The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers announced last week that after three decades of work, most radioactive soil cleanup at a Superfund site 12 miles west of New York City has been completed.
A ceremony was held Oct. 5 to mark major soil cleanup of the Formerly Utilized Sites Remedial Action Program (FUSRAP) site in Maywood, N.J. It was held by the Army Corps along with the New York Division and the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection and U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, according to an Oct. 14 press release.
More work awaits in the future, according to the release. Water cleanup is underway and not all the contaminated soil is yet accessible.
“Today the vast majority of the area has been cleared for unrestricted use: homeowners can use their property normally and public parks remain open for community recreation and other activities,” the Army Corps said in the release.
The contamination grows out of decades of thorium processing at the Maywood site.
The Army Corps’ cleanup started in 1997 and involved among other things addressing thorium-232 contamination. Some of the contamination dated back nearly a century and the EPA added Maywood to its Superfund list in 1984.
Soil remediation was completed in August at a cost of about $919 million. More than 11,000 rail cars of soil and debris were shipped offsite as part of the cleanup, according to the release.
An on-site New Jersey lab processed and analyzed over 350,000 samples in connection with the soil cleanup, according to the release.
Contamination on the site stems “from rare earths and thorium processing activities conducted at the Maywood Chemical Works (MCW) from the early 1900s through 1959,” according to a Corps fact sheet. “The property was subsequently sold to the Stepan Company (Stepan), a pharmaceutical manufacturer. The Maywood site is composed of the Maywood Interim Storage Site (MISS) and various nearby properties, including the Stepan property and numerous residential, commercial, and government properties in Maywood, Rochelle Park, and Lodi, New Jersey.”
