ASBURY PARK PRESS :: MONMOUTH EDITION

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03.13.16

DECADES OF
CLEANING UP

Treatment of groundwater continues at Toms River

site; development talks premature, officials say

Internet
scams ruin
the magic
DAVID P. WILLIS
PRESS ON YOUR SIDE
The post that showed up on Press
on Your Sides Facebook feed touted
such a great prize: eight free tickets to
Walt Disney World.
Each set were in boxes stacked
high in a photograph. All you had to do
was like the page, share it with
friends and make a comment and one
of those could be yours. Thousands already had liked
and shared. Who doesnt want free tickets to Walt
Disney World?
No thanks. The post was so scammy Facebook
later removed it.
Fraudsters have taken to social media, showing
up on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat and
even dating apps like Tinder. Any place where they
are people congregating online, there are these
scams that come out, said Bruce Snell, cybersecurity and privacy director for Intel Security.

Hoaxes and ID thieves

Stephen K. Havllik (right), senior remediation project manager for BASF, along with BASF spokesman David Johnson (from left)
conducted a tour for Press reporter Jean Mikle and Diane Salkie, remedial project manager for the EPA Region 2.

Some, like a Facebook post that circulated in December that claimed that Mark Zuckerberg was
awarding $4.5 million to 1,000 people who copied a
post and tagged friends, are simply stupid hoaxes.
Marketers also use Facebook quizzes, pages and
posts to collect more information about your interests and potential appetite for products and services, said Robert Siciliano, identity theft expert
with BestIDTheftCompanys.com.
They slurp all that data, he said. All that information boils down to wants and needs to sell them
something.
Others posts are more malicious, filled with links
with a goal to steal your personal information, such
as passwords, track your browsing activity or even

JEAN MIKLE @JEANMIKLE

See SCAMS, Page 7A

RUSS DESANTIS/CORRESPONDENT

TOMS RIVER - For decades, the sprawling property along the Toms River housed a chemical plant for
more than 3,000 workers. It had its own Boy Scout
Troop and fire department, and its executives were
highly respected members of the community.
All that changed after the former home of Toms
River Chemical Co. later known as Ciba-Geigy Corp.
was deemed an environmental Superfund disaster
site, thanks to years of illegal dumping of waste at various locations on the property.
Today, the 1,350-acre site larger than the city of
Hoboken has more deer and wild turkeys than people. Most of the buildings that housed Cibas dye-making operations have been razed. The sprawling property is largely vacant, except for two to three employees
who oversee the mostly automated cleanup of groundwater contamination.

Twenty years after dye production ceased on the

former Ciba site, polluted groundwater still is being
pumped and treated daily.
Cleanup of toxic soil and the removal of thousands
of waste-filled drums was finished in 2010, and BASF,
the German-based firm that now owns the property,
finished construction of a more efficient groundwater
treatment system in 2013 and began operating it in
2014.

Site clean-up costs more than $300 million

Ciba spent more than $300 million to treat groundwater and clean up toxic waste on its property, and
spent millions more to settle three lawsuits related to
toxic waste on its land and the polluted groundwater
See SITE, Page 10A

Weve already been doing it for 20 years. Its a very long-term process.
Decades is the right word.
STEPHEN K. HAVLIK,

SENIOR REMEDIATION PROJECT MANAGER AND TOMS RIVER SITE MANAGER FOR BASF

ASBURY PARK PRESS FILE PHOTO (LEFT) AND RUSS DESANTIS/CORRESPONDENT (RIGHT)

Left: Workers remove drums of waste from an unlined landfill on the Ciba-Geigy property in 2004. Right: Havllik talks about
one of the groundwater extraction wells which carry contaminated water to the treatment center.

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