A New Jersey county is in the last phases of an intensive U.S. Environmental Protection Agency project to remove the radium- contaminated soil upon which homes in several communities were built.
Problems in Essex County began nearly a century ago, when the U.S. Radium Corporation (now defunct) processed radium in the City of Orange Township in the early 1900s.
Few knew the danger of radioactive materials at the time. The company deposited radioactive tailings produced during processing in nearby garbage dumps.
Years later, those dumps were leveled as sites for housing. In some cases, contaminated soil was mixed with the concrete used to construct new homes. Today 240 properties in the densely populated county are identified as contaminated.
"The problem is that, when radium decays, it produces radon gas. When that collects in homes it can be dangerous. … People exposed to radon are subject to an increased likelihood of lung cancer," Bob McKnight said.
McKnight is the section chief of the federal Superfund project in New Jersey, which is charged with cleaning up the area.
The Creation of Superfund
Orange is the site of just one of more than 1,200 uncontrolled or abandoned hazardous-waste dumps across the U.S. that have designated Superfund sites. The EPA is charged with cleaning them up.
The U.S. Congress established the Superfund program in 1980. To fund it, legislators levied a tax on chemical and petroleum industries to finance cleanup of toxic dumps nationwide.
James Haklar, spokesperson for the Superfund region covering New York and New Jersey, says Love Canal played a key role in the creation of the Superfund program.
In 1978 residents of the western New York town discovered their community had been built on a chemical dump. "That sparked a community action," Haklar said. "People realized there could be other unidentified toxic dumps out there with people living on top of them."
Seventy percent of all Superfund cleanups are paid for by the parties responsible for the pollution. But in cases where companies responsible for pollution no longer exist, cannot pay, or refuse to pay, the EPA uses the Superfund money allocated by Congress to undertake the cleanup.
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