Lee Place Brownfield Needs More Work

A Lee Place brownfields site will need more study and remediation before possibly being cleared for new housing construction, a consultant said Thursday.

Meanwhile, a resident asked who might be held responsible for cancer illnesses and deaths in the neighborhood. Rasheed Abdul-Haqq said his son died of leukemia, he has prostate cancer and neighbors including a city police officer also contracted cancer. Abdul-Haqq questioned whether a “causal relationship” could be established at the former dry-cleaning plant.

Kevin McAllister of Brownfield Redevelopment Solutions called it “a complicated legal question” that he was not going to try to answer.

At Thursday’s public hearing at Washington Community School, McAllister presented results of a study at 208-222 Lee Place, the site where two houses had flanked the dry-cleaning plant. All structures as well as several underground tanks have been removed from the lots and the site has also undergone treatment of soil contamination by petroleum and various dry-cleaning chemicals. In addition, groundwater contaminated by perchloroethylene (PCE) has been remediated.

Although the site has been cleaned up and “somewhat restored,” McAllister said, the NJ DEP now wants offsite groundwater tested and a “vapor intrusion” study made based on the results of the groundwater tests. The effectiveness of the remediation and the cost of any further work will determine whether the site can be used for residential or green space uses, or for a combination of the two.

Abdul-Haqq said neighbors feel the contaminants may have spread “significantly.”

Monitoring wells to collect and analyze groundwater will determine the extent of any “plume” of contamination. The wells will be placed near the intersection of South Second Street and Stebbins Place, McAllister said, and one or more may need to be placed on residential property. In answer to resident Nancy Piwowar, he said wells may be placed 150 feet away from the site, where three wells have determined the direction of the groundwater flows.

The city has numerous brownfield sites, especially along its former industrial corridors, but they cannot be redeveloped until they are cleaned of contaminants. McAllister said a fact sheet on the Lee Place site is now on file in City Hall.

--Bernice