In the summer of 2005, around the time that residents of Upper Ringwood, New Jersey, began to wonder whether the skin rashes, nose bleeds and bronchitis that plagued their community were more than bad luck, the Ford Motor Co and the Environmental Protection Agency made a request: The automaker and the regulator wanted access to the yards around two families' homes to remove waste that had been dumped in the area. Ford boasts in its ads that "It's Easy Being Green," but residents feared the request suggested something not so easy at all. From the mid-1950s to the late 1970s, Ford operated an assembly plant in northern New Jersey, in nearby Mahwah, that cranked out millions of passenger cars. Ford closed the plant in 1980, after dumping what the EPA describes as thousands of tonnes of paint sludge and other waste in Upper Ringwood, a community of about 350 working-class residents located in the foothills of the Ramapo Mountains.
A few years later, the Environmental Protection Agency identified Upper Ringwood for priority cleanup under its Superfund program. Ford, deemed responsible for the pollution, spent the next five years assessing and removing sludge from a 202-hectare site that included 50 homes. Satisfied with Ford's cleanup, the EPA dropped Upper Ringwood as a Superfund site in 1994, having determined, according to a public notice, that "no further cleanup by responsible parties is appropriate" and that "the current risk posed by the site is within an acceptable range."
Yet recently, based on Ford's and the EPA's own recent follow-up studies of the soil and groundwater in Upper Ringwood, those conclusions unraveled and became fodder in what environmental experts say is now among the messiest industrial cleanup efforts in Superfund's 27-year history.
Since the EPA relisted Upper Ringwood last year as a Superfund site, cleanup experts in the area have not only removed several thousand tonnes of waste that crews had previously overlooked, but workers have also identified substantial amounts of potentially hazardous paint sludge in the yards of at least two private homes, according to federal regulators and Ford.
Last year, residents sued Ford in a New Jersey state court for property damage and personal injuries, citing the improper disposal of waste from the Mahwah plant. The lawsuit claims that Ford's hazardous paint sludge and other contaminated material, while dumped decades ago, still contaminate the soil, air and groundwater in their community; that Ford failed to tell more than 600 residents how dangerous the waste was; and that Ford has yet to properly clean up the mess.
To make their case, residents have enlisted several high-profile legal experts and consultants, including the environmental lawyer Robert F. Kennedy Jr, the physician James Dahlgren of Erin Brockovich fame, and the law firm of the late civil rights lawyer Johnnie Cochran. The lawyers contend in the suit that contaminated waste that Ford left behind has contributed to illnesses among residents like the diabetes that caused Paul Eugene Van Dunk to have his leg amputated and the cancer that killed his daughter. "This community was here long before Ford had anything to do with Upper Ringwood," says Andrew Carboy, a lead lawyer for the residents. "Ford's involvement here ended almost 40 years ago, but the community is still dealing with the health consequences of Ford's dumping."
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