Commissioner Jeffrey Nash, Mayor Victor Carstarfen, State Senator Nilsa Cruz-Perez, City Council President Angel Fuentes, and Council Vice President Arthur Barclay issued a joint statement on May 29 calling for the closure of the EMR scrap facility in Camden City following another fire at the site.
The officials said, “Today, we are calling for EMR to be shut down by the Department of Environmental Protection, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the Camden County Health Department, and every other governmental regulatory agency with any jurisdiction over EMR’s facility in the City of Camden. This morning, we awoke to a call that has come way too often for the residents of our community—another fire at the EMR scrap facility. This underscores the need for us to continue to put residents first and ask the DEP, EPA, and every other regulatory agency to shut down the operations inside this scrap yard located in Camden’s South Waterfront neighborhood.”
The statement continued: “We will not stand idly by while residents are exposed to fires on a regular basis and have to bear the burdens of an operation that clearly cannot function in a safe manner. We will no longer allow shelter-in-place alerts to go out because of another mishap in this scrap metal operation. Enough is enough, we’ve heard the same stories before about lithium-ion batteries and their dangers, but that story line is old and irrelevant at this point.”
According to Nash and his colleagues, “The city has worked with EMR in the past to try to improve their facility, but having another two-alarm fire that created smoke plumes throughout Camden County into Gloucester Township is unacceptable and leaving children and families exposed to the acrid smoke on their way to work and school is intolerable.”
Camden County supports over 500,000 residents across 37 municipalities through services such as public safety, health initiatives, transportation infrastructure improvements, economic development programs as well as facilities including parks and libraries designed to foster community well-being, according to the official website.
