Officials launch 6 lawsuits over pollution

NEWARK » State officials on Wednesday announced a new crackdown on polluters, saying that enforcement was “back in business” after a near-decade-long hiatus and launching six new lawsuits to recover damages and costs.

Attorney General Gurbir Grewal alongside Environmental Protection Commissioner Catherine McCabe and Acting Gov. Sheila Oliver announced the new lawsuits near the site of a former lighter plant that leached harmful vapors into homes in Newark, the state’s biggest city.

Grewal said it’s the largest single-day action the state has taken in at least a decade and the first new natural resources damages case since 2008. He seemed to take aim at Republican former Gov. Chris Christie’s administration for failing to pursue such cases but did not mention the two-term governor by name.

“These cases and this tool were all but ignored,” Grewal said. “Today, folks, we are back in business.”

Christie left office this year when Democrat Phil Murphy, who was out of the state on

The cost recovery sites are at the Ronson Metals cigarette lighter facility in Newark, Ruggiero Seafood Inc., also in Newark, and a Mobil gas station in Woodbridge.

Grewal said he didn’t have an estimate for what the state might recover financially but said the cases could take a long time to prosecute.

The residents who live on the site of the former lighter factory have had their homes remediated by the Department of Environmental Protection, Grewal said. Ronson Metals Corp., which operated the factory, has since closed.

Messages seeking responses from the companies named by the state and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, which oversees the Pohatcong Superfund site, were not immediately answered.

Christie had hailed the $225 million Exxon Mobil deal as the largest settlement of its kind in state history and pointed to it as a sign his administration was “aggressively litigating against polluters.”

Court documents showed the state initially sought about $8.9 billion in damages, a figure Exxon vigorously contested.

JULIO CORTEZ — THE ASSOCIATED PRESS New Jersey Attorney General Gurbir Grewal, left, greets Jasim Jackson, 9, after a news conference announcing pollution lawsuits filed by the state, Wednesday in Newark.