Essay - Discovering Signs of Paint Dumping by Dr. Chuck Stead
Dr. Chuck Stead has led the long fight for the remediation of a Superfund site in New York’s Torne Valley. He has a doctorate in Environmental Studies, and served as an environmental educator with Cornell Cooperative Extension. He has long worked as a storyteller, advocate, and researcher. He is Adjunct Professor of Environmental Studies at Ramapo College.
As a child, I attended a private Catholic school by day, then, stripped of my formal costume, I was a 19th century trapper. While my focus was on reading the forest, tracking wildlife, and watching for changes in the landscape, I also made note of any new activities in the sand quarries. After school, I entered the trap line usually covering the most heavily wooded stretch first. Cutting through a little ravine, called Crows Nest, I hiked the eastern wall of the valley until I reached Candle Brook, from there I turned south close to Torne Valley Road. It was often dark by the time I came down. In the morning, I went out in the dark and reversed the trek, so that I came down through the rough terrain by the early light of day.
A photo of Dr. Chuck Stead as a youth.
It was during that first year in the valley that I discovered signs of paint dumping. Late on a Saturday, I had decided to walk up the Valley Road instead of down. Having just come around the bend beyond the gate, I found two pickup trucks parked along the right side of the road. There was a cleared area behind the trucks up off the road, some saplings had been pushed over and the earth was torn up. The trucks were loaded with fifty-five gallon drums covered over with a heavy painter’s canvas. I put down my trappers pack and climbed into the first pickup, a Ford F150, and found the keys were in the ignition. Thrilled, I was tempted to turn the key but then realized this could mean the owner was near at hand so I slid out.
Pages from Chuck Stead's childhood notebooks.
The first time I actually sketched what could be seen as a record of dumping activities was in late fall of 1965 when I found a back hoe in the evening at Middle Pit. It was next to a freshly dug trench about two and a half feet wide and a good four feet deep. The ground all around was rock hard from freezing, but the trench still had water across its base. There were two or three steel drums empty but I could smell that syrupy sweet, acidic odor from them. I drew the scene including the back hoe, a couple of the drums,and the trench. This was on a weekday evening with the cold dark night closing in. The next morning, I came around the north side of the Middle Pit and the first thing I noticed was the back hoe tractor had been moved. I saw that the trench was filled in with dirt spread around making it difficult to know where the trench had been. Later that day, I stopped by the paint shop to tell Uncle Mal about the quarry crew working at night.
He shook his head and told me they weren’t quarrying at night, they were burying Ford paint up there. It was that common. A good many folks knew paint was being dumped and buried.
I have long been involved in studying the pollution sites of Ford Motor Company’s lead paint dumping in the New York/New Jersey area. By 2005, I started investigating portions of the Torne Valley indicated in my trapper’s journal from the 1960s.
Working with my undergraduate student interns from Ramapo College of Mahwah, New Jersey, I mapped out locations of paint dumping and ran tests to measure depth and condition of the hardened sludge.
This was arduous work often done in the winter, but we managed to draw the Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) and the Town of Ramapo back into council over this threat to the watershed. Over the next two years the Town negotiated with the Land Company to purchase a thirteen acre tract of land that included the paint sludge sites my students and I were studying. By 2007, while the two parties neared an agreement, Ford sent their remediation agency, Arcadis, into the Torne Valley to remove sludge we had documented in the flow of the Torne Brook.
This was the first sludge to be dealt with by Ford in the Torne Valley. My students continued to examine the area and eventually they drew up a map indicating sixteen dump sites of various depositions.
