The site had once been tidal marsh along the Elizabeth River, low-lying land barely above sea level. Chemical Control Corporation began operating there in 1970 as a hazardous waste disposal facility. The early years saw the company handling the region's industrial refuse with at least a veneer of legitimacy, but the situation deteriorated rapidly after William Collection was appointed president. Under his management, the drum count swelled from 30,000 to over 50,000. State officials ordered Collection to dispose of the accumulated waste safely. He refused. By 1979, the situation had become so dire that New Jersey condemned the entire site, but the drums remained -- row upon row of rusting containers holding benzene, cyanide, military nerve gas, PCBs, dioxins, and nitroglycerin, all corroding in the open air beside a waterway that fed into Newark Bay.

On the afternoon of April 21, 1980, the site ignited. The cause was never definitively established, though investigators pointed to unstable chemicals as the most likely trigger. What followed was no ordinary industrial fire. For fifteen hours, drums exploded and burned while firefighters worked to contain a conflagration that resisted conventional suppression. The blaze sent a toxic plume of airborne chemicals -- benzene, PCBs, toluene, and xylene among them -- across Elizabeth and into neighboring towns. Residents reported burning eyes, vomiting, diarrhea, and skin rashes. The fire forced what had been a state-level problem onto the national stage. Federal intervention followed swiftly, and the site became an early priority for the Environmental Protection Agency's newly developing Superfund cleanup framework.

The damage extended far beyond what burned that day. Before the fire, leaking drums had already contaminated groundwater and soil with hexachlorocyclopentadiene, PCBs, and toluene. The fire aerosolized chemicals that had previously been seeping slowly into the earth, scattering them across a far wider area. Firefighters who battled the blaze paid a steep price in the years that followed: lung disease, cancer, blood disorders, and nerve damage appeared among those who had stood closest to the flames. Community members in surrounding neighborhoods reported similar health effects. The full scope of chemical exposure remained difficult to quantify -- the sheer variety of substances on site, combined with incomplete records of what each drum contained, made precise accounting impossible.

The EPA's cleanup proceeded in three phases, beginning with immediate emergency actions in the early 1980s. Workers removed and decontaminated eleven box trailers and a vacuum truck. They cleared plugged storm sewers, sampled and removed 187 gas cylinders from the site and one from the Elizabeth River, and pulled every container found in the surrounding area. The longer-term remedial phases tackled the deeper contamination -- the soil saturated with decades of chemical leaching, the groundwater carrying toxins downstream. The work stretched across years. By the time the most intensive efforts wound down, the EPA had spent enough time and resources at the site to consider it a candidate for removal from the National Priorities List, a rare acknowledgment that even the most contaminated places can, with sufficient effort, be drawn back from the edge.

The Chemical Control site occupies a particular place in the history of American environmental regulation. Alongside incidents like Love Canal, it demonstrated that unregulated hazardous waste disposal posed dangers not just to isolated communities but to entire regions. The New York Times traced mob funding into the plant's operations, adding a layer of organized crime to what was already a story of institutional failure and corporate negligence. Today, the two-acre parcel sits quietly beside the Elizabeth River, its scars buried beneath layers of remediation. The surrounding community carries its own scars -- in the health records of aging firefighters, in the wariness of residents who remember the day the sky turned chemical-dark, and in the regulatory infrastructure that grew, in part, from what happened on this small patch of reclaimed marsh.