(The following article by Alex Nussbaum was posted on the Bergen Record website on November 29.)
BERGEN, N.J. — Workers hosed diesel fuel off the banks of the Hackensack River and scoured the waterline for signs of contamination Monday as the cleanup continued after a weekend leak at a Ridgefield Park rail yard.
Pollution tests downstream from the spill could take up to three weeks to complete, but environmentalists were already predicting the fuel would take a lasting toll on the river.
A state official, however, said that save for the death of one duck, the damage from the spill seemed limited, with the relatively lightweight diesel fuel evaporating quickly.
“It’s a light oil; it’s not persistent,” said Hayder Camargo, an emergency response specialist overseeing the cleanup for the state Department of Environmental Protection. “I don’t foresee any long-term environmental damage.”
Camargo surveyed the effort from Ridgefield Park on Monday afternoon, just outside the New York, Susquehanna & Western Railway depot where the railroad now says a parked locomotive leaked about 2,600 gallons Friday night. The fuel eventually trickled into the river, with patches of diesel spreading over a five-mile stretch – as far north as the Anderson Street bridge in Hackensack and south beyond Overpeck Creek.
The cleanup was expected to be finished by the end of the day today, said DEP spokeswoman Karen Hershey.
Just how much spilled into the Hackensack remained unclear. Camargo estimated 600 to 1,000 gallons had reached the water, based on his survey of the riverside and the material that had been removed so far.
A railroad spokesman, however, cited the U.S. Coast Guard’s initial estimate on Saturday that as little as 200 gallons entered the river. The company recovered about 2,000 gallons from a spill collection system, so no more than 600 made it into the water, said Nathan Fenno, an executive vice president with New York, Susquehanna.
The numbers were “rough estimates,” however, Fenno admitted. “We really don’t know exactly how much fuel was in the locomotive when the leak began and we still don’t know,” he said. The locomotive could hold up to 3,500 gallons, but it wasn’t believed to be fully loaded when a cracked filter allowed the fuel to escape, he said.
Nonetheless, the railroad was taking “full responsibility” for the spill, Fenno added. The company is legally bound to reimburse the state’s cleanup costs, the DEP said.
On Monday, more than a dozen employees with a state cleanup contractor worked the shores of the river, stringing out absorbent pads and an orange containment boom to capture the diesel. They raked up weeds, dead branches and other debris stained blue by the leaked fuel.
The sheen that had spread north and south along the river over the weekend was mostly gone, but Camargo said gathering up the remaining oil was vital. Otherwise, tides in the river would wash diesel off the shoreline and contaminate the water again, he said.
Other than the one “disturbed waterfowl,” officials had found no other animals affected by the spill, Camargo added.
Still, Hershey, the DEP spokeswoman, said it was too early to speculate on the ultimate impact. “I don’t think we’ll be able to tell you until we really fully understand the extent of the cleanup,” she said.
The state was “considering enforcement options,” against the railroad, she added, but declined to be more specific. Camargo said the company has been cooperative since the cleanup began.
Downstream, researchers with the New Jersey Meadowlands Commission took water and sediment samples to test for petroleum-related chemicals.
The scientists found some wetlands south of Overpeck Creek stained with diesel fuel, said agency spokesman Chris Gale. But overall, they also expect impacts to be short-lived. Because diesel is light, it should float atop the water and evaporate, rather than sink to the bottom and coat plant and animal life.
But the commission will await test results – not expected for two to three weeks – before giving the all-clear sign, he said.
The timing of the spill may help, added Bill Sheehan, executive director of the environmental group Hackensack Riverkeeper. With water temperatures falling, many of the migratory fish that frequent the river are out of the area, safe from whatever harm they might have incurred, Sheehan said.
“But an insult to the system is an insult to the system,” he said. “It’ll only have a negative impact. We won’t know until the future how negative it is.”
The railroad has been fighting local officials and environmentalists for months over open-air waste dumps that it’s opened along its tracks in North Bergen. The spill gave critics a new opportunity to slam the Cooperstown, N.Y., company. “They’re a bunch of outlaws,” Sheehan said.
Fenno, the railway executive, disagreed.
“I don’t think that we feel this particular incident is anything other than an unfortunate accident that we have attempted to respond to in an appropriate manner,” he said.