NEWARK, NEW JERSEY — The laboratories and other buildings that once housed a chemical manufacturer here in New Jersey’s most populous city have been demolished. More than 10,000 leaky drums and other containers once illegally stored here have long been removed. Its owner was convicted three decades ago.
Yet the groundwater beneath the 4.4-acre expanse once occupied by White Chemical Corp. in Newark remains contaminated, given a lack of federal funding.
“It wasn’t supposed to be like this,” Douglas Freeman, who runs youth sports programs in nearby Weequahic Park, said on a recent gray autumn afternoon, gesturing to the crumbling brick buildings and junk cars that show how the Superfund site has stunted the city’s revitalization efforts.
But three decades after federal officials declared it one of America’s most toxic spots, it’s about to get a jolt. This plot in Newark is among more than four dozen toxic waste sites to get cleanup funding from the newly-enacted infrastructure law, the Environmental Protection Agency announced Friday, totaling $1 billion.
“This work is just the beginning,” EPA Administrator Michael Regan said in […]
Thank you, Biden Administration and the EPA, for making a difference in our water and environment.
Finally! As a person who lives in a NJ town with a number of these sites it is beyond time that it be addressed. Addressing this issue now does nothing to change the underlying capitalist dynamic: “Privatize the profits, and socialize the costs.”