Toxic Land

By Fletcher Harper

Long Branch, New Jersey, is a community in transition, according to The New York Times . It sits 50 miles east of Trenton on the Jersey shore and 35 miles south of Manhattan. The latter distance can be traveled via a new high-speed ferry called the “Beast,” whose billboard ads show the ferry planing through the waves, a mouthful of shark's teeth painted ferociously on its yellow bow.

At the turn of the century, Long Branch and other central Jersey shore and lake towns were getaways for wealthy New Yorkers who arrived with summer steamer trunks to enjoy undeveloped beachfront and rustic lakeside cottages. Certain churches bear remnants of these earlier times, with an occasional Tiffany window peering incongruously from the middle of a vinyl sided exterior. But as New Jersey earned its industrialized reputation and as longer distance travel became easier, the summer crowds disappeared and Long Branch, along with Lakewood, Red Bank and other small central New Jersey cities, lost their luster and became the sites for small-scale industry, which then morphed into a mini-Rust Belt. Once-prosperous summer communities became depressed, and are now candidates for redevelopment or gentrification.

Many of the people who had suffered from the cancers and many of the children born with birth defects lived in the neighborhood surrounding what was once the primary source of employment in the community – an abandoned coal gasification plant. . .

In early 2002, a small group of African-American residents of Long Branch began to think that too many of their neighbors were coming down with rare forms of cancer, and that too many children were being born in their neighborhoods with birth defects. Many of the people who had suffered from the cancers and many of the children born with birth defects lived in the neighborhood surrounding what was once the primary source of employment in the community – an abandoned coal gasification plant sitting on fourteen acres of bare, cratered land in the middle of a residential neighborhood, like a piece of the moon airbrushed weirdly into the landscape. Surrounding the abandoned plant were two public housing projects, two daycare centers (one of them a Head Start center), two small black Pentecostal churches, and a senior citizens' housing project. The public housing projects had been constructed initially in the 1950's to house black soldiers who were not allowed to live with their white peers in nearby Ft. Monmouth.

Before the advent of electric lighting, plants like this one were the destination for regular shipments of coal that were immersed in a chemical solution, releasing gas, which was then fed through a local network of pipelines to fuel gas-fired street lamps. But gas was not the only by-product of the reaction that took place inside the plant. For decades, and before the advent of environmental laws, toluene, benzene and other chemical by-products had been drained directly into the ground. In 2003, testing identified traces of these chemicals at depths of 70 feet underneath the site. Toluene and benzene are both known carcinogens.

In late 2002, sparked on by the death of a friend from cancer, the group of residents formed an informal alliance and called themselves Concerned Citizens of Long Branch . They approached the state to request that the abandoned site be tested for the presence of environmental hazards. After encountering initial resistance that was due, the citizens felt, to the fact that the site's current owner was one of the more powerful men in the county, the state's Department of Environmental Protection ordered the company to conduct tests on their own site. The daycare centers neighboring the site were not warned that hazardous waste inspections and tests were being conducted on land that sits as close as ten feet to one of the daycare center's playgrounds.

One day, several children ran into their teacher from the playground, frightened and curious. “There's a spaceman in the yard!” they exclaimed. The teacher assumed they were joking, but on looking through the classroom window saw a group of men walking around the site in hazmat suits, covered from head to toe in the yellow and white safety clothing and breathing apparatus. The testing identified the toluene and benzene, but concluded that there was no evidence that the concentrations were great enough to pose a health threat.

While insisting on the validity of these conclusions, the company agreed to conduct an initial remediation of the site, paying for the two feet of soil closest to the surface to be removed. The site was to be covered with an orange felt liner, intended to warn any future builders or excavators that they should inquire at the Long Branch Health Department prior to digging further. The felt was then covered by two feet of fresh topsoil, and the remediation considered complete. As a friendly gesture, the company paid for a small park immediately adjacent to the remediated land, so that more children could play nearby.

A horrible odor filled the neighborhood air, thanks to an oily sludge seeping through the orange felt like pus disgorged from a wounded earth. In response, the engineering firm that had managed the initial remediation set up an industrial sprinkler system around the perimeter of the site and sprayed perfume normally used to mask incinerator odors. . .

Within nine months, a horrible odor filled the neighborhood air, thanks to an oily sludge seeping through the orange felt like pus disgorged from a wounded earth. In response, the engineering firm that had managed the initial remediation set up an industrial sprinkler system around the perimeter of the site and sprayed perfume normally used to mask incinerator odors over the area several times daily. Outraged, Concerned Citizens organized several community meetings, bringing over 100 community residents to sessions at which city, state and federal officials equivocated about whether further testing and remediation might be in order.

Within several months, and after company-conducted tests had continued to deny the existence of a health hazard, the local Housing Authority announced that it was releasing plans for the relocation of close to 100 residents of Grant Court and Seaview Manor, the two public housing projects. The buildings in these complexes would be razed, but despite intensive lobbying and public pressure, the City of Long Branch refused to guarantee that residents would be able to return to new apartments in their old neighborhood.

Members of Concerned Citizens began to think that the city intended to sell the property to developers who would build luxury high-rise condo units on the property, homes for commuters who would ride the Beast to work in Manhattan. “Our people got moved here once before when they didn't want us over at Ft. Monmouth,” one Concerned Citizens member told me. “What's going to stop them from moving us again?”

During this same time, the current owner of the site had hired a public relations firm to respond to the several articles in the local media raising questions about the site's status and remediation. “We think some of the local residents are overreacting, Reverend,” they told me at a meeting in their shiny offices near the Meadowlands. “We want the facts to get out there.”

Concerned Citizens recently identified a law firm to represent people who have lived near the abandoned site, claiming that the owners of the site knowingly subjected residents to unsafe exposures to toxic chemicals. Years will pass before this claim is settled. As I left Long Branch one afternoon after a community meeting, I saw an ad on the side of a bus promoting the services of the regional utility, the owner of the abandoned site. The ad showed a white, middle-class family gathered happily around a brightly lit dinner table inside a new home. “Keeping families in Monmouth County warm for over 100 years,” the text of the ad read. It's hard to believe that any ad agency could communicate on purpose with a darker sense of irony.

The Rev. Fletcher Harper is executive director of Partners for Environmental Quality , an interfaith coalition based in New Jersey. He is also a member of the executive committee of the Episcopal Ecological Network . Fletcher may be reached by email at revfharper@peqnj.org .