DUPONT'S TOXIC SECRET UNDER POMPTON LAKES

Go back, say 40 years. Picture a toxic plume as wide as eight football fields coursing below 400 homes like the hand of death and disease. Imagine families living above the plume in nice, suburban homes. Their children play in basements. In the summertime, these families may quench their thirst from a garden house hooked up to a well. They don't know anything is wrong. That information is being kept from them by DuPont.

What they are not being told is that toxins have spread from the neighboring DuPont plant that made munitions for both World Wars. They are not being told chemicals are dumped into unlined lagoons or that wastewater is contaminating some backyards. Or that toxic vapors are rising from the unground plume into their basements.

This is a section of Pompton Lakes. This is the toxic legacy of DuPont. And a comprehensive series by James O'Neill and Scott Fallon, published by The Record and NorthJersey.com, reveals these horrific toxic secrets in words, pictures and video.

It is hard to know where to begin. DuPont at various times over the past decades has settled with some homeowners. In 2004, some people received $950 and waived their right to sue for anything but cancer. At the time of these settlements, DuPont was already aware that testing was needed inside these homes to check for toxic vapors, but it did not want to show its hand to homeowners. It wanted the lawsuit settled.

And proving a direct link to the plume and the numbers of cancers in Pompton Lakes is near impossible. Yet a 2014 study by the state Health Department showed that cancer rates among Pompton Lakes women were 8 percent higher from 1990 to 2008 compared with New Jersey overall. Residents older than 80 died more frequently of cancer than those throughout the state and six surrounding towns. And that the number of hospitalizations among Pompton Lakes residents diagnosed with cancer "was statistically significantly higher than expected."

Helen Martens was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma in 2007. She told The Record: "These are our homes. If you don't feel safe in your homes, where the hell are you going to feel safe?"

Where indeed.

Another person who lived above the plume said, "It's so disheartening they could do this to people knowing they were doing it. They weren't stupid -- they knew."

It isn't even that simple - a large corporation trying to avoid taking responsibility for its actions. A lot of people in Pompton Lakes saw DuPont as their source of income. They did not want to make DuPont into a villain. When John Sinsimer was mayor in 1988, he went looking for a stack of Bibles. It was a borough tradition to give newly married couples a Bible. The cabinet where the Bibles were kept was locked and no one had the key. Sinsimer had the lock drilled and in addition to Bibles, he found three binders marked "DuPont."

That was when he first learned a plume of contaminated groundwater had spread from the DuPont property to the adjacent neighborhood. Most of the public was still in the dark, as well.

Yet, Sinsimer was not a local hero to all. The more public the contamination or "plume" became, the more it affected property values. But Region 2 EPA administrator Judith Enck said it best, "This is not a real estate marketing issue. This is a public health protection issue."

There are no easy solutions here, varying methods of remediating the site, including pressing for Superfund designation, which would put tighter controls on the cleanup, but not necessarily speed up the process. DuPont wants to experiment with an underground water barrier, which won't remove the toxins and could possibly flood basements with contaminants.

We urge readers to spend time with this series. Read the stories. Watch the video. So much that occurred in Pompton Lakes is unconscionable. Even when DuPont bought out homeowners, they later resold houses to new owners. It is a never-ending cycle of indifference to public health. DuPont has spent money to address some of the issues in Pompton Lakes, but the reality is that decades have passed and the situation is not resolved. Too many people who lived in the affected neighborhood have developed rare cancers. For a company that had a gross profit in 2016 of more than $10 billion, DuPont could have done much more.

At the bare minimum, tell residents of the potential danger the moment they knew the plume had moved into a residential community. On a practical level, DuPont through its spinoff company, Chemours, which is now responsible for the site, should buy out families who are trapped in their homes. It should aggressively work with state and federal officials to remediate the area quickly. And it should be held to account for not testing for toxic vapors before pressuring residents to sign off their rights to sue for anything other than cancer.

Toxic legacy. Toxic secrets. Read the series. Get angry. We are.