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By Jeff Pillets, The Jersey Vindicator
LAMBERTVILLE — Sixty years ago this August, Lady Bird Johnson came here to what was a working-class enclave on the Delaware River to chart progress in her husband’s “war on poverty.”
The first lady stopped in a neglected area of town known as Connaught Hill, an isolated patch of shacks, trailers and three-room houses that was home to some of the poorest people in New Jersey, including the descendants of slaves.
It was “a place of tar paper shacks, dirt roads and outdoor toilets,” Mrs. Johnson wrote in her diary, recalling her trip up Connaught Hill to the old Mennonite church, where she met with the children of migrant workers in the local Head Start program. “The little church was as bleak and poverty-stricken as any I have seen in the backwoods of East Texas or Alabama.”
Today, the people of Connaught Hill have been stricken by a new wave of adversity, in the form of so-called “forever chemicals” turning up at high levels in their well water.
Forever chemicals, commonly referred to under the acronym PFAS — per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances — are a family of some 12,000 man-made compounds that have been used since World War II in products from nonstick pans to textiles to food packaging. A large body of research has now linked the chemicals to birth defects, cancer, ulcerative colitis and a range of other deadly illnesses.
New private well test results that came in last month, combined with a smattering of earlier results from tests last summer, have convulsed residents of Connaught Hill: 71 of 74 wells tested now have confirmed PFAS levels above limits set by the state. Many wells on the hill have tested more than 10 times over the state limit.
What’s more, test results reported just a few weeks ago show that wells in an adjacent community, known as Cottage Hill, also have high levels of forever chemicals. Dozens more wells in both communities, which span Lambertville and West Amwell Township, have now been targeted for testing by the state Department of Environmental Protection.
For the past eight months, families on Connaught Hill and their pets have been drinking bottled water. Many have installed filtration systems in their basements or kitchens. Residents now meet to compare test results and to speculate about the source of contamination and the future of the 13-acre neighborhood that sits above the Delaware River.
Most of all, they talk about their health. There are worries, and whispers, about who is getting sick and why. There is also anger — anger at some local officials who residents say are less concerned about the hill’s plight than they are about courting rich developers and protecting Lambertville’s image as a quaint tourist town.
“There’s a whole overlooked community here that can’t drink their water, and we still don’t know where this stuff is coming from,” said Shaun D. Ellis, a library software engineer who has lived in Lambertville for 20 years. “We’re just so upset — PFAS contamination has been linked to diseases we know are prevalent right here in our little community.”
“Things like testicular cancer, pancreatic cancer, liver cancer, ulcerative colitis … we’re talking not just older adults, but minors as well.”
One teenage Connaught Hill resident with ulcerative colitis, residents say, recently underwent surgery to remove a section of intestine. Another has recently battled testicular cancer. Many residents of the hill have already filed tort claims in anticipation of future lawsuits against the city or parties who may have polluted the water.
Karen Atwood, a grandmother who has lived on the hill for decades, shares a home there with her mother, her daughter, and her four grandchildren. She is a two-time cancer survivor. When test results showed that her well was tainted, she says she just started to cry.
Now, Atwood has become the clerical and communications center of the hill’s water crisis, keeping track of test results and sharing phone numbers for local officials and testing companies.
“My whole family, everyone up here, has been drinking this well water for their entire lives,” she said. “Now I worry, how did I get sick? I worry about the young people in my family, the children. I worry about this community, and I wonder, how did this happen?”
Compounding the anxiety on the hill is the ongoing controversy over a proposed residential development that involves the possible construction of 200 new houses in the neighborhood. The plan could bring dozens of affordable housing units that residents say will be built on or near historically contaminated sites that have never been fully cleaned or even investigated.
Many residents of Lambertville, a one-square-mile community with a population of some 4,000, are opposed to the redevelopment plan and have criticized the town for holding two years’ worth of closed-door negotiations with K. Hovnanian Homes. The Jersey-based firm is among the largest homebuilders in the U.S., posting $3 billion in total revenue last year alone.
Lambertville Mayor Andrew J. Nowick, citing legal strictures and pending lawsuits, has declined to release records of the closed-door negotiations with K. Hovnanian or preliminary environmental tests the company has performed on some areas of the proposed development.
In an interview earlier this month, the mayor said he is deeply concerned for residents on Connaught Hill. He said the town would continue to support efforts by the state to test and delineate PFAS contamination. But he said he was barred from releasing or discussing any water sampling report submitted by the developer.
“We need to know where the heck this is coming from,” Nowick said. “We will continue to do everything in our power to protect the people here.”
Nowick added that the city has arranged testing grants and informational meetings for affected residents. Lambertville residents who discovered high levels of PFAS contamination in their drinking water objected to Nowick’s statement that the city provided testing grants. They said the city only offered loans to residents for professional well testing, which cost $700 or more apiece. Most residents had to do multiple tests. Applying for the city loans required residents to provide proof of income and voluminous paperwork. Liens were then placed on their property until the loans were repaid.
Nowick was the focus of a heated public attack last summer when news first surfaced that PFAS had turned up in high concentrations in a few Connaught Hill wells. Residents said they were especially upset that the mayor initially declined to alert the DEP and directed people to call Hunterdon County officials instead.
James Cally, a councilman and former mayor of neighboring West Amwell Township, was actually the first public official to notify the state, residents said. Cally’s office later notified state Sen. Shirley Turner about the issue and began working with nearby township residents to arrange well tests.
“As soon as somebody mentions PFAS, it’s all hands on deck,” Cally said.
Jeff Tittel, a 28-year Lambertville resident who is the former head of the New Jersey Sierra Club, said Connaught Hill is a sad example of public areas across the state that have virtually been sacrificed to industrial polluters and targeted for high-impact public ventures that more visible, affluent neighborhoods would never allow.
While poor neighborhoods from Newark to Camden have been the focus of so-called “environmental justice” advocates in Trenton, little headway has actually been made in reforming the system, Tittel said.
“What’s happening right here on this hill shows what our priorities really are,” Tittel said in an interview on Connaught Hill. “Landfills, recycling centers, ugly power lines, gas pipelines that no one else wanted — all of it has either been foisted on this one spot or planned for this site without the consent of the people who live here.”
“Now we’re talking about a residential development on contaminated land where people can’t drink the water,” he added. “Gimme a break. You also have to remember that all the contaminated water on the hill inevitably makes its way to the sewers and the Delaware River.”
A Dumping Ground
PFAS contamination has now shown up in dozens of water systems across New Jersey and the nation at large. In parts of the Ridgewood public water system, and large swaths of the Pinelands and Warren County, for example, PFAS concentrations have been found that are many times higher than the 14 parts-per-trillion limit set by the state. In many cases, finding the source of tainted water has proven difficult if not impossible.
Pinpointing just one source of PFAS pollution on Connaught Hill, residents say, will be a challenge: Over the years, the hill has been the designated landing site for everything that wasn’t really welcome in the showier parts of town along the river.
As far back as the mid-19th century, poor Black people, immigrants and itinerant laborers were steered to the hill, where they often lived in tents and lean-to shacks, according to historical accounts of Lambertville. Irish immigrants who fled the potato famines camped on the hill while they dug the 66-mile-long Delaware and Raritan Canal. Some died on the hill and were said to be buried in unmarked graves.
In the 1950s and ’60s, the hill was the site of the town dump that was abandoned but, residents say, never formally closed and remediated. A community cleanup day several years ago netted 200 old car tires. Families who live on the southern edge of the hill, hard by the old dump site, are still removing shards of glass and assorted metal refuse that pop up on their property.
A casual walk under the power lines that cut across the dump reveals a landscape studded with discarded appliances, building refuse and an occasional steel drum that residents say sometimes turns up in the overgrown site. It is, in fact, impossible to make out the borders of the landfill they say spreads indiscriminately down the slopes of the hill toward Quarry Street and Rocktown-Lambertville Road below.
Rene McCormick, who lives not far from the landfill site, said a neighbor once dug up the remains of a buried automobile. “You never know what you might find in the ground, ” she said.
Tests on McCormick’s water show her family had unacceptably high levels of PFAS contamination. Like many of her neighbors, she’s installed a filtration system and her water is now safe again.
Across the street from McCormick’s house, Erin Durborow was watching her husband and three children shoot hoops at a net and backboard set up on a dead-end street bordering their lot and the wooded area believed to be an old landfill site. The Durborow property, like most now on the hill, is attractive, tidy, and by Lambertville standards, large.
“We like living here because of the space and the peace and quiet. It’s a good place for the kids to grow up,” Durborow said. Now, when one of her children gets sick or develops a rash, she wonders: Is it the water? “You’ve got to be concerned about it,” she said.
On the other side of the hill, mounds of building debris and other scrap have been dumped at the site of the old Lambertville High School. When the three-story red brick academy closed in 1959, it became the home of the Taurus Corp., an industrial machine shop that used Teflon to coat metal parts for various products.
Teflon, the prototypical PFAS substance, is a popular waterproof coating used to make nonstick pans, kitchen utensils, waterproof jacket linings, and hundreds of other consumer products.
At one point, the Taurus Corp. reported having almost 50 employees working in its 5,000-square-foot manufacturing site in the old school, according to clips from the now-defunct Lambertville Beacon newspaper. But by the mid-1980s, the company went bankrupt, and in the summer of 1987, dangerous chemicals turned up in tests at the Washington Street site.
Officials from the state DEP, who inspected the shuttered Taurus facility, reported finding barrels of toxic chemicals and other contaminants abandoned at the site. There were signs that waste material had been dumped into the floor drains. One report cited “industrial discharge to the septic system.”
When excavators dug up a 10,000-gallon underground fuel tank at the site, they reported seeing “daylight” through a large hole on the bottom of the tank. Tests revealed unacceptably high levels of volatile organics and petroleum hydrocarbons. A toxic layer of sludge lined one of several cesspools discovered at the site.
These findings were documented in a 900-page DEP case file that tracked the investigation. The state ordered Taurus’ owner to clean the site, dispose of tainted material found during the excavation, backfill the land with clean soil, and test the property for chemicals for three years.
The owner was also ordered to install monitoring wells and even pay for a residence on Jefferson Street — more than a quarter-mile away — to hook into the city water system. The residence was the only address in the lower part of town still using well water. Then, as now, residents living near the river below receive water piped in by the city water company, which does not reach Connaught Hill.
“Water from the city? Are you kidding me?” Connaught Hill resident Beth O’Brien said. “We don’t even have fire hydrants up here.”
After half a decade of investigating and monitoring the groundwater, the state issued a “negative finding” letter clearing the Taurus site. None of the tests done around the old school were for PFAS, which at the time was a threat that was not on regulators’ radar.
The DEP did not immediately answer questions about the Connaught Hill site and the current PFAS investigation there. A request earlier this month to the agency for all records concerning the landfill was not fulfilled before this story was published. A spokesman said it would take several days to pull the information together.
Merrick Wilson, a developer the city said owns much of Connaught Hill’s open space — including both the landfill and Taurus sites — did not respond to several requests for comment. In a brief phone conversation Tuesday afternoon, he told The Vindicator he would answer questions about PFAS contamination on the hill in a subsequent interview, but did not respond when contacted.
A spokesman for K. Hovnanian, contacted earlier this month and again on last week, said he would need more time to prepare answers for this story.
“Looking Out for Each Other”
On a bright and breezy afternoon recently, a day when anglers down on the river were casting huge nets into the water to prepare for Lambertville’s annual Shad Festival, more than a dozen residents of Connaught Hill gathered to swap their PFAS readings and tell their stories.
They met on the same grassy commons where Lady Bird Johnson appeared almost six decades ago.
“We were on the bottom of the barrel then, and I guess we’re still there,” joked 73-year-old Rich Hindermeyer, who’s lived on the hill his entire life. “But we’ve learned to look out for each other.”
Hindermeyer and his neighbors shared laughs about city trash trucks careening through the hill’s narrow and winding streets. O’Brien was even able to joke about a car that crashed into her bungalow on Allen Street one day.
Some, like resident Bill Pidgeon, retold stories about how wreckage from the great mill fire of the ’70s or waste from the flood of ’55 was dragged through the neighborhood for disposal at the dump.
“It’s part of living in this place,” Pidgeon said. “Somehow or other, everything ends up here.”
The Jersey Vindicator is a nonprofit investigative news organization serving residents of the Garden State.
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