French's Landfill is town's 'last open sore' Officials want redeveloper to pay for cleanup of Superfund site BY PATRICIA A. MILLER Staff Writer BRICK TOWNSHIP - Township officials are tired of paying for the sins of the past. So they are taking what Township Council President Stephen C. Acropolis calls "baby steps" to see if it's possible to redevelop the defunct municipal landfill off Sally Ike Road. Council members unanimously agreed at its March 13 meeting to authorize Birdsall Engineering, the township engineering firm, to apply to the state Hazardous Discharge Site Remediation Fund for grants or loans to help pay for remediation costs. The township pays between $300,000 and $500,000 a year to monitor groundwater quality and migration at the roughly 42-acre, heavily wooded site, which sits on top of the Cohansey Aquifer. "It's one of the last open sores the township has," Acropolis said at the March 13 council meeting. "There is no closure in sight, no end in sight." Township officials hope that eventually some business entity would be interested in developing the site and in turn, pay for remediation costs. "They would be able to develop it, as long as they cleaned it up," Acropolis said Monday. The landfill, also known as French's Landfill, was closed in April 1979, six years after the township purchased it from Robert French with the intention of closing it down. It was placed on the federal Environmental Protection Agency's National Priorities List - better known as Superfund - in 1983. It was privately owned before 1972 and took in up to 120,000 gallons of waste, including chemical waste, per day. Elevated levels of cadmium and low levels of volatile organic compounds were found in some groundwater monitoring wells in 1987 in and around the site. Sediments and leachate were contaminated with various heavy metals. Several private wells not used for drinking water were found to be contaminated with VOCs in 1999. The township and the state Department of Environmental Protection entered into a consent order in 1982 to remediate the site. The township conducted a surface cleanup that year and removed about 150 drums and filled and vented three septage pits. It has paid for groundwater monitoring ever since. "As of December 2006, there is insufficient information to determine the site-wide Human Exposure status at the Brick Township Landfill Superfund site," according to the EPA's site progress profile for the landfill. The EPA also says a remedial investigation/feasibility study is being conducted to identify the nature and extent of the contamination. Previous studies have shown an underground, kidney-shaped 367-acre plume of contamination was moving in a southeasterly direction. The plume borders are Millbrook Road to the north, New York Avenue to the east, Brick Memorial High School and Greenbriar II to the southeast, the intersection of Sally Ike and Lanes Mill roads to the south, and the Garden State Parkway to the west, according to the township Web site. Samplings in 1998 and 1999 determined that the plume was more extensive than expected and had impacted several nearby irrigation wells, according to the EPA's fact sheet. The landfill site's future would be determined with input by the people most affected - those who live near the landfill, Acropolis said. "The people that live there would much rather have anything else on that site than a Superfund site," he said. "There is now money available so we can do a study to see if this site meets certain requirements for us to redevelop it."