New Jersey's Hackensack River Considered as a Superfund Site

"In an acknowledgment that the Hackensack River remains seriously polluted with a century of industrial waste, the federal government will consider adding the river to the federal Superfund list, a program reserved for the country’s most contaminated sites," reports James O'Neill.

Environmental protection groups like the Hackensack Riverkeeper have made strides in cleaning the river and its watershed, but the damage remains, to a certain extent, intractable. Bill Sheehan, executive director of the Hackensack Riverkeeper, is quoted in the article: "It wasn’t easy to convince me to take this route, especially since we’ve been the chief cheerleader for the river and done everything we could to celebrate the river and get people more involved in it….But the sediment is still horribly contaminated, and if we’re really going to give the river back to the people it belongs to, we need to get the sediment cleaned up."

As for what the assistance of the U.S. EPA warrants the site: "Superfund status for the 17-mile stretch of the river would prompt a multiyear investigation into both the extent of contamination and which companies would be responsible for cleanup costs, followed by more study to determine the best cleanup plan, which could include dredging and capping contaminated sediment."

New Jersey is the nation's capital of Superfund sites, with 114 in total. According to O'Neill, there are six Superfund sites in the Hackensack River's watershed, an ecosystem known as the Meadowlands.