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CLIFFVIEWPILOT.COM PHOTO: Pasquale Destro (No use without hyperlink)
Pasquale Destro spotted the deer sipping water Tuesday on the 16-acre former Quanta Resources Corporation site at 163 River Road, contaminated with hazardous substances from waste oils that were stored and treated there.
Dating back to the 1870s, the site was occupied by industries that processed coal tar and waste oil, while also producing arsenic as a by-product.
The New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection closed Quanta in 1981 after finding dozens of storage tanks, above- and below- ground, some of which held huge quantities of oil contaminated with PCBs. More than 9 million gallons of waste was removed.
The federal EPA finally added the site to its Superfund list in 2002, as development such as the nearby City Place collection of stores, dwellings and eateries — as well as a day-care center, continued to grow around the site.
Federal authorities say they plan to entomb much of the pollution at the site, which is fenced off and has monitoring wells sticking up from the marsh. Solidifying the potentially cancer-causing contaminants into underground blocks is much quicker and less expensive than hauling what they say amounts to 12,000 truckloads worth of poison from the site — and could pollute the air.
Monitoring wells can be seen at right / CLIFFVIEWPILOT.COM PHOTO: Pasquale Destro (No use without hyperlink)
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