"Officials Welcome Superfund Possibility for Hackensack River"

"The federal government’s decision to consider making the Hackensack River a Superfund site is drawing praise from local mayors and other elected officials — but that praise comes with caveats, including a sense that the Hackensack’s pollution is so pervasive and its hydrology so complex that trying to clean it up might be a fool’s errand.

A century of industrial activity has left the riverbed highly polluted with mercury, cancer-causing PCBs and other toxic chemicals.

After the Hackensack Riverkeeper petitioned the Environmental Protection Agency last week to grant the river Superfund status, the agency agreed to study whether to add the river to the program, reserved for the nation’s most contaminated sites."

James M. O’Neill reports for the Bergen Record February 15, 2015.