By RICHARD PEARSALL
Courier-Post Staff
CAMDEN
More than half of the contaminated dirt NJ Transit has piled into huge mounds along its light rail line in East Camden was trucked into the city from other towns along the 34-mile line, the agency now concedes.
Environmentalists say it is one more example of what they call "environmental injustice," dumping dirty dirt on a city already burdened with a county incinerator, a county sewage plant and countless brownfields.
NJ Transit had earlier asserted that the majority of dirt in its Camden berms - it cited a figure of 85 percent at one point - originated in the city. Now the agency puts the figure at only about 42 percent.
Residents of East Camden said Friday they're unhappy about the revelations.
"Our kids play out there, on their dirt bikes," said Irene Swinson, a mother of two. "During the winter, they went sledding."
But, she said, she was not surprised.
"It goes back to how they feel about the residents of Camden," Swinson said about state officials. "They figured they could dump it here and no one would say anything."
The contaminated dirt, piled into mounds as high as 30 feet and as long as several city blocks, would fill about 8,000 large dump trucks. It was dug up during construction of the South Jersey Light Rail Line, set to begin operating later this year. The dirt contains low levels of a variety of hazardous materials, including lead, arsenic, benzene and polychlorinated biphenyls or PCBs, a fact residents were not told about in advance.
Jane Nogaki, of the New Jersey Environmental Federation, faulted NJ Transit both for putting it there and for failing to consult residents before doing so.
"The neighbors were the last to know and had no say," she said. "Do you think this would happen in a suburb such as Cherry Hill or Haddonfield? Never."
City officials contend they, too, were kept in the dark about the contents of the dirt and are now investigating.
Both NJ Transit and the state Department of Environmental Protection say the dirt is safe because it is capped by clean soil and located in a nonresidential neighborhood.
Nogaki said those assertions do not pass "the common sense test" because of the proximity of residences to the freight yard where the dirt piles have been stacked.
Bill Whitlow, a psychology professor at Rutgers-Camden who has become engaged in a number of environmental issues in the city, agreed.
"While it's not in a residential area, it's next to a residential area," Whitlow said of the system of three berms sitting on the edge of the freight yard, behind some residences.
"There's no signage," he said, and in some areas, "no real control over access to the dirt."
Whitlow called the issue a setback for a state administration that has been trying to convince Camden residents it cares about their environment.
"It shows a lack of respect on someone's part," he said. `Children are vulnerable'
Nogaki said that dirt with even low levels of toxic material can be hazardous.
"Dirt blows off the piles as dust, or gets tracked into houses" she said, "and gets ingested."
Children are vulnerable not just because they play in it, Nogaki said, but because of their "tendency to touch things (such as dust on table tops), then put their fingers in their mouths."
NJ Transit stressed that the state DEP had approved its soil reuse plan.
That plan called for capping the most contaminated soil with 18 inches of cleaner soil and an additional 6 inches of topsoil that will support vegetation.
Penny Bassett Hackett, a spokeswoman for NJ Transit, said the agency did not consult neighbors before implementing the plan because such consultation "is not customary."
NJ Transit asserted for weeks that most of the dirt originated in the city, specifying at one point that 85 percent was from the city.
But an inventory produced at the request of the Courier-Post shows that Camden accounted for only 51,623 of the 123,791 cubic yards of dirt that went into construction of the berms in Camden.
The report states that most of the rest of the dirt - 46,703 cubic yards - came from next door, in Pennsauken.
But the inventory itself shows that most of that dirt actually originated elsewhere and was only stored temporarily in Pennsauken before being moved to Camden.
NJ Transit has constructed some smaller berms in Roebling and deposited about 12,000 cubic yards in landfills, 10,000 cubic yards in the Burlington County Landfill in Mansfield and 2,000 cubic yards of dirt in the Camden County landfill in Pennsauken.
Reach Richard Pearsall at (856)-486-2465 or rpearsall@courierpostonline.com
