More Oversite Needed at the Polluted Hercules Property

by Brian T. Lynch, MSW

The clean-up and redevelopment of the Hercules tract in Kenvil have always been a private enterprise with insufficient public oversite. That needs to change before March 1st, when the Roxbury Planning Board and the public will hear the case for approving a Hartz Mountain Corporation plan to build 57 acres of warehouses on this polluted land. 

After over 150 years of explosives manufacturing on the Hercules property in Kenvil, New Jersey, all manufacturing activity stopped in 1996. This left behind a thousand acres of arguably the most complex land contamination in the state's history. It created a major quandary for the Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) and potentially a substantial financial burden for taxpayers if the property was designated as a State Superfund Site. 

That didn’t happen. Instead, an agreement was reached between the DEP and Hercules (now with Ashland Global, a large chemical corporation that purchased the property). Under a new law, this agreement allows private companies to conduct and pay for all remediation activity on polluted land. All the initial decommissioning work and scientific studies of the property have been privately funded since then, including a twenty-year-long, two-phase Remediation Investigation Report (RIR) completed about seven years ago. 

That RIR report, and tens of thousands of other documents, were recently obtained the Raritan Headwaters Association under an OPRA request to the DEP. The review of this massive tranche of documents is ongoing, but potential environmental risks are immediately obvious. Here is just a small example of information contained in the 1,800-page RIR Summary

From the Report as regards just the surface waters and sediments at the facility:

“• SVOCs were detected in sediment, but not in surface water at five of the seven co-located
sample points.

• Beryllium, selenium, and silver were detected in sediment and not in surface water,
indicating these constituents are not partitioning [moving] from sediment to surface water.

• Arsenic, cadmium, chromium, cobalt, copper, lead, mercury, nickel, vanadium, and zinc
were detected in surface water and sediment.

• Aluminum, barium, calcium, iron, magnesium, potassium, and manganese were detected in both surface water and sediment samples from each co-location. Per the United States
Geological Survey (1984), these metals are commonly found in surficial geologic material in the vicinity of the Facility.”

And this:

“In certain instances, constituents were present at concentrations that exceeded their aqueous solubility limits by two to four orders of magnitude, indicating that these constituents were associated with suspended sediment entrained in the surface water

Here is another example of what the report says regarding soil in another area of the property: 

From the Report: [4-13, pdf pg 35]

“TNT in soil exceeds its IGWSSL [Impact to Groundwater Soil Screening Levels] in the TNT Area, the PETN [Pentaerythritol Tetranitrate] Area, and the western portion of the Dynamite Area. TNT and related breakdown constituents (4-Amino-2,6-dinitrotoluene, 2,4/2,6-Dinitrotoluene, and 2-Amino-4,6-Dinitrotoluene) exceed their respective GWQS[Groundwater Quality Standards] in… [12]… monitoring wells… located downgradient of soil sample results exceeding the IGWSSL for TNT."

And this example is regarding groundwater under the property: 

"RDX [1,3,5-Trinitroperhydro-1,3,5-triazine, Hexahydro-1,3,5-Trinitro-1,3,5-Triazine] exceeds its GWQS in a monitoring well (MW-36) co-located with and/or downgradient of soil samples with RDX detections that exceed its IGWSSL.”

 

A massive amount of demolition and decontamination work initially took place on the highly polluted Hercules property in the early 2000s. Many contaminated buildings and other structures were demolished and disposed of. Miles of pipelines were drained of toxic chemicals and removed from the ground where they were buried, and a decades-long science-based study of pollution on the site was begun. These efforts have been verbally characterized as successful, but any consequences that these early decommissioning activities may have had on the movement of toxic chemicals are not well documented in the final report. The RIR mostly provides a contemporary status of soil, sediment, groundwater, and surface water contamination.

The private work, by property owners and their contractors, must be overseen by a privately hired LSRP, or Licensed Site Remediation Professional. This person is specially trained and licensed by the state to oversee cleanup operations. The LSRP sends all reports and documents pertaining to the clean-up to the NJ DEP for final review and approval. The Hercules tract was eventually sold to Ashland Chemical’s property division which continues to privately fund all remediation activities at the Hercules tract today. The general concept is that the private corporation's investments to clean up the site will eventually yield corporate profits when the property is redeveloped. This type of agreement obviously precludes the possibility of the entire property being returned to a natural state.

In the intervening years since the initial decommissioning work, the land has been largely undisturbed. The RIR summary found that the current hydrology, the regrowth of vegetative cover, and an absence of human activity have stabilized the many chemical and heavy metal contaminates on the Hercules property. That is to say, the contamination is not currently migrating off the property. Furthermore, the vegetation covering the grounds helps to naturally break down many toxins in the soil. This is good news, but this still leaves pockets of substances in highly toxic quantities scattered throughout the site. As a result, the Hercules property remains off-limits to the general public. Those who have reason to be there must receive special training to avoid contamination, according to the RIR report.

An important finding suggested throughout the RIR is that if stabilizing conditions on the property change in the future, the contaminants could migrate off-site. This would create potential health risks for Roxbury residents and anyone downstream from the Black River. 

Many people are unaware that the Black River originates from the southern wetlands and the prolific freshwater springs on the Hercules property. The property sits over an "unconfined" aquifer that stretches across the Succasunna plains. But there is another "confined" aquifer (between nonporous rock layers) below it. That aquifer is tapped by both private and commercial wells in the region. It is believed that fissures in the rocks at the Hercules site allow some water to rise to the surface within the wetlands adding to the water that comes from rainfall.  The quality of water from this area of springs, known to the original Lenape natives as the Great Spring, appears to be very good.

The RIR Summary and other documents consistently refer to the 

To visualize the general flow of water at the Hercules site, think of a horseshoe leaning against a peg. The back of the horseshoe is elevated, while the open end of the horseshoe faces south along Rt. 46. The metal shoe represents a rocky ridge that encloses a sloped basin comprised of glacier-deposited sediments (the unconfined aquifer). A dip in the ridge at the northeast corner allows surface water in that area to run northeast into the Rockaway River basin. The rest of the groundwater and surface water travels in a southwesterly direction into the wetlands on the southern edge of the property. This then forms the Black River that drains into Sunset Lake and the Raritan River Basin.

The list of toxins found on the Hercules tract is long and varied. The entire site is cross-contaminated, but the concentrations of chemical pollutants in excess of safety standards are mostly found in locations where those substances were stored or used in manufacturing. For example, in the section referred to as the Maintenance Area near the center of the property, there was once an electrical generation plant where Hercules made its own electricity. It contained many electrical components that used PCB as a coolant. The huge 1940 explosion destroyed this equipment spreading PCBs over the property, much of which seeped into the soil at that location. In the area where TNT and dynamite were made, spills, past explosions, and antiquated production practices left unsafe concentrations of toxic explosives and energetic chemicals (or E&E) in the soil.

Near Duck Pond to the north, chemical waste and other polluted items were burned in a burn pit that released Dioxin and other chemicals into the air and surrounding soil. Further west of the burn pit, there is a licensed landfill covering multiple acres. According to documents recently reviewed, there is no record of what was deposited in that landfill in the early years of its operation. In another area, there is significant lead contamination in the soil where Hercules fabricated equipment made of lead (because it doesn’t spark when struck). There is also an inactive chemical waste treatment plant that is still licensed by the DEP to release up to 135,000 gallons of treated wastewater into the Black River daily. No wastewater has been released since 2002, and the license is up for renewal. An application to renew that license was just submitted to the DEP this month.

The Maintenance area mentioned above is where tons of PCB-tainted soil was hauled away last spring to special landfills. The TNT and Dynamite Areas are the current focus of bioremediation activities. Critically, all these remediation activities and future redevelopment activities require disturbing the soil and vegetation that keep toxic chemicals from migrating off the property. That’s why precautions being taken to prevent this from happening are essential to protect the environment and maintain human safety. The public has a right to know how we are being protected.

The two-decade-long RIR summary provides the factual basis for the bioremediation activity begun in January 2022. It documents the environmental hot spots on the site and informs future development plans, including the recently proposed Hartz Mountain redevelopment plan to build warehouses to be leased to future tenants. An area known as the Maintenance Area will be partly covered by the 57 acres of warehouses proposed by Hartz Mountain. The plan also requires building roadways, and parking lots. The redevelopment would encompass 200 acres in all. Covering that much land with impervious surfaces is an element of the remediation plan. The idea is to cap the tainted soil to prevent contaminants from migrating to the ground or surface water. This plan would generate millions of gallons of stormwater yearly based on rainfall averages. This stormwater would have to be captured, treated, and released to the Black River.  

Given the changes to the hydrology and land use of the property resulting from ongoing remediation activity and the proposed redevelopment, how this ultimately impacts the groundwater and the surface water flowing into the Black River requires full disclosure and public consideration.