Cleanup takes a big step forward

JERRY WOLKOWITZ An old building on the premises of Imperial Oil, Marlboro, is being carefully demolished in small sections as part of a federal Superfund cleanup.

An 88-year-old building at the Imperial Oil federal Superfund site off Tennent Road, Marlboro, is in the process of being demolished, bringing to fruition more than 20 years of work by Marlboro residents.

"It’s about time. It’s been an eyesore and a safety hazard for a long time," Mayor Matthew Scannapieco said.

Imperial Oil will continue doing business in an office building on the same premises as the building being demolished. The building being demolished has not been actively used since Imperial Oil took over the facilities in 1969, said Lizabeth Poulsen, a member of Marlboro’s Burnt Fly Bog-Imperial Oil Citizens Advisory Committee.

Representatives of and contractors hired by the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) have been on site since last week carefully taking the building apart.

"They’re doing a lot of hand work, taking it down bit by bit," Poulsen said. "There’s never going to be a big boom because this is something that has to be done very diligently. They’ve got to contain contamination and they’ve got to limit the destruction to just that site."

The building has a long history, Poulsen said. In 1912, it was built to be a ketchup factory.

"After that, it went on to become a rat bait factory, primarily producing arsenic," she said. "It stayed that way until the middle of the century."

In 1950, the building was purchased by Champion Chemical, which converted the structure into an oil reclamation facility. Champion Chemical continued using the building until 1969, when it entered into an agreement letting Imperial Oil blend and repackage unused oil at the site, she explained.

"Imperial Oil is still there, still doing business with the federal government," Poulsen said.

Efforts to address environmental concerns at the site began 20 years ago when Imperial Oil first made plans to knock down the building.

"That’s how we stumbled on its being a contaminated area," Poulsen said.

In 1983, the Imperial Oil site was declared a national Superfund site because high concentrations of petroleum hydrocarbons and heavy metals were detected, she said.

In 1985, the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection began an investigation to determine the nature of the contamination at the site.

"The DEP found that some substantial oil product was present in the ground water," Poulsen said. "Since that time it has been continual work between our advisory board and the DEP and EPA to clean it up."

Work has been done to clean up areas around the site that were found to be contaminated. All those efforts were leading up to the eventual demolition of the building.

"It has always been a given that this building was going to come down," Poulsen said.

Once the structure is demolished, testing will begin on the ground beneath.

"We don’t know what exactly is down there yet, because there hasn’t been a paper trail to follow," Poulsen said. "There could be pipes filled with oil or arsenic or even ketchup, and we won’t know until we get there."

Poulsen said more than $20 million has gone into the cleanup of the Imperial Oil site over the last 20 years.

"It has been a lot of long, hard work. It’s a continual process," she said. "We’ve had to struggle through approvals and bureaucracy, through DEP and EPA talks and so forth. The cleanup isn’t going to be quick either. There’s a lot of work left to do."