At a special meeting of the Keystone Contamination Committee three weeks ago, town officials finally confirmed what had been rumored for months: a plume of contamination has been found in town that is similar to the contamination spreading from the former Keystone Metal Finishers plant on Humboldt Street. Last year, residents around the Humboldt Street site learned that chemicals had seeped off the property and under many of the homes in the area. The new plume, smaller in overall size, with far less concentrations of the cancer-causing contaminants, was discovered at a town-owned property a few blocks away on Golden Avenue that until two years ago housed the town’s Department of Public Works (DPW). Town officials also reported that the soil around a drainage pipe for rainwater running from the Keystone property to the former DPW property has also shown signs of contamination. The contamination, according to representatives of PMK Group, the environmental engineers responsible for the cleanup of the Keystone site and assigned to investigate contamination at the DPW site, was not found in the pipes, but in the soil around the pipes. Jay Johnson, a PMK spokesperson, said the contamination was likely caused when the pipes were laid down, not as a result of water leaking out of the pipes. Although Johnson could not say when this occurred, records show that a company doing sewer work for the town in 1989 temporarily used the Keystone property to store dirt and concrete, despite the fact that the town knew Keystone was possibly contaminated even then. The contamination on the former DPW property, while much less intense than the Keystone contamination, is of a similar nature, causing a new group of residents to attend the Feb. 29 committee meeting, each expressing fears of what the contamination might mean to their property values. Values for residents in the Keystone area allegedly dropped because of the reports of contamination. Some of the residents around Golden Avenue fear the same thing might happen there. Source for new site is unknown Johnson said no one knows where the contamination came from on the at the former DPW site. He said that PMK removed an underground oil storage tank last year as well as 120 cubic yards of soil that had been contaminated by leaks in the tank. This was oil contamination, different from the chemical later discovered. Because the DPW land was up for sale, the potential buyer had it tested for a full spectrum of contaminants – especially for those found near and around Keystone, only a few blocks away. This resulted in the discovery of more contamination, and further study has shown a second plume of contamination spreading from some point on the Keystone property, but not yet onto private property. “We don’t where it comes from,” Johnson said, noting that this would be an area that PMK would be pursuing. “We don’t even know the full extent of the second plume.” But he said the DPW contamination is much less intense than the Keystone contamination, although it contains some chemicals not found in the Keystone plume. Several residents from the area asked if PMK would be coming onto the property to test it. Johnson said that at this point, PMK plans only to test in the street near the former DPW to see how far the contamination has spread off that property. If contamination is not found there, then there will be no reason to go onto people’s properties. “If these tests show contamination, then we may have to go on people’s properties,” he said. Residents have many concerns Residents said they wanted to be informed as to what is going on with the second plume and what it means to their health and their property values. Tests have showed gasoline additives in sump pump water, but Johnson that that can be found almost anywhere. Anthony Florio, a resident in the Keystone contamination site area, said he recently found out he has cancer and didn’t know whether it was related to the Keystone contamination. Although the state claims no cancer cluster exists in Secaucus, as many as eight different cases of cancer have been reported in and around the Keystone plume. Florio also said the town needs to address the devaluation of the properties and said this should be addressed before the April cutoff for tax appeals. Resident Dawn McAdam asked for a copy of the report on the DPW site as to what exactly was found there. She also wanted to know why her property – located within the Keystone plume – had been marked as contaminated on the tax rolls if the land was considered safe. Faith Link, another resident in the Keystone contamination area, asked how, if the town can’t sell the DPW property because of contamination, residents are supposed to sell their own property. The town’s sale of land was voided when the contamination was found. Several residents asked how they could prove to potential renters or buyers that their property is safe. The town’s environmental attorney, Patrick McNamara, said the state Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) was willing to issue a letter to allow people to rent, but doubted anyone would give homeowners a clean bill of health to sell. He suggested someone seek the Hudson County Regional Health Commission for an opinion. But he said residents would have to disclose the contamination if they tried to sell. Some good news Officials gave residents some good news concerning the cleanup, claiming that a compound released into the source of the contamination on the Keystone site had resulted in unexpected positive results, clearing up 85 to 96 percent of the most contaminated section, and that as a result, the town will develop an action plan by the end of April that will look into how to continue the cleanup efforts, even possibly removing the contamination from under residential properties to which it has spread. These results seem to dispel fears some residents had about another, as of yet undiscovered source of contamination on the Keystone property. “If another source of contamination exists, the numbers would have rebounded, but they stayed low,” said Johnson. Councilman Mike Grecco said once the course area is taken care of, the rest of the contamination area should dissipate on its own, though the town could look to do some additional cleanup. Officials also noted that one of four illegal wells on personal property near the Keystone site was also contaminated and that all four wells have been sealed as of early January. Gerald Pericone, town engineer and a principle partner of PMK, said that the wells were not registered with the state, and considered in violation of the law. While one well that is 350 feet deep is still uncapped on the Keystone Property, PMK has been using it for information gathering, and it has a well head which must be removed in order to get at it. He said once its uses vanish, the well will be sealed. Although many of the wells are older than the law that made them illegal, Pericone said the state requires them to be closed. Questions of inspections One question town officials have been reluctant to answer is whether they have any culpability in regards to possible cancer caused by the chemicals before the 1991 cleanup. After years of living across the street from the Keystone Metal Finishers plant on Humboldt Street – which became a federal Superfund cleanup project in 1991 when health officials found numerous chemicals exposed to the open air – residents wanted to know if their health has been threatened. Tests by the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in 1991 showed some of these had migrated into people’s basements. Residents wanted to know how the town could have let the factory owner get away with leaving chemicals loose for so long. Even if the land is safe now, many residents were exposed in the past, and could face the threat of cancer. McNamara said that environmental laws had only started in 1975, but could not explain why nothing had been done from 1975 to 1990 when the plant ceased its operations. Although McNamara tried to play down the apparent lack of inspections done by the town, the property owner, Joseph W. Karet, admitted in a 1989 interview with the Secaucus Reporter that the plant was still using some hazardous chemicals. This is supported by the state’s Right to Know report issued for that same period. Grecco said the health department had inspected and found problems there, but residents asked where those reports are. Resident Peter Link said the town had been negligent in filing Right to Know forms, filing only twice on Keystone since a relevant 1984 law was enacted. Although several residents asked McNamara for legal options, others complained that the attorney’s role was not to provide them with information but to keep the town from being sued. Grecco later conceded that McNamara’s role is not to determine what happened in the past on Keystone, but to assure that no information is released that would put the town in jeopardy of a lawsuit. At the March 14 council meeting at which residents again raised the issue, one resident from outside the plume agreed that the town should not release information – even if children in the area are found to have cancer – because plume residents are likely to use the information to sue the town. “Why should the town be supplying them with that information?” this resident asked, “when the rest of the town is going to have to pay the legal bills if these people sue?” Where are Manney’s records? Keystone residents complained that McNamara has several times claimed health records from the period were not available, despite the fact that former Health Officer Richard Manney was remarkably meticulous when it came to record-keeping. “He kept records of everything,” one Town Hall department head said recently. “Some people were afraid of everything he had in those files.” In 1997, access to Manney’s files brought him into dispute with members of the Board of Health, and – according to Manney at the time – was one of the reasons why he had not received a raise during his last year before being forced out. “It is my job to maintain the integrity of those records,” he told the Secaucus Reporter at that time. Several Keystone people said town officials could not find many of Manney’s records, something disputed by Mayor Dennis Elwell, who claimed that copies of Manney’s reports were on file at Hudson County Regional Health, which has an office in Secaucus. Yet several people in Town Hall who knew Manney said he often added information to his personal files that were not included in the official reports, comments that may or may not have a bearing on the Keystone situation. Late last year, DPW workers were seen removing cartons of files from the basement of 14 Centre Ave. where those records were originally kept.
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