ABSTRACT

On a hot summer day in September 1995, the residents of a small community located in the western highlands of New Jersey, watched in horror as one of the town’s favorite waterways rolling past their municipal building, abruptly ceased flowing. While the small trout and other resident fish life sought refuge in what few deep pools remained, the town’s leaders began to search for clues to this unprecedented event. The incident demonstrated the complex interrelationships between various components of a waterway ecosystem and our continued failure to recognize such interrelationships and to provide an adequate level of protection for the maintenance of their integrity. On a much grander scale, New York and New Jersey have been wrestling with the dilemma of what to do with approximately 7 million cubic yards of sediments contaminated with toxic metals and organic chemicals that need to be dredged from bottom of major shipping channels and docking facilities in the New York-New Jersey harbor complex.