(The following story by Richard Pearsall appeared on the Courier-Post website on January 13.)
CHERRY HILL, N.J. — Like the orphan ship full of ash that plagued Philadelphia a decade ago, NJ Transit’s dirt is coming back.
Some 5,000 cubic yards of contaminated dirt shipped from Camden to a quarry in Falls Township, Pa., is being “shipped back to New Jersey,” according to a spokesman for the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection.
“We don’t know where it’s going in New Jersey, but we’ve been told it’s going back,” said Karl Lasher, a spokesman for the Pa. DEP’s division of mining reclamation.
Penny Bassett Hackett, a spokeswoman for NJ Transit, declined to confirm that the dirt is definitely returning to the Garden State but said the agency is “negotiating with a facility not far from Camden” to take it.
Monday, Charles Clemons, an East Camden resident who lives just yards from the rail yard where NJ Transit deposited some 124,000 cubic yards of the contaminated dirt, expressed frustration at the latest development in the dirt saga.
“Our DEP says they (NJ Transit) can bring the dirt to Camden,” Clemons said, “but Pennsylvania says it can’t come there. Great.”
NJ Transit accumulated the dirt during construction of its 34-mile, Camden-to-Trenton light rail line.
The dirt contains low levels of such hazardous substances as lead, mercury and polychlorinated biphenyls, which render it unsuitable for residential areas but OK for industrial areas, according to NJ Transit and the New Jersey DEP.
The dirt became a problem for the transit agency after East Camden residents protested bitterly at having the dirt trucked through their neighborhood and piled into mounds as high as 30 feet.
In June, after the protest was taken up by state legislators, NJ Transit relented and agreed to remove the dirt. Since then it has entered into some $8 million worth of contracts to remove the dirt.
Of the $8 million in contracts awarded since June, $6 million has been handed out without public bidding, although state law and NJ Transit’s own charter require that contracts over $25,000 be advertised and put out for bid.
NJ Transit has repeatedly cited the “exigency” clause of its bylaws, designed for emergencies, to explain the no-bid contracts.
The emergency, it says, is the commitment it made to residents to remove the dirt.
The agency arranged to have the first 40,000 cubic yards of dirt shipped to a landfill in Staten Island using an existing contractor on the light rail line, the Agate Construction Co., to haul the dirt.
It arranged for the remainder to be shipped to the quarry in Bucks County through an intermediary firm, Beneficial Soils Solution, based in Maryland.
When news of those shipments surfaced, the Pennsylvania DEP suspended the permit it had granted, saying it may have been misled about the contents of the dirt. It said it planned to do its own analysis of the soil.
An examination of data submitted by an NJ Transit consultant indicated that the dirt was safe to be stored at the Penn Valley Quarry, but could not be allowed to come into contact with groundwater there, Lasher, the Pa. DEP spokesman, said.
At that point, Lasher stated, the quarry owner, who had intended to use the dirt to fill in a water-filled pit at the site, decided he wanted the dirt removed.
NJ Transit agreed, Lasher said.
“Since they’re removing it, we decided we didn’t need to do any testing of our own,” he said.
In a separate but related development, NJ Transit has begun removing similar, smaller berms it erected in the Roebling section of Florence.
That dirt, some 28,000 cubic yards of it, is being trucked to the Burlington County Landfill in nearby Mansfield, which is charging NJ Transit $10 per ton to dispose of it.