After assessment by the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) it was added to the National Priorities List in October 1986 for long-term remedial action.

The site is bounded in the north by Peckham Street/Union Road, by Chartley Swamp in the south and east, and by the ALI landfill in the west.

Isadore Shpack, a Russian Jewish immigrant and retired New York City municipal employee, began allowing dumping on the property in an effort to fill in its swamp.

[7][15] Shpack allowed completely unregulated dumping and is reported locally to have accepted any type of waste which was refused by the neighbouring municipal landfill.

[17] In 1978 John Sullivan, a 20-year-old local resident who was also a student at the Florida Institute of Technology, became curious about why snails in the area were losing their shells.

[20] The presence of Uranium-236 was indicative of reprocessed reactor fuel being dumped at the site, and testing of Uranium-235 samples demonstrated enrichment as high as 76%.

[12][14] FUSRAP is used to remediate or control sites "where radioactive contamination remains from the early years of the nation's atomic energy program.

"[13] Further surveys of the site uncovered extensive contamination with chemical wastes which had been dumped "in both bulk and containerized forms."

[12] Contaminants included volatile organic compounds (VOCs), heavy metals (e.g. nickel, cadmium, copper, lead and mercury), dioxins, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs).

[14] During 2000-2002 the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers - which had taken over the FUSRAP program in 1998 - performed "fieldwork" to prepare for a radiological survey and in 2004 the EPA put forward a cleanup plan.