March 19,
2015
New York, N.Y.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency today announced that $22 million
has been received from D.S.C. of Newark Enterprises, Inc. and its sole
shareholder, Anthony Coraci, for their liability in a settlement to recover the
federal and state government’s costs for cleanup and for natural resource damages
caused by contamination at the Cornell-Dubilier Electronics Superfund site in
South Plainfield, New Jersey.
The recovered funds were
divided among the plaintiffs. The EPA received $16.2 Million, New Jersey
received $1.2 Million, and the federal natural resource trustees represented by
the Department of Interior Fish and Wildlife Service, and the National Oceanic
and Atmospheric Administration, received natural resource damages of $4.4
Million.
Cornell-Dubilier
Electronics, Inc. manufactured electronics parts at a 26-acre facility at 333
Hamilton Boulevard in South Plainfield from 1936 to 1962. PCBs and solvents
were used in the manufacturing process, and the company disposed of
PCB-contaminated materials and other hazardous waste at the facility. Bound
Brook passes next to the former Cornell-Dubilier Electronics facility and was
contaminated with PCBs as a result of waste disposal at the facility, including
releases that continued long after its closure.
PCBs are chemicals that
persist in the environment and can affect the immune, reproductive, nervous and
endocrine systems and are potentially cancer-causing. Polychlorinated biphenyls
had been widely used in hundreds of industrial and commercial applications
until they were banned in 1979. More than 1.5 billion pounds of polychlorinated
biphenyls were manufactured in the United States before the EPA banned their
use with very narrow exceptions.
South Plainfield is supplied
with public water from a couple of companies. The public water supply is
routinely tested to ensure compliance with federal and state drinking water
standards.
“The legal agreement to
recover a portion of the costs of the Cornell-Dubilier Electronics Superfund
site means that the responsible parties will bear their share of the financial
burden for cleaning up this site,” said EPA Regional Administrator Judith A. Enck.
“The EPA searches for polluters legally responsible for the contamination at
sites that are placed on the Superfund list and it seeks to hold those parties
accountable for the costs of investigations and cleanups.”
Because of the nature and
complexity of the contamination at the Cornell-Dubilier site, the EPA divided
the cleanup into four phases.
In the first phase of
cleanup, the EPA cleaned up nearby residential, commercial and municipal
properties. PCB-contaminated soil was removed from 34 residential properties
near the former facility property.
In the second phase, EPA
cleaned up the contaminated buildings and soil on the former facility. The EPA
demolished 18 contaminated buildings and removed 26,400 tons of building debris
out of the area to be disposed of properly. EPA excavated approximately 21,000
tons of contaminated debris and soil from an undeveloped area of the facility.
Additionally, EPA treated contaminated soil at the site using a technology that
heats the material so that contaminants can be pulled out and captured. Soil
that could not be cleaned using this method was taken out of the area for
disposal at a licensed facility.
The third phase is ongoing
and focuses on the contaminated groundwater. The EPA is monitoring the groundwater
and will put in place restrictions that will prevent the use of untreated
groundwater as drinking water. In addition, EPA will perform periodic sampling
to confirm that potentially harmful vapors from the contaminated groundwater
are not seeping into nearby buildings. EPA deferred action on an area of the
groundwater that discharges to Bound Brook until the fourth phase of the
long-term cleanup project.
The EPA has proposed a plan
to clean up a nine mile stretch of Bound Brook as the fourth and final phase of
the cleanup of the Cornell-Dubilier Electronics Superfund site in South
Plainfield, New Jersey.
The proposed plan includes
dredging PCB-contaminated sediment, excavating soil from the flood plains,
excavating an area next to the former Cornell-Dubilier facility where
PCB-containing capacitors were buried, relocating a 36-inch waterline that
crosses the former facility, and containing groundwater that discharges from
the facility to Bound Brook. The estimated cost of the cleanup under this plan for
the third phase is $252 million. To date, the EPA’s cleanup costs for this site
exceed $180 million.
To learn more about
Cornell-Dubilier Electronics Superfund site, which is one single Superfund
site, please visit: http://www.epa.gov/region2/superfund/npl/cornell
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