Jan Barry is a poet, author and journalist. A co-founder of Vietnam Veterans Against the War, his poems and essays on the war have appeared in diverse publications. Featured in the HBO documentary Mann v. Ford, he was lead reporter for the “Toxic Legacy” series published by The Record (Bergen Co., NJ). Jan Barry is a recipient of several journalism awards. He was a member of an investigative project team at The Record that received a Grantham Prize for Excellence in Reporting on the Environment.
I first saw paint sludge in a residential backyard in Ringwood in 1995 on a tour with environmental protection officials. We looked at a pile of grayish lumps that a man who lived there said he unearthed near his backyard garden. An EPA representative said it was just a small clump overlooked in the 1987-90 cleanup of a Superfund site, and Ford would remove it. With the EPA on the case, my newspaper assignment editor told me the real story was a profile of the Ramapough Mountain People who lived in the neighborhood.
Paint sludge was a small part of the feature story I wrote on the Ramapoughs, a group of darkskinned people with Dutch names who claim Native American ancestry. I described a closeknit community living in mountainside homes overlooking a scenic state park, whose members complained of being dumped on. Residents talked of deaths and danger living amid abandoned iron mines, industrial waste dumps, municipal landfills, high-voltage electrical lines, and midnight dumping of tires and other debris.
This photograph was taken by Jan Barry in early 2005. Such documentation convinced editors at The Record to take a
closer look at the remediation efforts and remaining contamination at Ringwood.
Nine years later, I found myself on another toxic tour of Upper Ringwood. Residents showed EPA inspectors multi-colored, lead-based, chemical-reeking paint sludge among the fallen leaves in several places in the forest near their homes and then guided the group to the front yard of the home where sludge was found in the backyard in 1995. That day in February 2004, EPA officials gave the same assurances as before – that some small amount of sludge got overlooked and Ford would take care of it.
I was astounded. I reviewed my 1995 story and realized I’d been had. And I had not known enough to dig deeper, to ask more focused questions. Working with my colleague Barbara Williams, and then a team of investigative reporters, we set out to pin down the facts. Williams interviewed residents on health issues and found many in the community of about 400 people had cancer and other serious illnesses; many talked about family members who had died of cancer. I dug into EPA and DEP files on the original cleanup and then took a hike with a fellow reporter with a community newspaper and photographed rusted drums and moss-covered deposits of paint sludge in and beyond where the clean-up work was said to have been done. Among the files were early state investigators’ reports, which we used to help locate tons of paint waste at several sites that had not been cleaned up.
