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By Root 327 0

the hero/pain in the ass of an environmental saga, it is only necessary to be obsessive, compulsive, and workaholic, to have the instincts of a trained investigator, the disposition of a bloodhound, and the skill of a research librarian. It takes a pain in the ass to get bureaucrats off their butts and moving. What makes Spiegel different from the average pain in the ass is that he has a sense of humor. “The squeaking barrel gets the attention,” said Spiegel, mangling a metaphor for the cause. Spiegel (and the waste sites he adopted since he saw the green rabbits hopping across Arnie Livingston’s abandoned lot) gets a lot of attention. Combining plodding research and investigation with gonzo activism, he is part Ralph Nader and part Abbie Hoffman. He damn near drove the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection, not to mention the United States EPA, out of their bureaucratic minds. Spiegel filed innumerable Freedom of Information requests for government documents. He studied the laws and the regulations. He called and wrote both elected officials and regulators.

Proceeding through official channels is necessary but not sufficient in these cases, so Spiegel also took to holding impromptu press conferences on the CIC site. He led television-news crews to toxic hot spots. He mailed the EPA videotapes of children playing in arsenic-laced brooks and sent stuffed green bunnies to members of Congress. He “borrowed” soil samples from Arnold Livingston’s property, tested them, and publicized the results. “The soil and water samples are my secret weapons,” he said. “You can call and scream that you want the EPA to fix the problem. But when you tell the EPA and reporters about the arsenic levels you found, they pay attention.” On one occasion Spiegel walked a TV-news reporter to the front door of Arnold Livingston’s office and then prudently jumped out of the way when the reporter was thrown out. Commitment has its limits.

Spiegel pored over the “hot docs” he got from the EPA, patiently piecing together all the evidence, and led investigators to a buried lagoon filled with leaking fifty-five-gallon drums. Then he found yet another lagoon missed by state and federal investigators. He brought community groups and leaders into the fight to clean up CIC. He made the fight personal: the EPA was not the EPA; it was regional Superfund director Ray Basso, assigned by Spiegel to play the heavy. “Basso is not concerned about this cleanup,” Spiegel told a TV reporter. Am so, replied the harried Basso.

In 1992, seven years after CIC made the Superfund’s National Priorities List, a Pittsburgh contractor installed a $2-million rubber blanket over the waste lagoon, over the buried fifty-five-gallon drums, over 2,4-D and 2,4,5-T, over arsenic, lead, dinoseb, PCBs, chlordane, malathion, sodium arsenate, DDT, benzol, lindane, rotenone, propanil, sulfuric acid, acetone, caustic soda, and the rotting hay bales that had been used to soak up all the spills. They swept it all under a rubber blanket, literally covering it up.

The cap was designed to last from three to seven years. The EPA said it would return later to remove 106,000 cubic yards of soil and to refill the 17-foot-deep pit—when a site plan was ready and when funds were available.

Bob Spiegel moved on—downstream.

He started working on two arsenic-laced streams that meander through residential neighborhoods near the CIC site. With Shersick he organized the Edison Wetlands Association. State and federal envirocrats who thought they had seen the last of Spiegel were again looking at more tapes of children playing in chemical waste, TV reporters standing with Spiegel and families who lived along the contaminated streams, and newspaper stories about soil and water stats. So the EPA changed its tactics. Operating on Lyndon Johnson’s theory that it’s better to have your enemies “inside the tent pissin’ out than outside the tent pissin’ in,” the agency invited Spiegel into the tent.

The EPA responded to Spiegel and Shersick with a plan to excavate the entire streambed and dig out all the