LaTourette has led the agency since his predecessor, Catherine R. McCabe, retired in January.
“New Jersey has no shortage of environmental challenges from confronting the climate crisis to modernizing our water infrastructure, LaTourette said. NJDEP is charting a new course for the future in our great state, with a stronger, more just environment at its center.
Murphy s nomination will require confirmation by the state Senate.
LaTourette has a 20-year record fighting for equity and the environment. A New Jersey native and graduate of Rutgers and Rutgers Law School, he initially worked with Erin Brokovich s law firm, defending New Jersey communities whose tap water had been spoiled by petrochemicals.
Feds unveil plan to deal with the Passaic River’s toxic mud
Updated 5:16 PM;
Today 5:10 PM
The Diamond Alkali superfund site during boat tours on the Passaic River in Newark, N.J. on July 16, 2014 (Ed Murray/The Star-Ledger)SL
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The lower reaches of the Passaic River are toxic.
Heavy industrial pollution through the 19th and 20th centuries left the river-bottom laced with hazardous substances, including carcinogens like dioxins and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs).
It’s a history of pollution that has robbed residents in Newark and surrounding towns of the chance to fully enjoy the river, a fact that once led U.S. Sen. Cory Booker to call the river “New Jersey’s biggest crime scene.” To this day, people are warned against eating any fish or crabs pulled from the Passaic.
Some cancer-causing waste that lies for 9 miles along the bottom of the Passaic River in Essex, Bergen and Passaic counties would be removed while some contaminated sediment would be left and capped beneath a barrier, according to a $441 million cleanup plan unveiled Wednesday by federal environmental officials.
The plan, which still needs final approval, would dredge 387,000 cubic yards of contaminated sediment laced with cancer-causing dioxin, PCBs and heavy metals from North Arlington to the Dundee Dam, which lies across the river between Clifton and Garfield.
The plan by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is smaller than the $1.4 billion plan to partially dredge the river s lower 8 miles from bank to bank in Newark and Hudson County. The new plan targets hot spots in the river where dioxin and other pollutants have been detected.
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When it comes to memorialization, nothing beats a martyr even when your culture has done the martyring. So it has seemed, anyway, in a nation where no fewer than twenty-six states along with countless towns, sports teams, summer camps, and recreational vehicles bear names meant to evoke those humans who came before. Between 1492 and the American Revolution, this continent’s indigenous populace declined from an estimated ten million to a tenth of that. One of the genocide’s lesser-known effects was linguistic. Perhaps a quarter of the earth’s languages in the fifteenth century, linguists say, were American. Lost to us now are millions of words, in thousands of tongues, that Natives used to describe the grasslands and gullies and peaks of the lands that they inhabited. And yet many settlers were keen on borrowing these words, even as they killed the people who coined them. Hundreds of proper names and place-words, or misconstruals thereof, were placed