Five years later, cleanup at Ringwood still unfinished

Journalists for The Record of northern New Jersey have revisited the site of the paper’s “Toxic Legacy” series five years ago and found that the clean-up of a former Ford Motor Co. dump in environmentally sensitive woodlands remains incomplete. The original series prompted the EPA to take the unprecedented step of re-listing the tract as a Superfund site, more than a decade after federal regulators had declared it clean. The two-day series showed that while much progress has been made – more than five times the sludge removed before the original series has now been trucked off the site, for instance. But once again, the EPA is giving serious consideration to allowing highly toxic material to remain in place – most notably paint sludge that had been dumped in old iron mines that honeycomb the hilly terrain.