FLORENCE – A sprawling Superfund site here will get clean-up funds from the nation’s new infrastructure law, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
The former Roebling Steel Co. complex, which occupied a heavily polluted site along the Delaware River, is one of seven ‘backlogged’ sites in New Jersey to get Superfund money from the law.
The EPA also will direct infrastructure money to a second Superfund site in Burlington County — a five-acre property that once held Kauffman & Minteer, a tanker truck operation in the Jobstown section of Springfield.
Overall, the EPA will spend $1 billion in infrastructure money for work that was previously unfunded at 49 sites across the country. The agency also will accelerate clean-up efforts at dozens of other sites across the country, it said.
“This funding will be transformational for New Jersey communities impacted by toxic contamination,” Sen. Bob Menendez said Friday in a statement announcing the EPA’s spending plans.
He said clean-up efforts also “will provide critical investments in communities of color and low-income communities, which are disproportionately affected by legacy contamination from abandoned Superfund sites.”
The EPA has not specified how much money will be available for the Burlington County sites.
The agency on Friday said it’s “finalizing cleanup plans and preparing funding mechanisms to get construction work started as soon as possible.”
The Roebling Steel site, which dates to 1904, made steel and wire products before closing in the 1980s, according to an EPA account.
Parts of the site were later used for other industrial operations.
“Soil all around the site is contaminated with heavy metals such as lead, chromium and cadmium," said the EPA, which also noted contamination of groundwater, wetlands and river and creek sediments.
Clean-up activities that began in the 1980s have already resulted in asbestos mitigation at the site, as well as the decontamination and demolition of multiple buildings.
Future efforts will put an emphasis on groundwater and soil contamination, as well as the need for additional building demolition.
As part of the clean-up effort, the EPA has restored the main gate house at the complex.
The gate house and the adjacent village of Roebling, which was built to house steel company employees, “have been listed on the National Register of Historic Places since 1978,” the agency noted.
The Kauffman & Minteer property held a transportation company that from 1960 to 1981 “discharged wastewater used to clean the inside of its trucks into a drainage ditch and an unlined lagoon,” says an EPA account.
It notes a dike broke at the Monmouth Road site in 1984, allowing wastewater with hazardous substances to flow onto a neighboring property and into wetlands.
Pollution at the site has also contaminated groundwater and threatened an aquifer described as “a major source of potable water," the EPA said.
Infrastructure funds also will pay for remediation at a third Superfund site in South Jersey, the former Kil-Tone pesticide plant in Vineland, the EPA said. That site is heavily polluted with arsenic and lead as a result of manufacturing activities from the late 1910s to the late 1930s.
Jim Walsh covers public safety, economic development and other beats for the Courier-Post, Burlington County Times and The Daily Journal.
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