Thursday, May 22, 2008
BY JAN BARRY
STAFF WRITER
RINGWOOD — The state wants the borough to take the next step in getting to the bottom of sinkhole problems in Upper Ringwood's former mining community.
The Department of Environmental Protection has ordered Ringwood to do another round of testing, which was recommended by a consultant who did initial tests.
"If DEP is telling us to do it, I would imagine we would do it," Mayor Walter Davison said Wednesday after learning about the state directive. Davison said he hopes the state will help fund the geological tests, which have cost the municipality more than $186,000.
In a letter to Davison dated Tuesday, Edward Putnam, assistant director of the DEP's Publicly Funded Remediation section, said his agency "concurs with the findings ... and recommendations" of a report filed in March by Gary Gartenberg, a mining engineer hired by the town.
Gartenberg reported that tests done in 2006 and last year located a buried mine that had collapsed under a front yard and undermined Sheehan Drive. The testing also found voids under the yards of two homes on Van Dunk Lane, which the town ordered evacuated.
A third house once sat next to those two homes — until it collapsed from a massive sinkhole in 1979 and was demolished. Ringwood officials fenced off the two houses and relocated the residents, using municipal and state funds.
Given the network of mines under the residential neighborhood, Gartenberg said "additional testing and probable remediation" would be needed before anyone should be allowed back in the homes.
He also recommended more tests to map the extent of the mine near homes on Sheehan Drive — which has been repaired with a state grant. That mine, initial testing showed, runs underneath Peters Mine Road near a currently closed back entrance to Ringwood State Park.
Gartenberg also called for microgravity testing near other homes that are close to four old mines off Peters Mine Road, Cannon Mine Road and Van Dunk Lane.
The testers use a gravimeter, which measures differences in the local gravity field to map relative densities of underground terrain, such as a rock mass and a mine shaft.
Ford Motor Co., which owned the mining complex before donating the land to the town and the state, was excavating thousands of tons of paint waste near the areas where sinkholes appeared. Ford says cleanup of its Superfund dump sites and the sinkholes are unrelated, and no one has raised evidence to the contrary.
Despite promises of state aid to address the sinkhole problems, Ringwood has gotten squeezed by bureaucratic disagreements. After receiving a $238,000 grant from the state Department of Community Affairs, the borough was informed in December that those funds are from a federal Small Cities grant program, which doesn't pay for sinkhole problems that are near Superfund cleanup sites.
Davison, who took office in January with a newly elected Borough Council Republican majority, said the borough will continue to seek state and federal assistance to fix the sinkholes and help the displaced residents.
"We will be seeking any funding to be reimbursed," he said. "This is expensive to do."
E-mail: <mailto:barry@northjersey.com>barry@northjersey.com
Fast facts
Sinkholes form when soil erodes and collapses into an underground void. In Ringwood, old mines were filled with soil and debris, including scrap wood and other material that can rot and compress. Investigators are trying to determine the underground conditions below the sinkholes that have appeared near homes.
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