Published in the Asbury Park Press
By JEAN MIKLE
TOMS RIVER BUREAU
TOMS RIVER -- Cleanup of contaminants at the former Ciba-Geigy Corp. Superfund site in Dover Township could be completed by 2010, officials from the federal Environmental Protection Agency said last night.
At a meeting to discuss a $92 million plan to clean up 21 areas that are sources of pollution on the property, Romona Pezzella, EPA's remedial project manager for the Ciba site, laid out a time line for completing the work.
Construction of cleanup facilities would begin in 2002, and Pezzella said excavation and removal of about 35,000 drums of buried waste would take place in 2003 and 2004.
The drums would be removed by truck and taken off-site for treatment or would be placed in a landfill, Pezzella said at the meeting at town hall in Toms River.
Ciba Specialty Chemicals will foot the bill for cleanup at the 1,400-acre site where dyes, resins and pigments were manufactured for more than 40 years.
The main treatment process that would take place on site would be bioremediation, which would be used to clean about 145,000 cubic yards of contaminated soil on Ciba's property off Route 37.
The process includes using microbes that already exist on the site to eat pollutants in the soil. The microbes are stimulated by adding nutrients, straw and oxygen to speed up the decomposition of contaminants.
A large building of 1 1/2 to 2 acres would be constructed to house contaminated soil during the first stage of the bioremediation process. The first stage would take about four to six weeks, Pezzella said, and the material would then be moved outside, to a 10-acre outdoor treatment area, to complete the process.
The outdoor treatment stage would last about two to three months, she said.
Based on the results of a pilot bioremediation project conducted by Ciba, Pezzella said 2,000 to 2,500 cubic yards of soil could be treated per month, with 24,000 to 30,000 treated in a year.
The bioremediation process is expected to reduce the amount of pollutants in the source areas by about 90 percent, and is expected to cut the amount of contaminants leaching into ground water by 99 percent.
Pezzella noted that reducing the amount of pollutants reaching the ground water is "the driving force" of the cleanup operation. A system that has been in place for about four years removes about 2.7 million gallons of contaminated ground water a day, treats it to remove pollutants, then recharges the water back onto Ciba's property.
Pezzella said that while preparing the cleanup plan for the source areas, EPA and Ciba researchers looked at the efficiency of the ground-water treatment system and determined that it could be improved. Some wells being used to draw contaminated water could be sealed, and new wells might be drilled that could improve the treatment process, she said.
The EPA's decision to use bioremediation as the main cleanup tool at the Ciba site has received praise from many people in town. Many residents had raised concerns about the possibility that the EPA might choose thermal desorption, a process that includes heating soil to high temperatures to vaporize contaminants.
"I want to say thank you to the EPA for a lot of hard work to come up with a plan that minimizes the risks to the community," the Rev. Scott Minnich, a township resident, said last night. Minnich was one of many residents who raised concerns about possible emissions from a thermal desorption unit at meetings held last year.
The EPA is likely to formalize the Ciba cleanup remedy in a record of decision that will probably be released by fall, officials have said. The agency will then enter into negotiations with Ciba to work out details of the cleanup plan.
Published on July 13, 2000
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