Project History
In the 1900's, Central Jersey saw an intense increase in industrial activity and a corresponding influx of people. Factories and plants grew up along the rivers and jobs were plentiful. But a consequence was pollution that no one paid much attention to. Wetlands were considered worthless, filled indiscriminately with whatever waste products were generated. Rivers were used for the disposal of all kinds of waste – by industry, commerce, municipalities, transporters, farmers, hospitals and homeowners. People dumped industrial waste, raw sewage from our homes and businesses, used motor oil from our cars, boats and trains, and much of it ended up in our rivers and wetlands.
The legacy of this pollution is still evident today. In the wetlands along the Rahway River downstream from what is now the New Jersey Turnpike, roughly a hundred acres were filled starting in the 1930's with garbage, industrial waste, and anything else that people needed to get rid of. Further downstream, 85 more acres were filled from 1937 to 1974 with sludge from a wide variety of heavy industrial activities across the river in Linden.
The sludge from the American Cyanamid plant was mixed with contaminated water from the Arthur Kill and pumped in as slurry to settle in 6 huge impoundments built on the property. The slurry water was either decanted through sluices or percolated into the underlying strata. The fine solids settled in the man-made ponds. All around these impounds, oil companies built tank farms to store oil and other liquid products. Several aerial photographs showing the progression of this development from 1954 to the present are linked below.
Aerial 2009 – Old American Cyanamid Property – showing Impoundments