Fenimore Forever More?

By Matt Rooney | The Save Jersey Blog

LandfillHopes that last June’s legislation permitting the state to assume control of Roxbury’s Fenimore landfill (after plenty of obstruction) was the beginning of the end for fume-tortured residents haven’t exactly panned out, Save Jerseyans.

We’re about to enter another summer of health hazards for local residents without much movement at the state and federal levels.

As we speak, a legal fight is ongoing between the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) which wants to quickly “cap” the landfill and Fenimore’s municipal government officials who want to test the wells and then remove the offending substances. The Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR) is stepping in to conduct a probe but that’s little consolation for residents like this Roxbury resident (below the fold) who claims her life has literally been sidelined by the landfill’s ill effects…

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w7wFQQCqIs8

Matt Rooney
About Matt Rooney 8405 Articles
MATT ROONEY is SaveJersey.com's founder and editor-in-chief, a practicing New Jersey attorney, and the host of 'The Matt Rooney Show' on 1210 WPHT every Sunday evening from 7-10PM EST.

3 Comments

  1. What people not close to the situation don’t understand is the Roxbury town council and their attorney Anthony Bucco Jr. are in bed with Christie, the inept NJDEP, and corrupt Highlands Council to cap this with no regard for the law. The mayor of Roxbury is the Chairman of the Highlands Council and is a party to the crime while he claims he can do nothing because of conflicts of interest and lack of scientific data. Yet they have made the decision to go along with the NJDEP’s misguided plans.

    The town council is not really fighting and it’s all a dog and pony show. The cronyism and corruption run to the top. The town council now agrees with everything the NJDEP wants to do because they just want the problem to go away as fast as possible to save their political careers. The real mistake was the NJDEP letting a felon truck in C&D waste that is slowly poison residents and ruining a community. Now they just want to hide their errors by putting a band-aid on the whole thing.

    There needs to be a formal investigation into how so many laws and regulations were ignored to get this Christie pet project of capping landfills with solar farms started in the first place, Where’s all the money that was made by the fraudulent private company during the failed renovation and remediation? Now the taxpayers are left with an environmental disaster and holding the bill for what will be a short term and short sighted remediation. The only long terms solution to return Roxbury to the way it was as one of the top 100 communities for young people is to remove all the material that was brought in and cap the old historic waste with a clean clay cap.

    An impermeable garbage liner with dozens of gas treatment wells and an industrial air scrubber don’t belong in a residential community and are destined to break down and cost just as much as trucking out the material would. The residents of Roxbury need legal and scientific help from independent experts that have not been corrupted by New Jersey politics and intimidated by the bullying Christie administration. Otherwise their short term mistakes will affect Roxbury forever.

  2. When is Gov. Christie going to address the Fennimore landfill issue to the media an explain why ……”Everything is gone wrong.”
    I am totally concern on the bridge issue , but gov. Christie needs to speak on other issues in this state.? How about the Fennimore landfill issues involving 33,528 citizens of Roxbury and Flanders Township and how the DEP is making a bad situation worse , they lost control of this landfill went Bernardi had it and they are not doing any better whatsoever.
    It will not take years to truck it out , it did not take years to bring it in!!
    Its not correct to refer to this facility as a “landfill’. The facility is in no way a landfill as currently defined. Rather it is a long abandoned dump that was created without regard for environmental protection. There is no liner of any type. There is no leachate collection system, apart from an abandoned lagoon from which contaminated leachate was pumped and sprayed on the surface.
    That the DEP has no clue on what they are doing, therefore the only engineering solution to this problem, is to truck the material out

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