Mann v. Ford

Ringwood, NJ was once a mining community with rich land. Home of the Ramapo Mountain Indians, the area has housed generations of the same families for 250 years. In 1967, the Ford Motors plant in Mahwah, NJ (the largest in America when it was built) began using the Ramapo’s fields and streams, as well as their mines, as a dumpsite for paint sludge, causing a witches’ brew of carcinogens – Freon, metals, lead, arsenic – to seep into the drinking water and saturate the soil. Ford admitted to dumping through 1971, but claims it was legal at the time.