note FRom StoRYWoRKS aRtiStic DiRectoR | StoryWorks creates immediate arti sti c responses to some of the most controversial and challenging issues our society faces. We take investi gati ve journalism, commission playwrights to create plays based on the stories and then produce shows both in the San Francisco Bay Area, where The Center for Investi gati ve Reporti ng is based, and in the communiti es most directly aff ected by the issues. Over the past three years, StoryWorks has commissioned and produced seven producti ons, toured in aff ected communiti es, translated and performed work in Spanish, and challenged theater and journalism to work in innovati ve ways to represent our world and the immediate issues we confront. It is an honor to co-present with George Street Playhouse the world premiere of “Terra Incognita.”

For StoryWorks’ inaugural season in 2013, we commissioned two plays based on CIR’s reporti ng: “A Guide to the Aft ermath,” about female veterans suff ering from military sex-ual trauma and post-traumati c stress disorder, and “Headlock,” which confronted abuse in California’s adult care faciliti es. What began as an experiment to bring journalism to the stage and give voice to the marginalized and oppressed became a challenge to both our community as a whole and the arti sts who work with us to tell these stories. Our process evolved as we worked; this had never been done before. Our guiding principles were to proceed with integrity, following best journalism practi ces, and to allow arti sti c expres-sion and the creati ve process to thrive.

Once we began rehearsals, it became clear that we wanted to give communiti es an op-portunity to parti cipate, ask questi ons, tell their story and listen to those directly aff ected by our reporti ng. Aft er each performance, the journalists, arti sts and community members join the audience for a conversati on about the play and its themes. As we delve into the facts of the investi gati on and the personal stories of those involved, these conversati ons oft en are as long as the play itself. “Terra Incognita,” created in collaborati on with George Street Playhouse, is the seventh StoryWorks iterati on.

“StoryWorks gets to the emoti onal truth of investi gati ve journalism, based on facts and allowing for arti sti c explorati on, we delve into the personal stories behind the headlines and create dialogue through theater.”

Jennifer WelchArti sti c Director, StoryWorks from the Center for Investi gati ve Reporti ng

GeoRGe StReet plaYHoUSe | In the 42 years since its founding, George Street Play-house has become a nati onally recognized theatre, presenti ng an acclaimed mainstage season while providing an arti sti c home for established and emerging theatre arti sts. Its leadership consists of Arti sti c Director David Saint, Resident Arti sti c Director Michael Mastro and Managing Director Kelly Ryman. Founded in 1974, the Playhouse has been well represented by numerous producti ons both on and off -Broadway, including the Out-er Criti cs’ Circle Best Musical Award-winner The Toxic Avenger; the Outer Criti cs Cir-cle, Drama Desk and Drama League nominated producti on of The Spitfi re Grill; and the Broadway hit and Tony and Pulitzer Prize winning play Proof by David Auburn, which was developed at GSP during the 1999 Next Stage Series of new plays. In 2015, George Street Playhouse was represented by two producti ons in New York: the Broadway producti on of It Shoulda Been You, and Joe DiPietro’s Clever Litt le Lies, which opened off -Broad-way in October. Both shows received their premieres at the Playhouse. In additi on to its mainstage season, GSP’s Touring Educati onal Theatre features three issue-oriented pro-ducti ons that are seen by more than 40,000 students annually. George Street Playhouse programming is made possible in part by funds from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts/Department of State, a partner agency of the Nati onal Endowment for the Arts.

TERRA INCOGNITAWritten by R.N. Sandberg

Directed by Jim Jack

CAST Joseph. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Di Shawn GandyLena. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Kym GomesThe Expert. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Frances PuFlashlight, Crane, and others. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .David SeamonMontag, Lawman, and others. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Matt Baguth

PRODUCTION TEAMScenic Design/Properties Master. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Frank J. GiamellaCostume Design. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Diana GundackerLighting Design. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Tommy WilliamsonSound Design.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Ted CrimyStage Manager. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Erica LeeProduction Manager. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Megan CherryProps Assistant. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Helen TewksburyArtistic Director. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Jennifer Welch

“Terra Incognita” was made possible with the generous support from the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation.

Additional support provided by the Merrill G. and Emita E. Hastings Foundation.

“Terra Incognita” was commissioned byGeorge Street Playhouse and The Center for Investigative Reporting

David Saint, Artistic Director - George Street Playhouse Michael Mastro, Resident Artistic Director - George Street Playhouse

Kelly Ryman, Managing Director - George Street PlayhouseJim Jack, Director of Education - George Street Playhouse

Jennifer Welch, Artistic Director, StoryWorks

Special thanks to NJTV and NJTV News Executive Producer Phil Alongi and Correspon-dent Brenda Flanagan, Eliot and Anna Zigmund, Bob Harris, Jeff Entin, Passage Theatre Play Lab, Brad Vile, Franz Kafka

Matt Baguth (Montag, Metal, Backhoe, Lawman) is a former student of Terra Incognita director Jim Jack at Brooklyn College, where Matt received his MFA in acting last June. This is Matt’s first professional stage production out of graduate school. He recently co-starred in episodes of Daredevil on Netflix and Gotham on Fox. Other credits include DeGuiche in Cyrano De Berger-ac (SUNY Suffolk), Macbeth in Macbeth (Queens College), and Hal Carter in Picnic (Brooklyn College).

Di Shawn Gandy (Joseph K) has performed in six off-off Broadway plays with The Afrikan Wom-en’s Repertory Theater Company in NY; Matthew McAllister’s Dublin Down Doubles in the New York Theater Festival; Our Town Now at George Street Playhouse; The New Jersey One-Minute Play Festival. Indie films: How to Get Rich in 13 Easy Steps and An Evening with Donald Kem-pinski. He’s studied acting at George Street Playhouse and at Woody King Jr.’s New Federal Theatre, NY. He is also a playwright and has directed several plays.

Kym Gomes (Lena) is a graduate of The Acting Studio and a member of Chelsea Repertory Com-pany in NYC. She was most recently seen in the Sandra Feinstein-Gamm Theater production of The Rant. Other roles include Lorraine in A Lie Of The Mind, Lily in Crumbs From The Table Of Joy, Maria in Twelfth Night and April Greene inHot L. Baltimore. Directing credits for Chelsea Rep LAB include Last Chance Texaco, Ex-Miss Copper Queen and Woodstown. Kym produced and directed the award-winning NY International Fringe Festival production of By Hands Un-known, a collection of short plays from the 1800s on lynching in America.

Frances Pu (The Expert) is thankful to the New Jersey School for the Dramatic Arts (NJSDA), Alan (actor-husband), and family/friends for the training and support! Other stage credits: OMG, Chopsticks! (NYC off-off Broadway) and class showcases (NJSDA).

David Seamon (Flashlight, Crane, Township, Insurance, LSRP, App-Man, Fundman, NJDEP) is a professional playwright, composer, singer, actor, and pianist based out of New Brunswick, and is currently in his third year as a teaching artist at the George Street Playhouse. Previous roles include Leo Frank in Parade, The Balladeer/Lee Harvey Oswald in Assassins, and Jesus in Jesus Christ Superstar. He is currently developing an original musical for CoLab Arts called The Elev-enth Hour, which will premiere in New Brunswick in June 2016. Later this year, he will appear inThe Kingdom of Vincent Grapelli at the Workshop Theatre in Manhattan.

R.N. Sandberg (Playwright) has won acclaim for his realistic depictions of contemporary life, imaginative treatments of social issues, and inventive adaptations of classic literature. Theaters that have presented his work include The Barrow Group, Barter Theatre, Dallas Children’s The-ater, Fulton Opera House, Idaho Shakespeare Festival, Indiana Rep, Intiman Theatre, Kitchen Dog, La Mama, New York Music Theatre Festival, Open Eye, Providence Black Rep, Seattle Rep, Stage One: Louisville’s Children Theatre, Stages Repertory Theatre and Yale Cabaret. Awards and honors include the Bonderman National Playwriting Award for Can’t Believe It and the A.R.T. Discovering Justice Award for The Trials of the Massachusetts Servants. He is a member of the Philadelphia Dramatist Center and the Dramatists Guild and teaches playwriting, acting and dramatic literature at Princeton University.

Jim Jack (Director) recently directed My Name is Asher Lev at George Street Playhouse. Direct-ing credits for GSP’s Educational Tour and Community-based programs include: Our Town Now; Gabi Goes Green!; Austin the Unstoppable; IRL: in real life; New Kid; Peacemaker; and Break the Chains. Additional New York and regional credits include: The Road; Where is Home?;The Way It Was; K2 (Drama Logue Award for Outstanding Direction); Life and Limb; The Dumb Waiter;

CAST & CREATIVE TEAM

and The Zoo Story. Jim is the Director of Education and Outreach for George Street Playhouse.

Frank J. Giamella (Scenic Designer/Properties Master) is making his design debut on the Arthur Laurents Stage at George Street Playhouse with this production. During the producing season, he holds the title of Master Carpenter at the GSP Scene Shop and will be going into his third season on staff with the company this fall. A product of the Kean University Department of Theatre, many former designs are from a collegiate setting, including scenic designs for Intimate Apparel, 448 Psychosis, Macbeth, and The Odyssey (projection), as well as a number of assistant positions, charge scenic titles, and direction of Shepard’s Fool For Love.

Diana Gundacker (Costume Designer) is thrilled to be costume designer for Terra Incognita! Previous costume design credits include: Fiddler on the Roof at Red Bank Regional High School, Our Town at Princeton Day School, Our Town Now at George Street Playhouse, multiple events for National Dance Institute and George Street Playhouse’s Education Department.

Ted Crimy (Sound Designer) most recently designed sound for George Street Playhouse pro-ductions of The Whipping Man and Our Town, as well as additional design work on I Loved, I Lost, I Made Spaghetti and One of Your Biggest Fans. Before moving to New Jersey in 2011, Mr. Crimy designed sound for regional companies throughout the San Francisco Bay area, including Marin Theatre Company, The California Shakespeare Theatre, and the MFA program at A.C.T.

Tommy Williamson (Lighting Designer) is so happy to be designing at George Street for the first time on Terra Incognita. Tommy has worked at George Street for three seasons now, in which time he has held the title of, carpenter, lighting console operator, master electrician, and final-ly, lighting designer. Previously Tommy has designed such shows as 4:48 Psychosis, Sweeney Todd, The Odyssey, and Twelfth Night at Kean University, where he also acted as the Assistant Lighting Designer for four seasons with Premiere Stages. In 2012 Tommy began working as the Lighting Director for the touring dance competition Nuvo, traveling the country for six months before coming to New Brunswick and working at George Street.

Erica Leigh (Stage Manager) returns to George Street Playhouse after serving as stage manager for GSP’s Educational Touring Company during the 2015-16 season. She will also be a teaching artist at GSP’s Summer Theatre Academy in July. She has also served as an intern, assistant stage manager and tour manager at the Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey. She is a graduate of Ramapo College and Raritan Valley Community College.

Jennifer Welch (Artistic Director, StoryWorks) is the director and co-creator of StoryWorks, a groundbreaking project launched in 2013 that transforms journalism into theater, from The Center for Investigative Reporting, one of the longest-running investigative nonprofit news out-lets in the country. Welch is a member of Tides Theatre, the executive producer of the Des Voix Festival and a founding member of the Howells Transmitter Arts Collaborative. She focuses on new play development and theater for impact, social conversation and change. Her directing credits include: “Alicia’s Miracle,” “This Is Home,” “Gruesome Playground Injuries,” “Sweet Bird of Youth,” “Waiting for Godot,” “The Little Foxes,” “5 Lesbians Eating a Quiche,” “The Grapes of Wrath,” “Glengarry Glen Ross,” “Buried Child,” “The Trip to Bountiful,” “A View From the Bridge,” “The Rose Tattoo,” “The Night of the Iguana,” “Lysistrata,” “The Real Inspector Hound,” “Killer Joe” and StoryWorks. Her most recent stage credits include Margaret in “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” (winner of the 2014 Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle best actress award), part of a StoryWorks ensemble and Stella in “A Streetcar Named Desire.” She currently teaches acting for Tides The-atre in San Francisco.

Brenda Flanagan (Journalist) is a New Jersey transplant circa 1979 (from New Orleans, via

Maine). She has won four Emmy® Awards for her work including an undercover investigati-veseries on racial profiling, consumer safety stories and team coverage for “Miracle on the Hud-son: Flight 1549,” among many other awards. She began her career in TV journalism at New Jersey Network and moved to WWOR-TV, where she established the station’s Trenton Bureau and anchored public affairs programs. She covered the New Jersey Legislature and governor’s office (five governors) and national political conventions and has reported on mainstream New Jersey issues.

HoW NEW JERSEy NEWSRooMS ARE WoRKING ToGETHERto expoSe local contamination

One year ago, The Center for Investigative Reporting convened the first in a series of discussions about how New Jersey news organizations could partner to investigate the state’s toxic legacy. Our goal was to demonstrate the power of collaboration, leveraging New Jersey’s collective journalistic might to explore a pressing issue in the public interest. Starting in July 2015, reporters and editors from newsrooms across the Garden State began digging into the impacts of pollution and contamination on local residents. The resulting series, “Dirty Little Secrets,” included a broad group of media partners, including New Jersey Public Radio/WNYC, WHYY, NJTV, NJ Spotlight, Jersey Shore Hurricane News, WBGO, New Brunswick Today and the Rutgers Department of Journalism and Media Studies. The Center for Cooperative Media at Montclair State University helped CIR coordinate the project, made possible with support from the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation to CIR.

After months of reporting, the collaboration published an expansive series of stories. You can find all the reporting on Dirty Little Secrets project website: toxicnj.com.Here’s a look at what the series uncovered:

● WNYC reporter Sarah Gonzalez, along with the station’s Data News Team analyzed and mapped records on contaminated sites across the state, drawing special attention to those that remain without a cleanup plan in place.

● NJ Spotlight reporter Scott Gurian revealed how industrial sites along New Jersey’s coast remain vulnerable to environmental disaster, three years after Hurricane Sandy.

● NJTV correspondent Brenda Flanagan investigated how leakage from underground oil and gas tanks is causing a nightmare for some homeowners and putting the environment at risk.

● WHYY reporter Joe Hernandez examined the impacts of New Jersey’s contentious de-cision to largely privatize the cleanup of toxic sites across the state.

● WBGO’s Bob Hennelly explored how toxic diesel emissions from trucks threatens res-idents’ health.

There’s even more to the series, so visit toxicnj.com for all of the stories.

Inspired by the very reporting that fueled this collaboration, Terra Incognita is the latest production from our ongoing Dirty Little Secrets collaboration. With this performance, the Dirty Little Secrets team aims to bring this important reporting directly to New Jer-seyans, tapping into both the responsive nature of journalism and the live excitement of theater. Through this networked approach for investigative journalism, we hope to forge new models for collaboration not just among news organizations, but the communities they serve.

Cole GoinsThe Center for Investigative Reporting

ToXIC NJpaRt one: tHe coSt oFcontaminationby Brenda Flanagan This story is part of Dirty Little Secrets, a series investigating New Jersey’s toxic legacy, originally published on NJTV News.

“It was something out of a fantasy dream. A nightmare, almost, but it was really happening.”

Eliot Zigmund’s lived with a fuel oil tank nightmare for six long years. His yard on Larch Avenue in suburban Teaneck is pocked with test wells that monitor contaminants that are still flowing in groundwater beneath his property. This despite clean-up costs now pushing $600,000. The oil leaked from an old fuel tank once bur-ied in his side yard.

“We wanted the tank out of the ground. My oil service company told me it was a ticking time bomb. Even before they got the tank out of the ground, they smelled and saw oil. They saw holes in the tank. It was bad,” Zigmund said.

And it got much worse. After the con-tractors winched the tank up out of the ground in July 2009, they tested the soil and discovered serious con-tamination — a toxic plume of vola-tile organics that flowed beneath his neighbor’s home, as well.

“The first couple of years of this, this was really my house, my property. Their property was a construction zone,” he said. When asked how his neighbor’s reacted, he said, “Not well.

They didn’t take it well.”

“I was so angry,” said Ines Solomon, “and there was nothing I could do about it.”

Solomon is Zigmund’s neighbor and says she watched in frustration as workers jacked up Zigmund’s house and excavated 250 tons of tainted soil between their two properties. The remediation was prescribed by Triassic Technology, which was hired by his insurance company. They re-placed it with clean fill. The result?

“There’s still oil,” he said.

That’s why monitoring wells still pepper both his property and the Solomon’s. They’re connected by specially heated conduits to a shed in Zigmund’s backyard. The conduits lead to a filter that removes any resid-ual oil residue seeping from the water table into the monitoring wells.

“This is basically a very sophisticat-ed, big Brita. That’s the way it was explained to me: a big Brita filtration system,” he said.

The costly hookup hasn’t logged two consecutive clean months in more than a year of filtering. Zigmund’s insurer has since hired a different company, Earthworks Environmen-tal, to try a new technique: injecting the ground with hydrogen peroxide. That might cost another $100,000. Meanwhile, Zigmund says, his insur-ance company figures it’s responsi-ble for 82 percent of the estimated $600,000 bill. With the special state fund that reimburses homeowners for fuel oil tank removal costs basi-cally broke, that would leave Zigmund

on the hook for maybe $100,000. His home’s appraised at only $300,000.

“The fact that they’re looking to clean up the state environmentally on the backs of single family homeowners is just patently absurd,” he said. “These are expenses that no single family should be asked to endure.”

Next door, the Solomons feel similar-ly trapped. Their insurance company’s response?

“Our company will not touch this,” Solomon said. “We’re stuck. We can’t sell our property. We’ve asked if we can sell it. We cannot sell it until this has been resolved.”

And both families want to know why they’re ultimately responsible for what amounts to a toxic cleanup project, with impossibly high environ-mental standards.

“There’s no supervision from the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection. Never once in this six-year period has a representative of DEP come out here and looked at property or told me that the job’s being done correctly, the job is being done incor-rectly, we might’ve done it this way. You know, you’re on your own.”

Zigmund’s contractor, Triassic Tech-nology, called this case an “unfor-tunate circumstance” because the house sits on “shallow bedrock, where the water table fluctuates between the rock and the soil. That makes it a difficult to clean up. There’s a lot more testing that has to be done, it’s quite a bit more expensive. He faces the same cleanup standards as a chemical factory.”

The DEP said, “You can always find a case that everything just doesn’t work right.”

Assistant Commissioner Mark Pe-terson revealed that the DEP is now re-examining cleanup standards for underground heating oil tanks.

“Homeowners wanted that, so they had a greater predictability of the en-vironmental professional doing the work, and some environmental pro-fessionals wanted that also. So, we’re working on those regulations to re-vise them,” Peterson said.

“We feel so exhausted and burned out by this whole process. I’m 70 years old. I’ve done all the correct things in life. I’ve brought kids up. I’ve always been an honest person. I’m looking forward to my golden years here, and all I’m doing is wondering whether I’m going to have to abandon my house some day,” Zigmund said.

NJTV News contacted the DEP about Zigmund’s case and a member of the department was there at his home when peroxide treatments began. He’s hoping for success by next sum-mer, but Zigmund’s only one of tens of thousand of New Jersey residents facing what some call a fuel oil tank epidemic.

PART TWO: ThE hIDDEN LIAbILITIES Of hIDDEN OIL TANkS

It’s caked in clay, but looks solid enough as the backhoe gently hoists Joan Fitzgerald’s 500-gallon fuel oil tank out of the ground and into the air and deposits it on her front lawn in Clifton. But back in the excavated

hole, dark residue stains the dirt and the odor of petroleum is heavy above the pit.

“I can smell it,” she said.

Environmental consultant Steve Rich chops at the clay. Underneath holes appear in the 66-year-old steel. Day-light shines through some that are as big as dimes.

“I think, unfortunately, quite a bit of oil might have come out,” Rich said.

“I don’t know if I can talk to you right now. I’m upset. I’ve been upset all week, and now this just puts the icing on the cake,” Fitzgerald said.

Her tank is only one of an estimated 100,000 fuel oil storage tanks buried underground across New Jersey. They range in size from a couple hundred gallons to monsters that hold thou-sands of gallons.

Building inspector Earl Karlen says he sees things like this quite a bit. “May-be 50 percent of the old tanks — they do have holes, they do leak. It had been in the ground a long time, that’s why.”

Serious cases, where plumes of con-tamination ride groundwater chan-nels far beyond the tank pits, require extreme excavation.

“It was pretty bad, as you can see,” said Ken Lombardo, of Lombardo En-vironmental. “The house had to be put on piles and beams to remediate the soil.”

He figures cleanup will run $200,000. Insurance might cover half. The DEP

is notified whenever a critical level of contamination is detected. They get a technical report when it’s remediated. Homeowners then get a letter certi-fying that the cleanup is complete. They can’t sell the property without it, he says, because banks won’t of-fer mortgages on homes with under-ground oil tanks.

The grant money New Jersey set aside to help compensate homeown-ers for fuel oil tank removal can’t keep up with demand. There’s a waiting list with 1,700 names and the wait is four years long.

“Some are waiting it out,” Rich said. “Some are walking away from their homes. They walk away from their homes. They just don’t have the eq-uity in the property to ultimately clean or pay for remediation and get it cleaned up.”

“They’re really like the Wild West. You know, you just have these tanks out there that invariably at some point in time that are going to leak,” said en-vironmental attorney Stu Lieberman.

Lieberman points to New Jersey’s 2005 Fuel Oil Tank Exclusion Poli-cy. It lets insurers opt out of paying for damages from tank removal un-less homeowners can prove that oil leaked before 2005.

“It’s a sin,” he said. “It’s really a crime that the Division of Banking and In-surance allowed the insurance com-panies in New Jersey to stop covering these things.”

“The upshot is that there are many homeowners that don’t have cover-age, and don’t know that they don’t

have coverage,” Executive Vice Pres-ident of the Fuel Merchants Associ-ation of New Jersey Eric DeGesero said.

New Jersey’s Fuel Merchants Associ-ation questions whether the lack of DEP oversight on oil tank removals is driving up costs — especially if an insurer’s picking up part of the bill to fix those oil leaks that occurred more than a decade ago.

“The costs just seem to be a lot more in the insurance world than they might otherwise need to be,” DeGe-sero said.

“The cost that they sometimes incur for these remediations, it’s really a market driven process. That’s why the costs become so extensive in some cases,” said Kenneth Kloo, NJ DEP site remediation project director.

The DEP says that regulations permit industrial cleanups to leave behind small amounts of contaminants in the soil. That isn’t the case for home sites, where banks and buyers demand much more stringent remediation standards.

“There’s no ability to obtain a permit to leave any contamination behind,” Kloo said.

To help save cleanup costs, the DEP’s now considering a controversial fix: to relax some cleanup regulations for homeowner tanks of less than 2,000 gallons. Meanwhile, Senator Jennifer Beck is sponsoring legislation that would require insurance companies to start offering fuel oil tank liability policies to homeowners, again.

“If they don’t want it they have to sign and certify a letter back to the insur-er that they don’t want it,” she said. “Otherwise the homeowners’ insur-ance company must provide it auto-matically.”

“Homeowners insurance was intend-ed to be there for the structure and for your belongings inside. It wasn’t there to be a hazardous waste plan,” Christopher Stark from the Insurance Council of NJ said.

The insurance lobby says those policy changes and oil tank exclusions were very clear, and that insurers do not want to walk it all back a decade later.

“At the heart of this it’s an environ-mental issue,” said Stark. “It’s an issue of maintenance, it’s an issue of war-ranty and it’s an issue of making sure that you’ve replaced these tanks.”

Back in Clifton, Fitzgerald just heard that cleanup will cost $75,000 to re-move 125 tons of contaminated dirt. However, she does say that she un-wittingly made a mistake by convert-ing to natural gas heat before she re-moved the oil tank — and that voided her insurance policy.

She says she doesn’t think State Farm’s going to help her pay for it? “I just don’t think they will,” she said.

State Farm told NJTV News that they’re actively working with Fitzger-ald on her claim. Across New Jersey underground storage tanks and con-taminated soil from old gas stations and dry cleaners lurk underground. You might be living next to one and not even know it.

PART ThREE: CLEANUP bACkLOgStand downwind and you can smell gasoline vapors rising from this sludge as it cascades out of the backhoe bucket. Workers just pulled three, 6,000-gallon gas tanks from this former Valero station in Warren County. They’re now testing what lies beneath for chemical contaminants. It got added to the DEP’s list of toxic sites this October.

You can’t miss this, but suppose you just see bare concrete, or a grassy lot, where decades-old service stations have closed. What you can’t see are the toxic, cancer-causing chemicals in the ground soil. This mom of four can only remember.

“It was a gas station there,” she said. “When I was growing up it was a gas station.”

She didn’t want to show her face. She lives in a Trenton apartment house near a canal. It’s a spot listed on the DEP’s roster of contaminated under-ground tank sites. She didn’t realize petrochemical vapors could pene-trate her basement walls. Workers did some digging here about a year ago and she claims that tenants in her apartment complex got a disturbing form letter.

“We got a letter saying that there was some type of gas station that had some type of contaminated soil. If we had any symptoms of some type of illness to contact the health depart-ment,” she said.

“I mean, I’m outraged” said Doug O’Malley from Environment NJ. “Un-

derground storage tanks are an envi-ronmental ticking time bomb.”O’Malley is a clean water advocate and he says that it’s treating families like pollution detectors.

“The canary in the coal mine are fam-ilies here in Trenton. That’s not the way to do environmental policy in the state. Is there a problem? If you get sick — call us. That’s not how we should be treating the public in New Jersey,” he said.

According to the DEP, “Remedies don’t always require all contamina-tion to be removed.”

They also say that it does permit taint-ed soil to remain in some commercial cleanup cases, and that constant monitoring at test wells is crucial for that system to work while waiting for toxins to break down.

“A contaminated site isn’t a risk unless you have contamination present, and you also have an exposure pathway. By cutting off the exposure pathway you’re really successfully remediated the site,” Kenneth Kloo from the NJ DEP, said.

Last year, New Jersey’s DEP logged 5,036 cleanups at underground stor-age tank sites. They also discovered and added 4,928 new sites to the list — which now totals about 14,000. Of those about 10,000 are assigned for cleanup to private engineers called LSRPs — Licensed Site Remediation Professionals. It’s the unassigned sites — and the still-undiscovered ones — that worry them.

“You have sites out there that could potentially be dangerous that aren’t

being addressed,” William Groeling, President of Site Remediation Group said. “A lot of them, no one knows where the owner is, or they kind of disappeared, the company went bankrupt — that’s probably the big-gest challenge, getting those sites. And that’s something that the DEP is working on.”

But even at assigned sites enforce-ment is the large problem. At an old Getty station in Closter, the gasoline tanks got yanked in 1998 — but on-site wells show soil contaminated with toluene and other chemicals still lies beneath the cracked asphalt. Closter Environmental Commission-er Paul MacDonald says nobody has ever tested the groundwater further downhill.

“Well, there’s definitely contamina-tion,” he said. “I’m not aware if the contamination has moved offsite.”

That’s critical because the defunct station’s across the road from a work-ing farm, and about 450 yards from the Oradell Reservoir — a primary drinking water source for more than a million New Jersey residents. Unit-ed Water Co. says it’s detected no contamination. Daibes Enterprises bought the problematic site in 2009.

“The owners had the property for quite a while. I’m surprised it’s been sitting like this for this amount of time,” MacDonald said.

But Daibes is a year and a half behind on their clean-up schedule, the DEP says. In fact, it reports some 20 per-cent of sites like these are non-com-pliant. A federal EPA survey showed “recalcitrant responsible parties”

accounted for about a third of New Jersey’s remediation backlog in 2011.

We’ve been working with municipali-ties as a pilot to put in a ticket initia-tive,” Mark Pedersen, Assistant Com-missioner for the DEP said. “We’ve taken some initiative through the municipal courts and it’s worked out very well.”

But the DEP didn’t ticket Daibes, it blamed a paperwork error. Its records for the Trenton site were 18 months out-of-date. Critics says the depart-ment is too understaffed and over-whelmed to enforce its own regula-tions.

This fall, Closter did ticket Daibes, but only for failing to maintain the dilapi-dated building.

“They must’ve known there was a pollution problem in the soil under-ground,” MacDonald said. “When they bought it they assumed the lia-bility.”

The Closter site’s LSRP Keith Gagnon claims that tests show the contamina-tion gradually abates with time. They have new plans to drill extra monitor-ing wells across the road and closer to the reservoir next Spring. Sunoco owns the Trenton site, which hugs the Delaware Raritan Canal, and says it’s also constantly monitoring test wells waiting for contaminants to weather out of the soils. It could take years.

“We should clean up the problem and clean up the pollution, and not just hope that someone doesn’t get sick,” O’Malley said.

Mom’s lived here five years and both

her young sons are chronically ill.

“I don’t know,” she said. “It’s some-thing that I’m going to bring up to the pediatrician when I take them. It makes you wonder,”

That mom like so many people liv-ing around these kinds of sites didn’t know about the contamination or monitoring wells. Closter didn’t really know what was happening with that site either until we started making in-quiries. For the record the DEP calls the Closter sites in compliance, even with those test results.

The investigation into Toxic New Jer-sey has been a collaboration with a dozen content partners, public radio stations and private news organiza-tions, both Rutgers and Montclair State universities, facilitated by the Center for Investigative Reporting.

NJTV’s Mary Alice Williams inter-views Brenda Flanagan, NJ Spot-light’s Scott Gurian and WNYC and New Jersey Public Radio’s Sarah Gon-zalez.

Williams: Brenda, why isn’t the DEP enforcing these requirements in the first place?

Flanagan: By its own admission, the DEP is confronting so many of these sites, Mary Alice, that it has to do tri-age. As a matter of fact it told us this when we were there at a press avail-ability. It says that it prioritizes, and essentially focuses on sites that pose a direct health hazard. But I think that forcing the regulations beyond that would require a lot more time and a lot more money, and that’s always in short supply down in Trenton. I think

that if nobody is directly pushing for answers and for action, then the DEP is struggling to come up with the re-sources to keep up with it with all of these sites.

Williams: Sarah, what were some of the more surprising contaminated sites?

Gonzalez: So WNYC’s Data News team did an analysis of where New Jersey residents were in relation to all of these sites. We found that 90 per-cent, 89 percent of New Jerseyians live within a mile of some site that is contaminated, which I think in itself is pretty surprising. 1,400 of those sites, so 1,400 of the 14,000 contaminated sites are not in any stage of the pro-cess of ever getting it cleaned up.

Williams: What did you learn about the communities who have contam-inated sites that need to be cleaned up? What did you learn about how much information they had?

Gonzalez: So we, according to the state, the Department of Environ-mental Protection, initially they told us “Oh, these 1,400 or so sites are mostly abandoned properties.” They told us abandoned gas stations and former dry cleaners. And we went through the list and we knocked on doors and we drove to all of those sites. And we found schools, and hos-pitals, and police stations and nursing homes and all of these open, active businesses that have some kind of contamination and no plan in place to ever clean it up. And when I started asking people, like Newark Schools, which are run by the state of New Jersey, or the Newark Police Depart-ment, you know, what is the situation

with this site, there is some form of contamination there and there is no plan to clean it. They weren’t even aware of it. The people who should be aware of those things were not aware of it. So, there was really a commu-nication problem between the state and the cities, and even developers and the owners, of these sites.

Williams: You interviewed people who were not aware that they had breathing in toxic fumes from what kind of factory was it, a lighter fluid factory? Were you surprised by how long it took for state involvement?

Gonzalez: I think what was surprising about that case was that in 2013, the DEP became aware that homes were built on the site of a former lighter fluid factory when homes were nev-er supposed to be built there. It was supposed to be like a parking struc-ture, or something like that. So, they became aware of it. They tested the air and they found out there were these toxic fumes coming into peo-ple’s homes and they kind of put a band-aid on the problem. What was surprising though, was that, and I mean, this is the nature of contam-ination, contamination conditions change, it spreads. We had moved a block over and now the next, to the block next to that and so residents that I spoke with got letters from the DEP just this past October saying that we have to start testing your air.

Williams: Finally, what did you learn about race and class and the role that they play in prioritizing clean up?

Gonzalez: So again, most of the state is located near a contaminated site, but 75 percent of people who live

below the poverty line in New Jersey live within a mile of a site who has no plan to clean it up. 80 percent of Latinos in New Jersey live near one of these sites with no cleanup plan, and 75 percent of black residents, com-pared to about 40 percent of white residents.

Williams: Scott, let’s go to you. You have personal experience with this — you inherited an old, abandoned gas station that your grandfather owned, right?

Gurian: Right, I have an interesting perspective on all of this reporting we have been doing. I think that when the average person thinks of a contaminated site, they picture some former industrial facility that might have dumped chemicals into the river out back years ago. What we found out is that many of these sites are much smaller; former gas stations, former dry cleaners. As I know myself through personal experience, a few years back I inherited a former gas station that my grandparents had run back in the fifties and sixties. It had been sitting vacant for a number of decades, meanwhile there were still gas tanks in the ground. There was an enormous remediation that we had to deal with that we were told could cost over $600,000, which was more money than we had.

Williams: And who was responsible?

Gurian: That’s the question, the es-tate was my grandparents.

Williams: $600,000 is more than the estate was worth.

Gurian: Exactly. It’s a tricky situation

and a lot of site owners are in this sit-uation. It’s more than the property’s worth, it’s more than they can afford, what do they do about it? We were lucky in the end. It took several years of dealing with developers, with the town, with the state, and we finally actually had a developer come and purchase our property because it happened to be in a good location where he could redevelop it. Many of these site owners are in much less desirable areas, in blighted areas, in urban areas, and they don’t have that luxury of that happening. On top of that the state fund to clean up a lot these leaking, underground storage tanks have been severely depleted over the last several years.

Williams: What kind of damage was meted out by Sandy along New Jer-sey’s industrial coast?

Gurian: We looked at that, as well. Most of the focus after Sandy was the residential parts of the coast, the Jersey Shore, but there is a whole in-dustrial part of the coast, particularly in Northern Jersey, where you have sewage treatment plants in New York and New Jersey that leak gallons of raw sewage into the waterways. You have a lot of oil and gas facilities in the Arthur Kill between New Jersey and Staten Island.

Williams: Why haven’t those areas gotten the kind of attention that oth-er parts of the coast got?

Gurian: I think for several reasons. Part of it is just that people don’t live there. This is a part of the coast that people don’t see. You really need to get in a boat in order to see it. There’s not, you know, scenic walkways and

so forth there. These are private in-dustries that run this site, and the state, by and large, has left it up to these private industries to come up with solutions to mitigate their facil-ities from future storms.

Williams: Private individuals are re-sponsible for not allowing this type of seepage into the waterways. Is there a need for a more comprehensive plan under the circumstances?

Gurian: That has been the criticism from some environmentalists and planning experts that we spoke to. They feel that if toxic chemicals seep out of any of these factories, these industrial facilities they affect the safety, the livelihoods, the health of potentially thousands of people. The state has made such an effort to pro-tect the residential parts of the coast — building dunes, building sea walls and so forth. But, there hasn’t been that comprehensive approach to the industrial parts of the coast.

Williams: Do you see it anytime soon?

Gurian: There? It hasn’t been pro-posed yet. It’s hard to come up with solutions. These are facilities that are hundreds of acres in some cas-es. There are no simple answers, but environmentalists say that the state needs to at least start having the con-servation.

This story is part of Dirty Little Secrets, a series investigating New Jersey’s toxic legacy, originally published on NJTV News. The full reports can be found on our website at njtvnews.org.

About NJTV: New Jersey’s public television network, brings quality arts, education and pub-lic affairs programming to all 21 counties in New Jersey and its tri-state neighbors. NJTV presents acclaimed PBS series such as Nature, American Masters, Charlie Rose, and BBC World News America and children’s programs with diverse local programs including Amer-ican Songbook at NJPAC, On the Record with Michael Aron, Driving Jersey, NJDocs, Due Process, One-on-One with Steve Adubato, Classroom Close-Up NJ and State of the Arts. The network’s flagship news broadcast, NJTV News with Mary Alice Williams, features stories from across the Garden State utilizing the Agnes Varis NJTV Studio in Newark, its studios at the Trenton Statehouse and New Jersey City University and remote cameras at university content bureaus as well as media partners. The NJTV website offers online programs and free digital resources for educators. NJTV is comprised of WNJN, WNJS, WNJB and WNJT, which collectively broadcast throughout NJ. NJTV is operated under an agreement with the state of New Jersey by Public Media NJ, Inc. (PMNJ), a non-profit affiliate of WNET, parent company of award-winning New York public television stations THIRTEEN and WLIW21.

About CIR: The Center for Investigative Reporting is the nation’s first independent,multiplatform investigative reporting organization. Devoted to holding powerful interests accountable to the public trust, CIR creatively employs cutting-edge technology and innova-tive storytelling to reveal injustice, spark change at all levels of society and influence public dialogue on critical issues. With PRX, CIR co-produces the nationally distributed Reveal radio show and podcast, which features CIR’s reporting, as well as stories from public radio stations and a wide range of media partners, both nonprofit and commercial. CIR produces high-im-pact reporting across print, video, TV, radio and online platforms and is the recipient of the prestigious MacArthur Award for Creative and Effective Institutions, winner of 2013 and 2015 Emmy Awards and a 2013 George Foster Peabody Award, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2012 (for local reporting) and 2013 (for public service). For more, visit revealnews.org. Find and follow Reveal on Twitter and Facebook.

PAST STORYWORkS PRODUCTIONSHeaDlocK was written by William Bivins and directed by Jennifer Welch based on Ryan Gabrielson’s investigation into abuse at California’s adult care facilities.

a GUiDe to tHe aFteRmatH was written by Jon Bernson and directed by Jennifer Welch, inspired by Mimi Chakarova’s documentary about female veterans suffering from PTSD and military sexual trauma.

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