“If Superfund status is any indicator, New Jersey has the dirtiest dirt in the country, and the Gold Coast has some of the dirtiest dirt in New Jersey.”.
This is the Quanta Resources Superfund Site, one of 1,335 contaminated sites across America that the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) deems most urgently in need of a clean-up.
With 114 Superfund sites, New Jersey is home to more than any other state in the country.
Bergen County, where the Quanta Site is located, and Hudson County, which includes the rest of the Gold Coast, together have 12 Superfund sites—more than the entire state of Louisiana.
If Superfund status is any indicator, New Jersey has the dirtiest dirt in the country, and the Gold Coast has some of the dirtiest dirt in New Jersey.
When I visited the Quanta Site in early March, the sky was blue and the Hudson was milky and bland.
He had lived in Edgewater for 25 years and was nonchalant about the cleanup, figuring it would eventually turn into an apartment building like everything else.
"All the industries were located in New Jersey," Guillermo Rocha, a professor of geology at Brooklyn College and former environmental engineer for New Jersey Superfund cleanups told me.
"New Jersey's famous,” explained an environmental engineer I met with on the Quanta Site familiar with the work underway.
“All down the river,” Doug said, “Fill gets brought it, or was brought in back in the day…and that fill had incinerator ash, whatever they could get their hands on, for land.
"I dig it," said Doug.
From 1896 to 1974, the Quanta Site was home to one of those leaky waterfront factories: a roofing tar plant in an industrial strip at the south end of the mostly residential Edgewater called Shadyside (back then, Edgewater’s slogan was: “Where homes and industry blend”).
When it comes up in a soil boring, in the “spoon,” it looks like the soil is stained, said Doug.
Over the years, the plant at the Quanta site distilled and refined millions of gallons of coal tar into a menu of useful residues and chemicals.
“Some incident occurred,” said Doug.
This was back when people didn't think about things like that." One documented incident happened in 1924, when 38,000 liters of coal tar pitch burned at the site.
This was back when people didn’t think about things like that.”.
In 1980, a company called Quanta Resources started using the site to store and recycle oil and waste from refineries, chemical producers, and other industries.
Over the next few years, the NJDEP and the EPA removed the storage tanks and enormous amounts of contaminated oil and dirt from the site—but by then, the problem had leached deeper.
The coal tar from a century of spills had oozed down through the loose fill layer on top of the site to the impermeable layer of clay left from the old marsh, what environmental engineers call the “meadow mat.” In addition to the coal tar contamination, a plume of arsenic from an adjacent fertilizer factory had spread into the soil of the Quanta Site.
In 2002, the Quanta Site was listed on the National Priorities List, becoming a Superfund site.
In Superfund lingo, the method used to clean up a site is the “remedy.” Contaminated sites require “remedial action.” Cleaning up dirt is “soil remediation.” A major part of the remediation process—and one reason Superfund cleanups often take so long—is selecting a proper remedy.
Depending on the contaminant and location of the site, those include digging up the contaminated dirt and taking it elsewhere, encapsulating it within some kind of tomb, and seeding plants in it that can break down contaminants.
It can be “air sparged,” a process in which air is blown underneath the contaminated dirt so the rising vapors can be captured.
“There are many things you have to do.” He worked on one Superfund project south of the Quanta Site in Jersey City which required transporting tens of thousands of cubic yards of dirt full of chromium to burn in a facility in South Carolina.
The primary remedy the EPA selected for the Quanta Site is known as “in situ stabilization.” This entails mixing contaminated dirt with a cement-like material while it’s in the ground.
"When you're done, it looks like really thick pea soup.
Except it's not green, it's grey,” Doug said.
“What it does is, once it gets mixed with water and soil, it creates a monolith,” said Doug.
"Anything that disturbs the material has the potential to release volatiles and odors,” said Doug.
When full-scale work started on the Quanta site in 2017 without the tents, the people of Edgewater discovered their own odor threshold.
“The smell was ridiculous,” a sales manager at a massage parlor adjacent to the site told me.
An employee at the AT&T store south of the site told me people on the bus would immediately turn their heads away in disgust when the doors opened at her stop.
They're blobs," said Doug of the contaminated areas where the monoliths are mixed.
The boundaries of these "blobs" are inferred from soil samples taken from around the site, like connecting the dots.
Once the monoliths have hardened in place, the tents will be cleared and the site will again be covered with fill and “capped” with material meant to defend the monoliths against the elements.
Like the rest of the Gold Coast, a developer will likely take over the site, and the toxic blocks will be entombed there beneath whatever gets built.
It's gonna be landscaped,” said Doug?
According to a recent report from the US Government Accountability Office on the risks to Superfund sites posed by climate change, 60 percent of Superfund sites in the United States are at risk for floods and wildfires exacerbated by climate change.
Many sites, including those along the Gold Coast, are at risk of flooding from increases in storm surges, extreme weather, and rising sea levels, which could carry contaminated soil away?
The Quanta site is at risk of flooding even without any sea-level rise.
"When you think about it, the concrete that the Romans used 2000 years ago still exists in Rome,” said Doug?
How it shafts all the drivers who spent big money on new cars expecting they'd be able to work whenever they wanted, like the advertisements said they could.
In our collective state of suspended isolation, we’ll take time to dig deep into the vanguard of soil science, land management, and fascinating subterranean systems, unearthing some of the Anthropocene’s dirtiest dirt-related secrets along the way
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