Written by Eric A. Shore, personal injury, disability, and employment law attorney, practicing since 1994, with offices in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Florida. Eric Shore has helped people across the United States get justice, protect their jobs, and secure disability benefits when serious illness took away their ability to work.
If You Cannot Read the Whole Article, Read This First
If you searched “Keyport cancer cluster” or you are here because someone close to you is sick, start here.
A Keyport resident named Rusty Morris has documented 41 homes with cancer cases, 28 of them clustered around First Street. Near that street sits the former Aeromarine Industrial Park — a landfill that operated from roughly 1962 to 1979. A 2010 environmental assessment found five known carcinogens at the site: benzene, arsenic, lead, vinyl chloride, and PCBs. Those contaminants have been leaching into soil, groundwater, and Raritan Bay.
New Jersey regulators have fined the site owner nearly $900,000. As of April 2026, those fines have not been paid. The site has never been properly capped or cleaned up.
No official cancer cluster designation has been made. The link between the landfill and the cancers has not been formally established. But the contamination is documented. The chemicals are known carcinogens. Two independent public health experts say the pattern is alarming enough to demand investigation now.
If you or someone you love has gotten sick and it is affecting your ability to work, do not wait for the investigation. That problem is already here.
New Jersey disability has a 30-day deadline from your first missed day of work. Miss it and the benefit is gone.
Social Security disability can take 12 to 24 months. Most people are denied the first time.
Eric A. Shore — a personal injury and disability attorney licensed in New Jersey for more than 30 years — handles exactly this situation. Disability benefits, employment protections, and potential legal claims, all under one roof. Call 1-800-CANT-WORK for a free consultation.
What People Are Feeling Right Now
If you’re searching for this, you probably already know someone who is sick. Maybe it’s you. Maybe it’s your mother, your neighbor, the family down the street. You saw the map. You saw the red Xs. You started counting.
If someone close to you is sick and it’s affecting your ability to work, do not wait for the investigation to finish. That problem is already here.
That feeling — the one that sits in your chest and won’t leave — is the feeling that something was done wrong and nobody stopped it. That someone knew, or should have known. That the people who got sick didn’t have to.
That feeling may be right.
This article will tell you what is actually known, what isn’t, and what is being done. Nothing is overstated here. Nothing is left out.
What Is the Aeromarine Landfill and Why Are People Worried?
The former Aeromarine Industrial Park sits near First Street in Keyport, New Jersey. It ran as a landfill from approximately 1962 to 1979. The New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection ordered it shut down that year — citing numerous operating and engineering deficiencies. Bay Ridge Realty has owned the site since the 1990s.
A local resident named Rusty Morris started mapping cancer diagnoses in his neighborhood. He marked houses with red Xs. By April 2026 he’d marked 41 homes, with 28 concentrated on and around First Street — the street closest to the former landfill. The cancer types documented include prostate, brain, lung, stomach, colon, breast, appendix, kidney, intestinal, ovarian, thyroid, leukemia, and lymphoma.
A 2010 environmental assessment found at least five known carcinogens. They weren’t staying put. They were leaching into the soil, into groundwater, and into Raritan Bay by way of Chingarora Creek. Part of the site was also identified as a methane hot spot.
Nobody has properly capped this site. Nobody has cleaned it up. The Borough of Keyport filed suit against Bay Ridge Realty in 2021 to force remediation. The New Jersey DEP has issued fines totaling nearly $900,000. As of April 2026 those fines remain unpaid.
What Chemicals Were Found and What Do They Do to the Body?
The 2010 assessment identified five carcinogens. Here is what each one is and what the research says.
Benzene
Benzene is found in gasoline and industrial solvents. It gets into air, water, and soil. The research on benzene and cancer isn’t ambiguous — long-term exposure is linked to leukemia and other blood cancers. The World Health Organization classifies it as a known human carcinogen. There is no safe level of exposure.
Arsenic
Arsenic occurs naturally but becomes dangerous when it concentrates near industrial sites. It’s linked to cancers of the bladder, kidney, lung, skin, and liver. People living near contaminated sites can be exposed for years through drinking water and soil contact without knowing it.
Lead
Lead is toxic at any level. Once it’s in the soil and water, it stays — which is part of why a site that closed in 1979 can still be a problem in 2026. It affects the brain and nervous system and is particularly dangerous for children. Research also links long-term lead exposure to lung and stomach cancer.
Vinyl Chloride
Vinyl chloride is used to make PVC plastic. It’s one of the more alarming findings here because it’s a known cause of angiosarcoma — a rare and aggressive liver cancer. It’s also linked to brain and lung cancers. Vinyl chloride evaporates easily and can enter buildings through foundation cracks, which means indoor exposure is possible for people who never set foot on the site itself.
PCBs (Polychlorinated Biphenyls)
PCBs were banned in the United States in 1979 — the same year the Aeromarine site was shut down. They accumulate in the body and in wildlife. Long-term exposure is linked to liver cancer. PCBs bind to soil and sediment, which is exactly why they turn up at sites like this decades after operations ended.
What I’ve seen over 30 years of representing clients with serious illness and injury in New Jersey is that people often come to us already knowing something was wrong. They just didn’t have a name for it yet. When a site contains this many documented carcinogens and has sat unremediated for this long, the question isn’t whether harm was possible. The question is who was paying attention.
If you are already dealing with cancer, the question of what caused it matters. But the more immediate issue is what happens to your job and your income while everything else is being figured out.
What Is a Cancer Cluster and Has Keyport Been Officially Designated as One?
Health authorities define a cancer cluster as a greater-than-expected number of cancer cases in a defined group of people, in a specific geographic area, over a specific time period.
Keyport hasn’t received an official designation. Not yet. That process requires extensive data collection, statistical analysis, and usually years to complete.
That doesn’t mean what Rusty Morris documented isn’t real. It means the formal investigation hasn’t happened yet.
Dr. Alexis Mraz of The College of New Jersey’s Department of Public Health reviewed Morris’s map and said the concentration appeared unusually high and warranted investigation. Dr. Scarlett Gomez of UC San Francisco went further — she said the area shouldn’t have to wait for an official designation before the site gets cleaned up.
Here is what’s already established, without any further investigation: five documented carcinogens at the site, leaching into the surrounding area for decades, on a site that has never been cleaned up. That’s the baseline. Whatever the official process eventually determines gets built on top of that.
What Has the Government Done — and Not Done?
This is where a lot of people feel the anger that brought them to this article.
The New Jersey DEP shut the landfill down in 1979. That was 46 years ago. It found deficiencies serious enough to close the site. Then the site sat. Nobody came back to fix it.
A 2010 environmental assessment confirmed five carcinogens. The DEP issued fines totaling nearly $900,000 against Bay Ridge Realty. As of April 2026 those fines haven’t been paid. The site is still uncapped.
Keyport Mayor Rose Araneo has called for a DEP investigation and remediation. Congressman Frank Pallone has written to the EPA and the CDC demanding a full federal and state investigation. The DEP says it’s considering next steps, including environmental sampling and a public health assessment. The Borough of Keyport’s lawsuit against Bay Ridge Realty continues.
Nothing has been cleaned up. The fines haven’t been collected. A neighborhood sitting next to a documented carcinogen site has been waiting for action since before most of the people living there were born.
New Jersey Has Been Here Before
Toms River. Pompton Lakes. Brick. Paulsboro.
New Jersey has one of the longest histories of industrial contamination and cancer cluster investigations in the country. Toms River is the most studied case — a childhood cancer cluster eventually linked to contaminated drinking water from industrial dumping. It took years to establish. The families who lived through it will tell you the investigation felt longer than the actual wait.
Sometimes a cause gets confirmed. Sometimes the data stays inconclusive. The investigations almost always take far longer than they should.
What Keyport families are dealing with right now — the fear, the uncertainty, the anger at a system that moves slowly when people are hurting — is something New Jersey has seen before. That doesn’t make it acceptable. It means these families aren’t alone.
What Should You Do If You Live Near the Aeromarine Site?
Talk to your doctor. Tell them where you live and tell them about the landfill. Ask whether any screening makes sense given what’s known about the contaminants. Lead, benzene, arsenic, vinyl chloride, and PCBs all have medical screening considerations, and your doctor needs that context to give you useful guidance.
Keep records. If you’ve been diagnosed with anything, document it. Write down when you first noticed symptoms. Keep copies of medical records. If you’ve lived near the site for years, put that in writing and keep it with your other documents. This matters more than most people realize.
Don’t assume any deadline on a potential legal claim has passed. Environmental contamination cases have their own legal timelines — sometimes longer than people expect, and sometimes running from the date someone reasonably discovered the connection, not the date the contamination began. At the Law Offices of Eric A. Shore, we’ve seen clients come to us years after a diagnosis not knowing whether any claim was still available. The answer isn’t always no. But you don’t find that out by waiting.
If you’re on well water near this site, get it tested. Municipal water doesn’t eliminate all risk — groundwater contamination affects soil and air regardless of your water source.
Follow the story. Official investigations produce reports and public comment periods. Staying informed is not passive.
If You Are Already Sick and It Is Affecting Your Ability to Work
Some of the people reading this are past the point of wondering what might happen. They already have a diagnosis. They’re already missing work. They’re scared about money on top of everything else.
If that’s where you are, there’s more to tell you.
A serious illness that stops you from working doesn’t create one problem. It creates several — at the same time, each with its own deadline. State disability pay. Employer disability coverage. Federal Social Security disability. Employment protections under the FMLA and ADA. And potentially a legal claim if the cause of the illness is eventually established.
Most people don’t know about all of them. Most find out about the ones they missed after the deadlines have passed. Eric Shore and the team at the Law Offices of Eric A. Shore have spent more than 30 years sitting across from clients in exactly this situation — seriously ill, out of work, unaware that multiple benefit windows were already running. That is the problem we were built to solve.
I have represented hundreds of people with serious illness — leukemia, lymphoma, lung disease, brain tumors. Some of them thought they had time to figure this out. They did not.
Has cancer or serious illness disabled you or someone in your family?
If you have been diagnosed with cancer and you cannot work, several benefit clocks may already be running. Most people do not find out until one of them has expired.
New Jersey state disability requires an application within 30 days of your first missed day of work. Social Security disability takes 12 to 24 months from application to first payment in most cases. Long-term disability appeals under employer plans typically must be filed within 180 days of a denial. And if a toxic exposure contributed to your illness, that claim has its own deadline too.
These clocks do not pause while an official investigation is underway. We can help you understand which ones apply to your situation and make sure none of them get missed.
Call 1-800-CANT-WORK for a free consultation. There is no fee unless we recover money for you.
How We Help
The Law Offices of Eric A. Shore has been handling cases like this for more than 30 years. Personal injury. Workers’ compensation. Social Security disability. Long-term disability. Employment law. All under one roof. Eric Shore has represented tens of thousands of clients in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and across the country who developed serious medical conditions that took away their ability to work. That is the practice we built. This is what we do.
We call it a DISINJURY™ case. That’s when a serious illness or injury doesn’t just affect your health — it stops your income. Multiple legal and financial problems, running at the same time, each with its own clock. In illness cases specifically — cancer, nerve damage, conditions that develop over time — those clocks often started before the person knew they had a claim at all.
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“People in these situations come to us thinking they have one problem. They almost always have several. Each one has a deadline. We make sure none of them get missed.” — Eric A. Shore, Law Offices of Eric A. Shore |
We’re not going to tell you that you have a case against the Aeromarine site owner. Nobody knows that yet. What we can tell you is that if you’re sick and missing work, the disability side of this has deadlines already running. New Jersey state disability requires an application within 30 days of your first day off work. Federal Social Security takes 12 to 24 months from application to first payment in most cases. Long-term disability denials under employer plans typically carry a 180-day appeal window under federal law.
Missing those deadlines doesn’t buy you more time. It closes doors that don’t open again.
The consultation is free. You owe nothing unless we recover money for you.
Call 1-800-CANT-WORK
Questions People Are Actually Asking About the Keyport Cancer Cluster
Is the water in Keyport safe to drink?
Keyport residents on municipal water aren’t drinking from contaminated groundwater directly. But groundwater contamination doesn’t stay in one place. It leaches into soil, affects air quality near the site, and enters the food chain through local waterways including Chingarora Creek and Raritan Bay. If you’re on private well water near the Aeromarine site, get it tested. Don’t wait.
What cancers are linked to the chemicals found at the Aeromarine landfill?
Benzene is linked to leukemia and blood cancers. Arsenic to bladder, kidney, lung, and skin cancers. Lead to lung and stomach cancers, among others. Vinyl chloride to angiosarcoma of the liver, brain cancer, and lung cancer. PCBs to liver cancer and potentially others. The cancers Morris documented — prostate, brain, lung, stomach, colon, breast, appendix, kidney, intestinal, ovarian, thyroid, leukemia, and lymphoma — include types associated with every one of those five chemicals.
Has Keyport been officially declared a cancer cluster?
No. As of April 2026, there’s no official designation. The process requires formal statistical analysis and takes time. But public health experts who’ve reviewed the data say the pattern is unusually concentrated and demands investigation. The absence of an official label doesn’t make the concern less real.
Why hasn’t the landfill been cleaned up?
The DEP shut the site down in 1979. Carcinogens were confirmed there in 2010. Fines totaling nearly $900,000 have been levied against the owner. As of April 2026 those fines haven’t been paid, the site hasn’t been remediated, and the Borough of Keyport is in court trying to force the cleanup to happen. That’s where things stand.
Can I sue the landfill owner for my cancer?
An environmental contamination lawsuit requires establishing a causal link between specific chemicals at a specific site and a specific diagnosis. That link hasn’t been formally established in Keyport. It may come through an official investigation. If it does, the legal picture changes significantly.
In the meantime: document everything. Don’t conclude you have no claim before speaking with a lawyer. Environmental cases have timelines that are different from what most people expect.
What is the difference between the Keyport situation and Toms River?
Toms River became the most studied childhood cancer cluster in American history. An investigation eventually linked elevated leukemia rates to chemical contamination of the municipal drinking water — a specific, traceable pathway. Keyport is earlier in that process. The contamination is documented. The pattern has been mapped. Official investigation hasn’t begun. Whether Keyport follows Toms River’s path depends on what investigators find.
I am sick and cannot work. What disability benefits can I apply for?
You may qualify for New Jersey Temporary Disability Insurance, short-term or long-term disability through your employer, and federal Social Security disability. New Jersey state disability requires an application within 30 days of your first day off work — that deadline doesn’t move. Federal Social Security typically takes 12 to 24 months from application to first payment. Long-term disability appeals under employer-sponsored plans usually allow 180 days after a denial.
The Law Offices of Eric A. Shore has helped clients in New Jersey with exactly these claims for more than 30 years. A free consultation is the fastest way to understand what’s still open to you.
Does filing for disability benefits affect a potential lawsuit?
Not directly. Disability benefits and a personal injury or environmental claim run on separate tracks. Collecting state or federal disability pay doesn’t forfeit your right to pursue a legal claim if one develops. Some employer long-term disability policies carry offset clauses that can interact with settlements — which is one reason it’s better to have one legal team handling both sides rather than managing them separately.
A Final Word
The people who are sick in Keyport didn’t choose to live near a contaminated landfill. The people who are scared didn’t choose to wonder whether their neighborhood spent decades being slowly poisoned. The people who are angry didn’t choose to wait 46 years for a site the DEP itself called deficient to finally be addressed.
Whatever a formal investigation eventually concludes, what happened in Keyport is already a story about what happens when environmental enforcement fails the people it’s supposed to protect.
The state may take years to figure out what caused this. You do not have years to figure out how to get paid.
If you’ve been affected by this and your ability to work is changing, we’re here.
Eric A. Shore
Law Offices of Eric A. Shore
1-800-CANT-WORK | 1800cantwork.com
Philadelphia, PA | Drexel Hill, PA | Cherry Hill, NJ | Atlantic City, NJ | Fort Lauderdale, FL
Free consultation. No fee unless we win.
