazardous waste illegally kept on the property.

The investigators found approximately 8,000 drums of chemicals, many of which contained flammable and corrosive substances and were improperly stored.

By the end of that year, the federal government issued a public health advisory to 12,000 people living and working near the White Chemical site. The owner of White Chemical was indicted, and in 1991, the site was designated a federal Superfund, labeled of the most polluted sites in the United States.

Nearly three decades later, the White Chemical site could play a role in Newark’s redevelopment boom. But clean-up has to be finished first, and the plot was one of five Superfund sites in New Jersey that had their remediations delayed in 2019 simply because there was no money for the work.

That’s according to a recent report from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency that detailed 34 Superfund sites across the country that saw clean-up stall in the fiscal year 2019 (October 2018 to September 2019) due to lack of funding. The news spurred a trio of federal lawmakers, including Rep. Frank Pallone, D-6th Dist., to send a letter to the EPA demanding answers to questions about the backlog.

New Jersey’s five sites were the most of any state. The affected sites ranged from Newark to Burlington County.

• Kauffman & Minteer Inc., Springfield Township (Burlington County)
• Roebling Steel Co., Florence Township
• Unimatic Manufacturing Corporation, Fairfield
• White Chemical Corp., Newark
• Woodbrook Road Dump, South Plainfield

It isn’t exactly unexpected that the Garden State would lead in the amount of unfunded Superfund work: New Jersey has more Superfund sites than any other state, a legacy of the Garden State’s industrial past — from car factories and chemical manufacturing to the lazy disposal of hazardous waste in landfills — and its relatively aggressive work to place sites on the Superfund list, and get the federal help that entails.

But every year that clean-up is delayed for a Superfund site is another year that the surrounding must wait to putting the property back to use.

Lengthy clean-ups

Even with the proper funding, cleaning a Superfund site takes time.

Superfund sites are the nation’s most environmentally toxic places: Areas where pollution levels are high enough to earn a spot on the National Priorities List (NPL.) The work of ridding those sites of the toxic materials can take years depending on the nature of the contamination and the process is often fraught with legal negotiations and delays.

Take for example the Roebling Steel Superfund site in Florence, which manufactured the steel wires for the Brooklyn Bridge, the George Washington Bridge and the Golden Gate Bridge, but has left a toxic footprint on the banks of the Delaware River. The site was placed on the Superfund list in 1983, and cleanup work has been ongoing in phases since 1990, according to the EPA.

In a statement to NJ Advance Media, the EPA said the Trump administration has made cleaning up Superfund sites a top priority and stressed that all or part of 27 Superfund sites around the country were deemed thoroughly remediated and removed from the Superfund list in fiscal year 2019.

There are currently 1,335 Superfund sites in the U.S.; 114 of those are in New Jersey.

“We believe that a site on the National Priorities List should be just that – a national priority,” an EPA spokesperson said. "Deleting a site from the NPL not only lets the community know that the site no longer poses a human or ecological health risk, but also gives confidence to the business community that the land is once again ready for productive use.”

Funding decisions

Clean-up work at Superfund sites hinges on whether the site’s original polluters have been found and mandated to pay, as well as money available in the EPA budget, the EPA said. An agency spokesperson noted that since 1996, there have only been two years when the Superfund program was fully funded.

Over time, funding the Superfund program has become less of a priority for Congress, according to Michael Greenberg, a distinguished professor at Rutgers’ Bloustein School who studies Superfund redevelopment.

“We clearly are seeing a winding down, not of the sites but of the money,” Greenberg said.

As clean-up work progresses at a given Superfund site, the EPA assesses how the public health threat has changed. Those assessments inform how the agency divvies up its limited available cash — should it continue to fund the site to further lessen the threat, or is the space now safe enough to prioritize work at other Superfund sites?

For instance, look to the Kauffman & Minteer Superfund site in Burlington County. From 1961 and into the 1980s, Kauffman & Minteer, Inc. ran an industrial transportation business in the Jobstown section of Springfield Township. The company used an unlined pit to store wastewater after cleaning the inside of its trucks; in 1984 the dyke surrounding that lagoon broke and the wastewater spilled, leaving the site polluted with a variety of hazardous chemicals. In 1988, four years after the spill, the Kauffman & Minteer site was added to the Superfund list.

The EPA has already done some clean-up work at the site, including taking steps to deal with surface level pollution, according to a spokesperson. All that’s left is to remediate the contaminated groundwater at the site, and the first phase of that was done between 2007 and 2011.

Properties near the Kauffman & Minteer site rely on wells for drinking water, but the EPA said that groundwater contamination at the site has not been found endanger those wells.

Affected communities

The five New Jersey sites that missed out on clean-up funding in 2019 don’t exist in a vacuum; they are each part of a municipality. City officials have high hopes for Newark’s White Chemical site, which has seen ongoing clean-up work since it was placed on the Superfund list 1991, according to the EPA.

So far, hazardous materials and contaminated buildings and soil have been removed from the property. Now, the last phase of remediation aims to restore groundwater quality at the site — work that the EPA estimated in 2012 would cost at least $25 million.

City spokesman Frank Baraff said that the lot is in a prime area for redevelopment thanks to the planned PATH extension, the growth of Port Newark and its proximity to Newark Liberty International Airport.

“We are concerned about it," Baraff said of the delay in EPA funding. "That area is extremely important. It’s one of a number of sites that we need to press the feds on.”

Baraff added that the area around the White Chemical site is considered a major focus for future residential and commercial development. As for the site itself, the Port Authority is eying it as a potential new rail yard to serve the PATH extension.

For now, the city is leasing the White Chemical site to be used as a parking lot — the only permitted use for the land until remediation is complete, according to Baraff.

The Kauffman & Minteer site poses a similar challenge for Springfield Township.

The EPA said that Springfield currently uses the Kauffman & Minteer site, but Mayor Denis McDaniel told NJ Advance Media downplayed that use.

McDaniel described the site as “dormant” and that it is only used as storage. The mayor added that there are currently no plans to use the site in the future, but he hopes that will change once clean-up is finished.

“Ideally, the township would be able to utilize it for some purpose or sell it to a developer of some kind,” McDaniel said.

Elsewhere in Burlington County, Florence Township isn’t too concerned about the delay at the Roebling Steel site, according to Richard Brook, the township’s business administrator.

Brook said that township wants to see the waterfront site redeveloped for something other than a warehouse or an industrial facility. He said that Florence is beginning to have informal talks with developers to gather ideas for the site. He said the hope is to set those redevelopment plans and coordinate with the EPA before the final step of clean-up is done — installing a massive cap of material at the site to stop any remaining pollution from spreading.

Brook wants to avoid having the cap be installed, only to have it later destroyed for development work.

“Theoretically, you could cap the whole site, spend millions of dollars, and then go rip it up,” Brook said.

Michael Sol Warren may be reached at mwarren@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @MSolDub. Find NJ.com on Facebook.

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