Camden cleanup aided by stimulus

In one short sentence, Gloucester City Mayor William James summed up the mission and frustration of a decade of radioactive-waste removal north and south of the Walt Whitman Bridge: "Just get it out of here."

Residents welcome $22 million in federal stimulus money that will finish the cleanup of a portion of the Welsbach/General Gas Mantle Superfund site. The former factory at Fourth and Jefferson Streets in Camden's Waterfront South neighborhood is one of 50 sites nationwide sharing $600 million.

"It had been quiet. Fenced off," said Patrick Mulligan, assistant director of the nonprofit Heart of Camden. "Nothing like the extent of work going on there now."

The stimulus money will allow the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to direct all $16 million in the annual budget toward Gloucester City, including a project next month near the football and baseball fields along Johnson Boulevard.

"EPA believes that the cleanup of the General Gas Mantle property will serve as a catalyst for redevelopment of the area," spokeswoman Elizabeth Totman said. "It's also, clearly, accelerating the time frame of the overall cleanup of the site."

In the early 20th century, Welsbach in Gloucester City was America's largest manufacturer of gas mantles, a precursor to the lightbulb. General Gas Mantle in Camden, which opened in 1912, was its closest competitor. Both companies went out of business in the early 1940s.

The factories left behind thorium, a radioactive chemical used to make mantles glow brighter. It's tasteless and odorless, and it lingers for 14 billion years. Prolonged exposure can increase the chance of cancer and lung disease.

Since June, workers in Camden have been scooping out contaminated soil and sending it to a hazardous-waste dump in the West. They'll fill in the site with clean soil so it can be reused. Completion time depends on the extent of radioactive material found, Totman said.

Neither city knew the extent of contamination until 1981, when the EPA conducted an aerial radiological survey. As a result, the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection investigated 1,100 properties with potential problems, and in 1996, the Welsbach/General Gas Mantle site was added to the federal Superfund National Priorities List.

EPA officials think Welsbach workers took home buckets of what they believed to be clean fill from the factory's slag piles to plug holes and build roads. It was laced with thorium, radium, and other elements. Essex Street in Gloucester City was likely a filled-in streambed, according to Natalie Loney, the EPA's community-involvement coordinator. Bits of mantle were found around the city swim club. In Camden, processed thorium probably fell off horse-drawn wagons headed to the factory.

Cleanup began in 1999. The largest projects so far - all in Gloucester City - include Essex Street, the swim club, the future home of a middle school on Division Street, Temple Avenue, and Newton Creek.

Some Camden residents have been frustrated that until the stimulus money was announced, a greater portion of the budget had been spent in Gloucester City, said Roy Jones, coordinator of the South Jersey Environmental Justice Alliance.

Loney said that the EPA was aware of the "disproportional burden of pollution" on the Waterfront South neighborhood from a multitude of sources, but that the gas-mantle factory predates them, "when Camden was a very different place."

The EPA set Superfund site cleanup priorities according to the "hot spots" identified in the 1981 flyover, she said.

General Gas Mantle didn't process ore in Camden, as Welsbach did in Gloucester City, Loney said, so contamination there wasn't as widespread. The biggest issues involved the vacant factory building, so it was torn down in 2001, and residential buildings along Arlington Street, which were remediated in 2004.

Also, Gloucester City's problems proved more challenging than the EPA had expected.

"In 2002, Gloucester City had been neglected so long we cut corners on design to get in the field right away," Rick Robinson, project manager, said at a public meeting Tuesday in Gloucester City.

Traces of radiological material were "all over" - deep and widespread, under streets and houses, and around the swim club's dive pool, he said.

"You didn't know what was there until you started digging," Loney said. "Normally you do test pits. We couldn't really dig under people's homes."

Because of better testing, EPA officials think they have a pretty accurate picture of the soil around the athletic fields, she said. Cleanup should go faster. To date, work is complete on 424 of 488 Camden properties. Cleanup is under way on 37, and design and investigation continue on 27.

In Gloucester City, work is finished on 384 of 447 properties. Cleanup is under way on 10, and design and investigation continue on 53.

Work doesn't proceed until funding for the entire project is secured, Loney said. For example, this year's budget can pay for only half the athletic-field cleanup, so Robinson won't begin the southern portion until he can cover the entire budget.

"We're not going to leave an open hole in the ground," Loney said.

At last week's meeting, Louisa Llewellyn, 77, a lifetime Gloucester City resident and longtime school board member, said her niece's twin home was torn down in the Essex Street cleanup, and soil was removed from her sister's backyard. "She got a new pool," Llewellyn said.

"A lot of people worry that we have high cancer rates in the city, but we have a lot of blue-collar workers who worked in the shipyards and who were smokers," Llewellyn said. "People can always look outside themselves for a justification."

Dominic Staiano, former president of the swim club and an active member of the Little League, has been a community partner with the EPA from the start.

"Initially, they told me they'd be here 10 years. That was 1996," he said.

Doctors have assured Staiano that thorium poisoning could come only from ingestion or from constant, direct exposure over a long time, he said.

"I'd like to get it removed. Am I overly concerned? No," he said.