Just an hour away from Jersey City a town, Toms River, reeled from catastrophic contaminations by a former chemical plant owned by Ciba-Geigy, a former multinational company based in Switzerland.
The plant poisoned the ground and water in Toms River. A cluster of cancer cases were reported in children of the township. The New Jersey Department of Health reported 87 cases of pediatric cancer in the town between 1979 and 1995.
During the early and mid 1960s residents of communities along Toms River started noticing dead fishes, turtles, eels and muskrats. They also noticed the river changing colors during the day and started reporting it to different agencies and government officials.
“There are some very early reports that point right back to Ciba-Geigy and say that’s the problem”, shared Britta Forsberg, the Executive Director of Save Barnegat Bay, a non-profit organization working to restore and protect the Barnegat Bay and its ecosystem. Forsberg and others used the Open Public Records Act (OPRA) to get all of the Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) records and found a “newsletter from Ciba themselves.”
“They say [in the newsletter] they've come up with a solution that's going to take all the political pressure off of them. They're going to put a pipeline to the ocean because dilution is the solution to pollution. They don't use those words, but they do say dilution is going to solve this”, recounted Forsberg.
For a while, public outcry diminished, but the problems persisted. Surfers began noticing their bathing suits changing color after swimming in the ocean. In 1981, the DEP conducted water sample tests that found the water was "mutagenic and teratogenic"—capable of causing genetic mutations and birth defects. However, the DEP never released this report to the public.
While the Ciba-Geigy site in Toms River was declared a Superfund site in 1983, the plant continued operating despite the suppressed DEP report and its Superfund designation. The situation reached a breaking point in 1984 when a pipe belonging to Ciba broke at the intersection of Vaughan and Bay Avenue. Around the same time, reporter Don Bennett uncovered the previously hidden mutagenicity report.
"When that pipe broke, that's when it became undeniable that something's going on over there and it's much bigger than what the government or others are letting on. And then it's after that that they discover that there's 80,000 drums buried in the ground," said Forsberg.
Yet despite these revelations, the company continued operations. Meanwhile, Forsberg encountered local residents who were organizing grassroots efforts to address the growing health concerns.
"I met in the very beginning, just by chance of fate, several women because they were mothers and their children were sick. They had started meeting in their kitchens and living rooms, comparing notes," recalled Forsberg. These residents were gathering together, organizing, and sharing resources as they witnessed a disturbing pattern emerging.
It wasn’t until 2023 that a final settlement was reached with Ciba-Geigy Co.
However many residents and victim families blasted the agreement for being insufficient.
While the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has declared the site under control for human exposure, it is still an active superfund site where the remediation process hasn’t completed. The site still has a vast plume of chemically contaminated groundwater beneath it.
The site is currently owned by BASF Corp. that took over the site in 2010. German based BASF Corp. agreed to preserve 1,000 acres of land to protect the groundwater resources that were contaminated and agreed to design and implement nine restoration projects on 275 acres of preserved land. The company also agreed to pay $500,000 to oversee the plan.
A former resident of Toms River said while BASF might be "being safe about what they dump–there have been way too many times in the past where we find out chemicals we thought were safe have dangerous consequences."
The settlement is being challenged. An administrative appeal has been filed by Save Barnegat Bay. “We are trying to make this fight the last time that a small town has to deal with this”, said Forsberg.
Toms River Superfund is known as one of the most toxic sites in the U.S but there are more than 1300 active superfund sites all around the country.
In the late 1970s as toxic waste dumps received national attention as the public became aware of the health and environmental risks, Congress established the Comprehensive Environmental Response Compensation and Liability Act (CERCLA), which is informally called Superfund. The Act allows the EPA to clean up contaminated sites and force responsible parties to "either perform cleanups or reimburse the government for EPA-led cleanup work".
New Jersey has the most Superfund sites.
The EPA categorizes these sites into "Human Exposure Under Control" and those where "Human Exposure Not Under Control". 11 of the 114 sites in NJ have the latter status.
Some of New Jersey's most toxic sites
Rolling Knolls LF
Rolling Knolls Landfill site, in Chatham Township, is approximately 200-acre. During the 1930s through 1968 when it was used as a landfill, it received municipal solid waste, construction and demolition debris.
To Bill Kibler, Executive Director of the Great Swamp Watershed Association, calling the site a "landfill" is misleading—he insists it's more accurately described as a "dump."
"When I hear the term landfill, it suggests to me and I think to the public that there was some thought that went into this—some engineering perhaps, some plan for how this was going to be managed—and that's simply not the case with this dump and a lot of others like it."
In reality, Kibler explained, it was little more than "someone digging a hole in the ground and beginning to accept municipal waste, industrial waste, sewage sludge, and a variety of other materials."
"There's no liner, there's no drainage, there's no treatment system—any of the things you might associate with a modern landfill. None of that exists here," he said. "It's just a whole lot of toxic, buried garbage."
Some of the contaminants in the site include Polychlorinated Biphenyls (PCBs), metals, benzene, Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS).
Cornell Dubilier Electronics Inc.
Cornell Dubilier, an electronic manufacturing company, used the 26-acre site from 1936 to 1962 to make electronic components.
Poor waste handling practices resulted in releases of PCBs and chlorinated volatile organic compounds (VOCs), primarily trichloroethylene (TCE). The soil, sediment and groundwater at the site were contaminated.
The site was added to the EPA's National Priorities List in 1998 and the cleanup process is still ongoing.
EPA's Superfund Human Exposure Dashboard states that the site has "a potential for unacceptable cancer risk and non-cancer hazard from exposure to total polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) and aroclors in sediment, floodplain soil, fish, and shellfish that is relatively widespread throughout".
Human exposure is expected to be controlled by 2051.
Former Kil-Tone Company
The former Kil-Tone Company manufactured arsenic-based pesticides from the 1910s to late 1930s.
EPA has found elevated concentrations of arsenic and lead in soil on the former facility property.
The site was added to the NPL list in 2016. Human exposure is expected to be under control by 2029.
Diamond Alkali Co.
In Newark's Ironbound neighborhood is located Diamond Alkali Company, one of the most toxic sites in the U.S.
The site, a former chemical plant where cleanup is priced at $1.4 billion is one of the eleven in New Jersey State that constain uncontrolled toxic wastes.
These sites are vulnerable not only to the effects of climate change but also damaging to human health.
Despite being added to NPL in 1984 after EPA sampled the site and found high levels of dioxin, highly toxic chemicals that are carcinogenic, the remediation process hasn't been completed.
In fact the long-awaited clean up of the site was finalized only this year.
With 114 active Superfund sites—more than any other state—New Jersey faces an enormous environmental remediation challenge. The stories of these four sites highlight the long-term consequences of industrial pollution and the slow, complex process of cleanup.
As climate change threatens to exacerbate the risks posed by these sites, the urgency of complete remediation grows. Yet the timeline for full cleanup at many sites extends decades into the future, with some, like Cornell Dubilier, not expected to have human exposure controlled until 2051.
Methodology
The data for this story came from EPA's National Priorties List. It was then cleaned and analyzed on pandas.
After analyzing for the state counts, I merged the EPA data with geospatial data on zip code to add the population of the area where the site is located.
I looked into the Human Exposure Dashboard on EPA's site and looked deeper into sites in New Jersey where the human exposure is defined as not under control. I started contacting environmental organizations, health department officals and residents of the area. This was the hardest part of the story as I wasn't able to speak with many people.
The charts and maps were made on DataWrapper.