Thousands of longshoremen, arriving on a fleet of buses after shutting Port of New York and New Jersey piers for the day, rallied yesterday at a Fort Monmouth hearing where they clashed loudly with environmentalists over ocean disposal of mud cleared from the port's channels.Identifiable by the ocean-blue "DREDGE NOW" baseball caps they wore, the dockworkers repeatedly erupted into boos and catcalls as Rep. Frank Pallone (D-6th Dist.) and mayors of Shore communities called for an end to the practice.
Col. William Pearce, the Army Corps of Engineers official who chaired the hearing, asked for order in the 1,000-seat theatre, to little avail. The theatre was jammed with longshoremen and hundreds more waited outside.
"This is not the NFL, so please don't taunt the opposition," Pearce said plaintively at one point.
But the colonel's patience ran out about an hour after the hearing reconvened last night following a dinner break.
Unable to restore order after Pallone spoke again, Pearce canceled the session but extended until Feb. 10 the time in which written comments can be submitted to the corps' district office at 26 Federal Plaza in New York.
"We know a lot of citizens were disappointed," spokesman Peter Shugert explained. "But it got to the point where good order could not be maintained."
Only once during the three-hour afternoon session did the crowd fall silent, when representatives of the federal Environmental Protection Agency and National Marine Fisheries Service said the mud being shipped offshore was not toxic, as alleged by environmentalists.
In fact, placing the clean material on top of contaminated mud dumped in the past will prevent it from continuing to pollute the zone three miles off Sandy Hook, said the EPA's Ronald Borsellino.
Rep. Robert Menendez (D-13th Dist.) warned that the balance of economic and environmental concerns was at the heart of a 1996 agreement crafted by Vice President Al Gore.
"If we change what we agreed to now, then everything falls apart," Menendez said.
But Pallone said the deal always envisioned an end to ocean disposal after alternatives were found. He branded interim steps taken by the EPA and the Army Corps as "bureaucratic hogwash."
Dockworkers then taunted him, calling out "hogwash" as he continued his remarks.
Afterward, Pallone was confronted by Charles Wowkanech, president of the New Jersey State AFL-CIO. "You're a ... liar," Wowkanech said, jabbing his index finger at Pallone, "You're finished."
The labor leader later explained he would recommend that the AFL-CIO's executive board withhold future support from Pallone.
Longshoremen also hooted as Cindy Zipf, executive director of Clean Ocean Action, who told them, "We're not against you."
Despite the taunts, Zipf flashed a thumbs-up as she concluded and even coaxed a burly dockworker to give up his cap, which she wore as she left the theatre.
Both sides squared off under the watchful eye of a phalanx of Department of Defense and military police, who maintained their watch at a hearing that continued into the night. The International Longshoremen's Association chartered 52 buses to carry more than 2,000 dockworkers to the hearing, according to spokesman James McNamara.
The Army Corps called the session to review a permit it issued in November to the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey to clear berths at Brooklyn piers used by cocoa and coffee ships. After Pallone said he had never received notice of the plan, the Corps agreed to conduct the session to elicit information that a spokesman said might warrant changes or even a revocation of the three-year permit.
No decision will be made until after the expiration of the comment period, Army Corps spokesman Shugert said.
In the meantime, the maritime and environmental communities used the hearing to rekindle a dispute over the 96-year-old practice of disposing of harbor mud offshore. Although there are 125 such sites around the country, the Mud Dump six miles off Sandy Hook has gained notoriety because environmental and fishing groups objected to depositing chemically tainted dredge spoils at the two-mile-square zone.
The controversy delayed dredging projects in the bistate port for six years until the 1996 agreement closed the site in 1997 to all but material rated Category 1, the cleanest standard set by the Army Corps and EPA.
Contaminated mud is now entombed in a $49 million pit beneath Newark Bay or mixed with cement kiln dust and used on construction sites, methods that are five or six times more costly than the $7.50 per yard charged for ocean dumping.
The clean material is to be used to cover the contaminated sediment placed at the Mud Dump before testing standards became so sophisticated they could detect even trace amounts of contamination. Now the dump is known as the Historic Area Remediation Site, or HARS.
Although the EPA and the Army Corps said the Brooklyn mud falls in the suitable-for-cover category, environmentalists dispute that. That has led to both sides accusing each other of reneging on the Gore agreement and threatening delays of critical dredging projects as huge new ships that need deeper water are already calling at the bistate port.
Lillian Borrone, port commerce director for the Port Authority, said those projects count on releasing almost 30 million cubic yards in the ocean at a cost of about $2.5 billion compared with $12.5 billion on land.
"The channel deepening program would have to be completely re-evaluated," Borrone warned. At the same time, however, the effort to cover the tainted sediments at the HARS would be set back unnecesarily. When the job is done in conjunction with dredging projects, the EPA estimates it will take 10 to 15 years to cover the contaminated mud up to three feet with 54 million cubic yards or 3.6 million truckloads. If the government agreed to pay for an independent effort, it could take 40 years.
Zipf, who has been leading the opposition to the Brooklyn and Queens permits, maintains the bigger projects are not jeopardized at all.
"That deeper stuff is clean stuff," she said, and would be acceptable as remediation," said Zipf, who leads a coalition of fishing and environmental groups.
Zipf disputed charges environmentalists were backing away from the Gore agreement.
"The only reneging that's happening is the federal agencies are not putting uncontaminated material in ocean to remediate the HARS," she said.
Zipf maintains the EPA changed its suitability criteria in late 1996 and now actually allows higher levels of contamination in the mud destined for covering the site. "Every contaminant, every toxin tested for, is increased - in some cases enormously."
"We did not do anything to change the Category 1 criteria or make it less stringent in any way," EPA spokeswoman Mary Helen Cervantes-Gross said.