Last week, more than 10 years after the EPA took the Ford Motor Co. industrial dump in Ringwood off the Superfund list, Ford was busy removing a blob of toxic waste the size of a swimming pool from the same site.
That appears to be just the beginning of an effort to finally clean up the 500-acre site thoroughly.
One of the next steps is to check all nearby residential properties for similar poisons, but already disagreements are arising over just how thorough a job Ford and the EPA plan to do. This is absurd.
As we've said repeatedly, Ford and the EPA have not gotten the job done right after several decades. Much of the toxic material that Ford dumped from its Mahwah plant between 1967 and 1973 is still there, and still reeking. This time, the cleanup had better be exhaustive.
Lawyers for the residents object to the most recent plan they've seen, saying that it calls for a visual inspection and soil sampling only if sludge is found. But Joe Gowers, the EPA's project manager, insists that the preliminary inspection plan also calls for the digging of trenches up to five feet deep - about where he expects to hit bedrock - and for extensive soil and air sampling.
If that's the case, Ford and the EPA sure have done a bad job of explaining their plan to local residents, who have every right to be skeptical about the cleanup. After all, these are the same outfits that missed a 280-cubic-yard chunk of toxic waste next to a hiking trail in nearby Ringwood State Park. And DEP Commissioner Bradley Campbell says his department is "finding additional areas of contamination daily."
All of this toxic waste is in an area where people live, and where streams flow into the Wanaque Reservoir. The EPA and Ford have failed woefully to clean up this mess in the past. All they have been good at is excuses.
No more.
This time, they had better do the job right. The best way to do that is to go about the cleanup as if this land were in their own back yards.