EPA to hold meeting in Fair Lawn addressing treatment plan for contaminated groundwater - NorthJersey.com

Fair Lawn NJ: EPA to talk plan for contaminated groundwater

EPA to hold meeting in Fair Lawn addressing treatment plan for contaminated groundwater

2-minute read
Stephanie Noda

The Environmental Protection Agency will give more insight into how it plans to address the treatment of contaminated water in Fair Lawn with public meetings later this month.

Residents are being invited to information sessions on July 27 to learn more about the status of the Fair Lawn Well Field Superfund site. The Superfund site is located at Westmoreland Well Field, located west of Route 208, which has contaminated groundwater from chemicals leaching from a nearby industrial park decades ago.

There will be two sessions residents can attend that will be held by EPA representatives, borough officials and representatives from the companies Sandvik, Inc. and Thermo Fisher Scientific, who were responsible for the investigation and remediation of the Superfund site since 1983, according to the borough’s official website.

The plan to address the site, which is under review by the EPA, is to “build a state-of-the-art groundwater treatment plant on 11th Street, in a location adjacent to the existing water storage tank,” according to the borough’s website.

The meeting will cover the status of the federal Superfund process, treatment plant construction plans, treatment plant operations and project safety and transportation, according to the website.

The EPA had originally announced the $19.5 million plan in 2018 to expand three existing pump-and-treat systems at the Westmoreland Well Field to remove several chemicals including 1,4-dioxane, PFOA and PFOS.

Fair Lawn shut down four of the borough’s 14 wells in 2016 after borough officials were concerned with high levels of 1,4-dioxane, a “likely carcinogen” that can also cause liver and kidney damage, and shut down three more wells in 2017 after finding high levels of PFOA and PFOS, chemicals that are linked with kidney and testicular cancer. The borough began buying water from the Passaic Valley Water Commission and Suez, which is known as Veolia today and operates the Oradell Reservoir, to make up for the closed seven wells.

The New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection initially discovered contamination in the ground near Westmoreland Well Field in 1978, which included tetrachloroethylene and trichloroethylene, chemicals that have been linked to kidney and liver damage and cancer.

It was determined the contamination was caused by the chemicals leaching into the water supply from companies Kodak, Fisher Scientific and Sandvik Inc. in the nearby Fair Lawn Industrial Park. Kodak filed for bankruptcy in 2012, according to the EPA.

One session will run from 2 to 4 p.m. and the second session will run from 6 to 8 p.m. on July 27. Both meetings will be held at the Fair Lawn Senior Center at 11-05 Gardiner Road.