Hazard: The Heart of Ringwood

Drilled

Critical Frequency

True Crime, Earth Sciences, Social Sciences, Science

4.8 • 2.3K Ratings

🗓️ 27 September 2022

⏱️ 44 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Introducing Hazard NJ! A new series examining prominent Superfund sites around New Jersey, and ways they're impacted by climate change. In this episode: Ringwood and Ford's toxic legacy. In July 2005, Roger De Groat stepped outside his home in the secluded, forested community of Upper Ringwood to find a hole the size of a swimming pool where his backyard used to be. Roger's home, like the rest in the neighborhood, sits atop an extensive system of abandoned iron mines, and sinkholes like these have opened every so often for decades. But what's in the mines is a different kind of lingering threat. Ford Motor Company turned the mines into a toxic waste dump in the '60s and '70s, with little regard for the people, overwhelmingly Ramapough Lenape Nation tribal members, that were dumped on. Today the community is gripped by cancer and other diseases that residents believe is tied to the chemicals Ford left behind. When the EPA put the Ringwood Mines on the Superfund list, a shoddy cleanup left so much pollution behind that the site had to be relisted. A second try at cleaning up the mess is now underway. As climate change brings increasingly heavy rains to the area, toxic chemicals known to be in the groundwater are threatening to migrate towards a critical water supply reservoir nearby.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome back to Drilled I'm Amy Westervelt.
0:13.5	Today we have a little bit of a different type of episode for you.
0:18.0	We're bringing you an episode from Hazard NJ.
0:21.9	This is an investigative podcast and multimedia project from NJ Spotlight News.
0:27.8	It's the PBS station in New Jersey.
0:30.4	It's focused on revealing the dangers that climate change poses to the state's superfund
0:35.4	sites and the health threats that that poses to people.
0:39.0	I'm personally really invested in this show because I've been talking to the show's
0:44.7	creator and host and reporter Jordan Gasparé about this idea for a while.
0:49.9	This idea that, you know, most people don't know what superfund sites are or what they
0:55.7	are today and we definitely don't know how climate change is going to intersect with
1:00.7	this sort of legacy of industrial pollution all over the country.
1:05.5	This particular episode looks at a site in Wingwood, New Jersey.
1:10.7	In July 2005, Roger DeGroote stepped outside his home in the secluded forested community
1:17.3	of Upper Ringwood to find a hole the size of a swimming pool where his backyard used
1:23.3	to be.
1:24.3	The home, like the rest in the neighborhood, sits atop an extensive and poorly understood
1:29.2	system of abandon iron mines and sinkholes like these have opened up every so often for
1:35.7	decades.
1:36.7	But what's in the mines is a different kind of lingering threat.
1:41.7	Ford Motor Company turned the mines and the area around them into a toxic waste dump in
1:46.2	the 60s and 70s with little regard for the community.
	...

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