Keyport Group Seeks Federal Cleanup Of Old Landfill Site

More than 1,000 documents are what Keyport Unity says it gathered from the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection, its licensed environmental professionals and news coverage dating to the 1960s. Hundreds of cancer cases have been reported near an old landfill and industrial site in Keyport. The group submitted a request for a federal environmental review at the Environmental Protection Agency's office in Manhattan on Thursday, asking that the site be declared a superfund and fully remediated rather than capped and built over.

The state environmental agency has said there is no pathway for carcinogens to reach Keyport neighborhoods. Testing there has not covered every property. Sal Liguori, whose rented home on Walnut Street sits next to the former Aeromarine industrial site and landfill, hired his own analysis. The results advised him to leave. "Levels where I needed to get out of the house," Liguori said. "The advice to me was, 'You need to get out of the house now.' It was hard to take that call." Liguori has led the Keyport Unity local action team since the cancer cluster was first identified six months ago. He has since moved and received a leukemia diagnosis, and he is stepping back from the role.

Alex Craft, of Keyport Unity, said the group's request rests on records the state itself produced. "We cited over 1,000 different documents that come from the NJ DEP itself, their licensed LSRPs, news articles that were written about this all the way back in the '60s," Craft said. The group's experts say the site qualifies for the federal program. Craft pointed to a mismatch between that assessment and state positions: "When the person who started the program - which was based on the Spill Fund Act - is telling us that this site more than qualifies, and then elected officials and appointees are turning around and telling us that it doesn't, doesn't really make sense to us," Craft said.

Craft also addressed the community directly: "There are things to see here, and everything is not fine. So, we need our community to understand that so they can advocate for themselves and we can advocate for each other."

The New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection is reviewing Keyport Unity's request to use the Spill Act for cleanup, the agency told News 12. The department is still testing in Union Beach, the adjacent town. In court, the property owner, BayRidge Realty, has faced more than $1.2 million in environmental fines. Independent expert coverage previously examined a possible link between Keyport contamination and the cancer cases.