(Some idiot just wrote a defense of Ford under my review of “Mann V. Ford” because it was “legal” to dump toxic waste in the 1960s using Mafia haulers. This article that appeared in the Bergen Record is an antidote to such garbage.)
The Record (Bergen County, NJ) October 2, 2005 Sunday Ford, the feds, the mob: Making a wasteland By JAN BARRY, MARY JO LAYTON, ALEX NUSSBAUM, TOM TRONCONE, LINDY WASHBURN, BARBARA WILLIAMS and THOMAS E. FRANKLIN, Wire Services A slab of bright blue lies beside a mountain stream above the Wanaque Reservoir. It’s a sporty color, maybe the “Diamond Blue” that Ford sprayed on Galaxies in the late 1960s. It hardened like lava where it was dumped more than a generation ago. When running high, the stream rinses over the slab and down the mountain, through marshes and past beaver dams, toward the reservoir. It’s everywhere, this paint. Chunks of it jut from the driveway of a house in Ringwood where a child got lead poisoning. It is so toxic he and his mom have moved out. Piles of it, weathered and gray and wrinkled like an elephant’s skin, cling to a hillside. Nearby is the home of a boy who died of a rare tumor. On the other side of the hill a spring-fed stream once ran clear and fresh. For generations, it quenched the thirst of the mountain’s residents, the Ramapoughs. Now the water is bright orange and laced with cancer-causing benzene. Just upstream from Mahwah, a ridge of waste paint longer than a football field slowly leaches arsenic, lead and other heavy metals into the Ramapo River. It is in countless other places – in landfills, on farms, along hiking trails in the woodlands that sweep across the northern edge of New Jersey and form the region’s important watersheds. The paint sludge is from the Ford Motor Co.’s factory in Mahwah, once the largest auto assembly plant in the nation. Before closing in 1980, the behemoth plant spat out 6 million vehicles and an ocean of contaminants – including enough paint sludge to fill two of the three tubes of the Lincoln Tunnel. Millions of gallons of paint sludge was dumped in the remote section of Ringwood that is home to the Ramapoughs. Their children played in it. The streams washed over it. Early this summer, state officials announced some cancer rates there are unusually high. The Ramapoughs blame the sludge. For the past eight months, The Record has been investigating Ford’s toxic legacy. A team of journalists went house to house documenting health complaints among the Ramapoughs. They hiked through the mountains and found paint sludge that had been missed by four government-supervised cleanups in Ringwood. They found sludge near homes, in parks and in the watershed. Not far from the site of Ford’s Mahwah plant, they discovered sludge that had been tossed off the side of the road, even dumped near wells for public water supplies. Tests commissioned by the newspaper found lead, arsenic and xylenes in the sludge – some at 100 times the levels the government considers safe. The tests indicate the contamination is spreading. The Record found that Ford repeatedly dumped in poor communities and failed to clean up its mess. Documents reveal that Ford executives knew as early as 34 years ago that its waste had contaminated a stream that feeds the Wanaque Reservoir. They show that the company tried to evade responsibility by presenting tainted land as a “gift” to the state. Organized crime played a key role in a vast assault on the environment. An analysis of public records and interviews with truckers who hauled Ford’s waste shows mob-controlled contractors dumped anywhere they could get away with it. They bribed, threatened, even murdered to maintain control of Ford’s trash. Millions of gallons of hazardous waste vanished in their hands. Today, officials say they simply don’t have the staff to search for it all. Government at all levels shares the blame. For years, it allowed mobsters to turn New Jersey into a toxic dumping ground. Initial attempts at statewide environmental regulation in the late 1970s only made the situation worse. full: http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2011/07/18/what-ford-did-to-the-ramapough-mountain-indians/ _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
