Superfundnewspage

April 16, 2004
The Tragedy Of Tar Creek
Superfund was created to ensure that America's toxic-waste dumps got cleaned up. An inside look at one of its failures
Margot Roosevelt, Picher, OK, Time Magazine

To get a better view of the situation, John Sparkman guns his flame-red truck up a massive pile of gravel. From the summit, a lifeless brown wasteland stretches to the horizon, like a scene from a science-fiction movie. Mountains of mine tailings, some as tall as 13-story buildings, others as wide as four football fields, loom over streets, homes, churches and schools. Dust, laced with lead, cadmium and other poisonous metals, blows off the man-made hills and 800 acres of dry settling ponds. "It gets in your teeth," says Sparkman, head of a local citizens' group. "It cakes in your ears and hair. It's like we've been environmentally raped."

Hyperbole? Drive through the desolate towns around Picher, Okla., and you might think differently. This is eco-assault on an epic scale. The prairie here in the northeast corner of the state is punctured with 480 open mine shafts and 30,000 drill holes. Little League fields have been built over an immense underground cavity that could collapse at any time. Acid mine waste flushes into drinking wells. When the water rises in Tar Creek, which runs through the site, a neon-orange scum oozes onto the roadside. Wild onions, a regional delicacy tossed into scrambled eggs, are saturated with cadmium - which may explain, local doctors say, why three different kidney dialysis centers have opened here to serve a population of only 30,000.

But the grimmest legacy of a century of intensive lead and zinc mining are the "lead heads," or "chat rats," as the kids who grew up around here are known. As toddlers, they played in sandboxes of chat - the powdery output of mills after ore is extracted from rock. As preteens, they rode their bikes across the gravel mounds and swam in lime-green sinkholes. Their parents used mine tailings to make driveways and foundations, never thinking that contaminated dust might blow through the heating ducts of their ranch houses. In the past decade, studies have shown that up to 38% of local children have had high levels of lead in their blood - an exposure that can cause permanent neurological damage and learning disabilities. "Our kids hit a brick wall," says Kim Pace, principal of the Picher-Cardin Elementary School. "Their eyes skip and jump. It takes them 100 repetitions to learn a sound."

At her kitchen table, Evona Moss helps her son Michael, 10, with his homework. Michael grew up across the street from a chat pile, and at one point the third-grader's lead levels measured 40% above the Centers for Disease Control's danger level. He repeated kindergarten. "I used to think he was lazy," says his mother, "but he tries so hard. One minute he knows the words, and a half-hour later he doesn't. Every night he kneels down and prays to be a better reader."

It wasn't supposed to be like this. In 1980, Congress passed the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act - commonly known as the Superfund law - one of the boldest environmental statutes in U.S. history. It was a law designed to fit all circumstances. It covered existing plants whose owners could be forced to clean up their dumps. It covered polluted sites long since abandoned by their owners: defunct factories, refineries and mines. Even when companies followed the standard, if dubious, practices of the day - dumping toxic waste in rivers, burying it in leaky drums or just leaving it, as in Oklahoma, to blow in the wind - they would be held accountable. And if they refused to clean up their messes, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) would do so for them and charge treble damages for its trouble. In the event that the perpetrators had disappeared or gone out of business, a general tax on polluting industries - a "Superfund"--would pay to fix the damage.

But today Superfund is a program under siege, plagued by partisan politics, industry stonewalling and bureaucratic inertia. The U.S. government has spent $27 billion on the effort and forced individual polluters to spend an additional $21 billion. Love Canal, the deadly dump in New York State that spurred the law's passage, has been capped with a layer of clay, and the EPA proposed last month to take it off the list. So far, 278 sites have been delisted. But there are thousands more out there. According to the General Accounting Office (GAO), 1 out of 4 Americans still lives within four miles of a Superfund site - many of them killing fields saturated with cancer-causing chemicals and other toxins.

The GAO reports that the program's budget fell 35% in inflation-adjusted dollars over the past decade. And environmentalists say that Bush appointees are slowing the pace of cleanups and failing to list potential new sites. According to the EPA's inspector general, 29 projects in 17 states were underfunded last year. The Administration, charges New Jersey Senator Frank Lautenberg, a Democrat, has "allowed - deliberately - these sites to rot where they are."

Tar Creek is a case in point. Two decades after it was targeted on the very first Superfund priority list, the 40-sq.-mi. site is worse off than ever. Early on, the government confined its effort to the polluted creek, without looking at chat piles, soil, air quality or the danger of subsidence. Was it a lack of knowledge of the danger, as EPA claims? Or industry influence, as environmentalists charge? Whatever the reason, federal attorneys settled with mining companies for pennies on the dollar. Now, after fruitless efforts to contain 28 billion gal. of acid mine water, contamination is spreading across a vast watershed. And although the EPA trucked out toxic dirt from about 2,000 homes and schools, Tar Creek's children still show elevated lead levels at six times the national average.

Administration officials say they are cleaning up the nation's 1,240 highest-priority sites as fast as they can. But that will be harder, since the multibillion-dollar industry-paid trust fund, set aside for abandoned sites such as Tar Creek, ran dry in October. The fund was supplied by taxes on the purchase of toxic chemicals and petroleum and on corporate profits above $2 million. But the Republican-led Congress allowed the fees to expire in 1995. Bush is the first President to oppose the levies, and last month Lautenberg and other Senate Democrats lost a narrow vote to reinstate them. In protest, the Sierra Club aired "Make Polluters Pay" TV ads in Pennsylvania, Florida and Michigan - all swing states. And on April 15, tax day, activists in 25 states picketed post offices to object. "We went from polluters paying to citizens paying," says Oklahoma environmentalist Earl Hatley. "Now EPA doesn't have the money for megasites like Tar Creek."

Meanwhile, Superfund defenders in Washington are bracing for a new battle: a Bush-appointed advisory committee, which they claim is heavily stacked with corporate members, issued a report last week that pushes for administrative changes. "It is a wonky thing," says Julie Wolk of the Public Interest Research Group. "But it could dramatically weaken the program." Companies want to limit liability and shift responsibility to the states, where rules are more flexible. Federal standards are "rigid and extreme," says Michael Steinberg of the Superfund Settlements Project, an industry group that includes General Electric, DuPont and IBM. "Groundwater must meet standards for tap water, even though at many of these sites no one drinks it. Soil at many sites must be clean enough so people could play in it. The costs exceed the benefits."

With the EPA's clout slackening, private attorneys are moving in. At Tar Creek, lawyers are suing seven mining companies on behalf of scores of lead-exposed children. A separate suit demanding a cleanup was filed by the Quapaw Indians, whose land was leased for the mines. And environmentalist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has joined a class action to force companies to relocate the population of two polluted towns, Picher and Cardin. Court papers suggest that mining executives knew as early as the 1930s that the contaminated dust was dangerous but sought to, in their words, "dissuade" the government from intervening. A mining-company lawyer says the charge is based on "out-of-context reading" of historical documents.

Just how dangerous that dust might be is still a matter of dispute. Doctors at the Harvard School of Public Health have begun extensive studies in Tar Creek, not just of lead exposure but also of the cocktail mix of lead, manganese, cadmium and other metals that interact in unknown ways. "We're looking at four generations of poisoning," says Rebecca Jim of the L.E.A.D. agency, a local group. Meanwhile, parents like Evona Moss wonder what else the toxic brew might have done. Did it cause her obesity and bad teeth? Is it responsible for the malformation of her daughter's shins? Does her baby's asthma come from the chat? Her nephew's cancer? No one knows because no one has done careful, long-term studies.

Tar Creek is an extreme case. But like Tolstoy's unhappy families, every Superfund site is tragic and contentious in its own way. In Libby, Mont., a massive mine blanketed the town with asbestos dust, killing at least 215 people and sickening 1,100 more with cancer and lung disease - yet cleanup funds have been cut so sharply that it could take 10 to 15 years to finish the job. In Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, miners dumped 60 million tons of toxic metals into waterways, but state officials are fighting a Superfund cleanup, fearing a stigma that might hurt tourism. In New York, General Electric, which contaminated 40 miles of the Hudson River with cancer-causing PCBs, has hired high-profile attorney Laurence Tribe to convince federal courts that the Superfund law is unconstitutional. And in New Jersey, where the rabbits frolicking around the Chemical Insecticide Corp. plant once grew green-tinged fur, cleanup funds were restored only after locals sent green plush bunnies to members of Congress.

At Tar Creek, many residents have given up hope. Even the EPA, which has spent $107 million at the site, isn't sure if it can ever be repaired. "We don't have an off-the-shelf remedy," says EPA Superfund official Randy Deitz. "What do you do with the enormous chat piles? When does cleanup become impracticable? We have limited resources." In a show of no-confidence, the Oklahoma legislature last week passed a $5 million buyout for all families with children under 6. John Sparkman, who heads the Tar Creek Steering Committee, a group of buyout supporters, veers between cynicism and despair. "They think we're poor white trash," he says bitterly, driving past Picher's boarded-up storefronts. "The votes here don't affect any federal election - so why bother? We've agitated till we can't agitate anymore." Meanwhile, at Tar Creek, the toxic dust keeps blowing in the wind.

April 16 2004
Idaho Superfund Cleanup Plan Discussed
Los Angeles Times

Wallace, Idaho - Residents and lawmakers in the Idaho Panhandle's Silver Valley told a federal panel that a proposal to dramatically expand the Superfund cleanup is too costly and extensive, and would diminish the region's economy. U.S. Sen. Mike Crapo, R-Idaho, told a National Academy of Sciences panel Thursday that the local economy will be hurt if the cleanup is extended over the next three decades.

"You must understand the impacts a scientific decision will have on the lives of people here," Crapo said. Jim Hollingsworth, a building contractor, echoed the sentiments of many residents when he disputed that mining pollution was as extensive as the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency contends.

Remaining cleanup could be completed faster and more cheaply than the project proposed by EPA, he said. "Unless we bring some common sense to this issue we will not spend just the projected hundreds of millions, but tens of billions," said Hollingsworth, a Republican legislative candidate. A century of mining and smelting silver, lead and other minerals left huge piles of contaminated wastes.

The EPA has conducted a two-decade cleanup under the Superfund program in the area around the community of Kellogg. But the EPA recently decided to extend that cleanup through the entire Coeur d'Alene River basin, from Kellogg into Washington state, at a cost of $359 million over three decades.

That has infuriated many residents, who want the EPA to declare the area clean so they can concentrate on rebuilding the local economy, especially tourism. Idaho members of Congress secured funding for an NAS review of the science the EPA used to make its decision to expand the cleanup. The panel's report, which will review the geographical scope of the wastes, the way risk to humans was assessed and the way blood lead levels in children were estimated, is due next March.

April 16, 2004
Harbor cleanup nears key stage
By Aaron Nicodemus, Standard-Times

NEW BEDFORD -- The massive cleanup of New Bedford Harbor is set to reach a critical stage in September, officials from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said this week. The construction of a dewatering facility on Herman Melville Boulevard, behind the Wharf Tavern on the North Terminal waterfront, is expected to be completed in July. A desanding facility will be built by August about a mile away, on Sawyer Street.

The two facilities will process the contaminated sediment dredged from the harbor bottom. The dried sediment "cake" that is the result of the processing will be taken to a disposal facility.

The harbor is contaminated with polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), which manufacturers pumped into the harbor over decades.

Once the infrastructure is in place, the EPA can begin dredging. The agency will start in the areas of highest contamination, in the harbor area near the former Aerovox facility on Belleville Avenue. How long it will take depends on how much funding the federal government provides to the project. If the project received an average of $15 million per year, dredging the harbor would take 20 years. With $30 million per year, the dredging would take 12 years; with $80 million per year, four years.

The federal Superfund, which used to pay for cleanup of toxic sites like New Bedford Harbor, has been drained. There are concerns about federal appropriations to such projects now that the Superfund is empty. The first dredging of the harbor will last from September to December, then pause for winter and resume in the spring 2005. This story appeared on Page A4 of The Standard-Times on April 16, 2004.

April 16, 2004
Superfund tax protest prompts Sununu response
By Dan Bustard, Eagle Times

CLAREMONT - A tax day protest over funding for the clean up of superfund sites in Claremont got the attention of one of New Hampshire's U.S. senators Thursday. Sen. John Sununu, R-NH, responded to a letter dropped off at his Claremont office Thursday morning by members of CLEAR, Citizens Leading for Environmental Action and Responsibility, regarding the elimination of the tax on polluters to pay for Superfund cleanups.

"Citizens in the communities of Claremont and Newport are very concerned about toxic pollution from Superfund sites," read the letter CLEAR's Jackie Elliott gave to Christopher Collins of Sununu's staff. "Newport is host to an ash landfill filled with more than 300,000 tons of toxic ash produced by burning at least a million tons of garbage at the Wheelabrator incinerator. That toxic mountain of ash sits on Claremont's eastern border above an aquifer and less than 1,000 feet from the Sugar River, a source of some of Claremont's drinking water."

The protest included signs and stickers as CLEAR members asked people filing their federal income tax returns to place the stickers calling for polluters to pay on their returns. The protest was part of a 25-state event sponsored by BE SAFE, urging for the reinstatement of the polluters' tax.

The signs and stickers were also prominently displayed at Thursday night's meeting of the New Hampshire-Vermont Solid Waste Project's joint committee meeting. This is where Collins read Sununu's response, trying to explain the "misunderstanding" surround[ing] the issue.

"What many people may not know is that polluters are paying the lion's share of Superfund clean up costs. Historically, some 70 percent of costs have been paid by polluters. According to the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, 87 percent of the cost of new clean ups in 2003 were paid by polluters," said Sununu in a statement read by Collins.

The polluter tax expired in 1995 and was not renewed. CLEAR's letter described Sununu and Sen. Judd Gregg, R-NH, as both voting against making polluters pay for Superfund clean up. Sununu disagreed.

"As a long-time supporter of superfund reform, I have joined my congressional colleagues in approving more than $3.8 million in federal resources to help clean up Superfund sites, and I strongly support an additional $1.38 billion in federal funds budgeted thus far for next year. I have consistently supported extending Superfund taxes as part of comprehensive Superfund reform," said the senator, who cited several bills he has cosponsored to achieve Superfund reform and bring back the polluters tax.

"Each of these bills includes a recommendation that the Superfund tax on specific businesses be reimposed as part of a comprehensive approach to hazardous waste clean up," he said.

"Obviously this is a matter of grave trepidation for us, especially for the downstream residents of Claremont, the CLEAR letter reads. "Both the citizens of Newport and Claremont fear the day that they will face environmental degradation of Superfund proportions at the site, It is recognized by many that ash monofills like ours are Superfund sites in the making and it is only matter of time before it becomes apparent."

The Newport ash landfill was closed three years ago, but it remains a hot topic. As the solid waste project approaches its likely end in 2007, one of its goals is to sell off its assets, including the ash landfill. At next month's executive committee meeting, a vote may be taken to hire an engineering firm to assess the current health of the landfill and potential problems in the future. As required by the state, the project has a trust fund established for post-closure monitoring for 30 years.

Newport has expressed interest in obtaining a conservation easement to prevent the rest of the land owned by the project at the landfill from being used as a landfill.

April 15, 2004
Groups protest Superfund clean up funding
Washington Times

(UPI) -- A network of environmental groups Thursday reminded taxpayers at post offices in 25 states their dollars fund the clean up of Superfund sites. The groups said taxpayers will pay upwards of $1.27 billion for the Superfund program because the Bush administration has failed to hold corporate polluters responsible.

"It is wrong to have taxpayers pay for Superfund while industries associated with toxic contamination that poisons our water, soil and air continue to get a free pass on these costs," said Lois Marie Gibbs, executive director of the Center for Health, Environment & Justice, a member of the network.

The "polluter pay" taxes -- laws that require the polluters to take financial responsibility for their own pollution -- expired in 1995, but the groups urged the reinstatement of them to replenish the federal Superfund. "Reinstating Superfund's polluter pay taxes must happen to fulfill Superfund's original intent of a fair and equitable approach to cleaning up toxic waste sites," said Gibbs.

April 15, 2004
Tax-day protesters think polluters should foot bill
Portsmouth News

PORTSMOUTH - Last-minute tax filers will be greeted at post offices here and in Concord, Claremont, Merrimack, Milford and Newport on April 15 by citizens concerned that their tax dollars are paying for the cleanup of Superfund toxic waste sites, while polluters are let off the hook.

Armed with the message that polluters - not taxpayers - should pay to clean up toxic waste sites, the National Environmental Trust will tell community about the amount of money the Bush administration is asking taxpayers to pay in New Hampshire, with the release of a new analysis outlining the cost of Superfund to taxpayers.

The National Environmental Trust will join the BE SAFE network, including the Center for Health, Environment and Justice, the Sierra Club, U.S. PIRG, and NET affiliates in other states, to hold Polluter Pay Tax Day events in more than 20 states across the country. Additional information can be found on the group's Web site at www.besafenet.com.

Last October, the federal Superfund toxic waste cleanup program ran out of polluter-contributed funds, according to the opposing group, leaving taxpayers to shoulder the financial burden. Reinstating the polluter pays fees is a fair and fiscally sound solution that would ensure the cleanup of toxic waste sites and protect the health of American communities. New Hampshire got hit hard. Both the Mohawk Tannery site in Nashua and the New Hampshire Plating Company site in Merrimack received insufficient dollars for cleanup.

The Portsmouth event will run from 8 a.m. to 1 p.m., at 80 Daniel St. For more information, contact the National Environmental Trust, Rich Bianculli, at 436-7356 or 508-335-9005, or send e-mail to vermont22@comcast.net

April 15, 2004
Groups rally to reinstate tax on polluters
You make a mess, you clean it up.
The Daily Oakland Press

But environmentalists say that lesson is lost on the Bush administration, which has refused to reauthorize "polluters pay" fees that once funded toxic waste site cleanups.Now, say environmentalists, cleanups of the nation's worst toxic waste sites - including in Oakland County - are being done with general fund money.

The Sierra Club and other environmental groups say they want taxpayers to know that they - and not the companies that make the products that caused the pollution - are footing the cleanup bill. They've organized a Tax Day protest 5-7 tonight at the U.S. Postal Service Office, 200 W Second St. in Royal Oak.

Gayle Miller, conservation program director for the Sierra Club's Mackinac Chapter, said the administration has not asked for reauthorization of Superfund fees - a cleanup program launched in 1980 in the wake of the Love Canal environmental disaster in Niagara Falls, N.Y. The fund ran out of money last fall.

Congress stopped authorizing the fees, paid by the petroleum and chemical industries, as well as a corporate surtax, in 1995. While the Clinton administration asked every year for the fees to be reauthorized, the Bush administration has not done so.

"Because that has not been reauthorized, the burden of doing the cleanups has fallen on the taxpayers," said Miller.

Bruce Hoeft, associate regional representative for the Sierra Club at the group's Oakland County office in Clawson, said cleanups are either not done or are delayed.

"Now some of your tax money is going into cleanups, whereas it used to be the polluters that paid," said Hoeft.

But Angela Logomasino, director of risk and environmental policy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C., said the fees were not truly "polluter pays," that all petroleum and chemical companies had to pay, whether they had caused a problem or not.

"It's unjust in my opinion to punish somebody who never did anything wrong," she said.

She also said the EPA can collect money from polluters through lawsuits and by using consent agreements.

And Jeff Stormo, a spokesman for the Michigan Republican Party, called the Sierra Club a "group of environmental extremists who are disingenuous in their attacks on the president."

"President Bush's budget includes $150 million to accelerate Superfund cleanup," he said. "If they were serious about supporting true environmental policies they would support President Bush's Clear Skies (air pollution) initiative."

At least five Oakland County sites are listed by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency as either being currently or previously on the National Priorities List.

The list shows hazardous waste sites in the country that are eligible for long-term Superfund cleanups. The list includes two sites in Rose Township and individual sites in Highland and Springfield townships and Rochester Hills.

The Springfield site, currently in the final phase of cleanup, was Michigan's first toxic emergency site. It was discovered in 1971 and rediscovered in 1979.

About 1,500 barrels containing industrial waste from companies such as Chrysler Corp., Ford Motor Company and General Motors were dumped on 20 acres of private property on Woodland Trail in the late 1960s by now-deceased waste hauler Tucker Ford.

That site was cleaned up through a consent order, said Nancy Strole, Springfield Township clerk. The responsible parties agreed to pay an estimated $8-9 million.

"This was a situation where the responsible parties actually paid for the cleanup, so no fund money was used," she said.

"Our concern was if we had to rely on using the Superfund monies for that site in Springfield Township, we still would perhaps be waiting for a cleanup," said Strole.

"The number of sites out there, in my understanding, is so great and where this site would have ranked in the scheme of things ... this site would have probably been far down on the list."

Still, Springfield was fortunate that the responsible companies - 10 in total - entered into the consent decree. Other communities with so-called "orphan" sites - where there is no responsible party or the party is not able to pay for a cleanup - might not be so lucky.

"If there aren't monies in that fund, and if there aren't the responsible parties to step up to the plate and pay for that cleanup, how is it going to be done?" said Strole. "It's not."

Hoeft and Miller said the protesters will be outside the post office and will not interfere with postal workers and long lines of people trying to file their tax returns before the midnight deadline.

April 14, 2004
ChannelOklahoma.com
House Passes Tar Creek Relocation Plan, Health Insurance Bill
Representatives Approve Two Of Governor's Key Proposals

OKLAHOMA CITY -- The House passed two key parts of Gov. Brad Henry's policy agenda Tuesday. A measure aimed at moving families with young children away from the Tar Creek Superfund site passed on a 78-18 vote. The Senate bill is Governor Brad Henry's proposal to spend $5 million to buy the homes of families who have children 6 years old or younger.

Young children have been shown to be the most susceptible to developing health problems linked to lead exposure. Henry said the state should move quickly to get the most vulnerable children out of harm's way. The bill now heads back to the Senate for consideration of House amendments. The House also approved a proposal to expand health care coverage to about 600,000 uninsured Oklahomans.

The bill's author, Rep. M.C. Leist, said the bill would create a pilot premium assistance program that would help small businesses and their eligible employees buy employer-sponsored insurance or buy into a state-sponsored benefit plan. The bill passed 85-11 Tuesday and now heads to the governor's desk. Several Republican legislators opposed the bill. They said the insurance would be a government handout to able-bodied, working Oklahomans who should be responsible for paying their own health care costs.

April 15, 2004
Greenwatch Today
On Tax Day, Taxpayers Paying for Polluters' Clean-Up

As Americans stream into post offices across the country today to mail their tax returns, their task will be made even less palatable when they learn that the Bush administration is now charging the public -- rather than polluters -- for the clean-up of Superfund sites.

The BE SAFE Network, a joint project of several national, state, and local environmental groups, is organizing community events in 26 states to highlight how the Bush administration is using tax dollars to clean up contaminated sites, rather than follow the traditional practice of collecting fees from corporate polluters. Despite federal law mandating that the polluters should pay, the public is underwriting toxic cleanups.[1]

A new tax analysis by U.S. PIRG, a member of the Be Safe network, has determined that taxpayers will spend upwards of $1.27 billion for toxics cleanups this year, compared to $303 million in 1995. In Ohio, for example, the state paid $9.9 million towards cleanup of 29 Superfund sites in 1995; in 2004, Ohio will pay nearly $41.3 million. Pennsylvania, with 92 Superfund sites, will spend nearly $50.7 million in 2004, compared to $12.2 million in 1995.[2]

"On Tax Day, Americans are especially concerned about how their tax dollars are being spent. Unfortunately, with the Superfund toxic waste program, the Bush administration is using tax dollars instead of making corporate polluters pay to clean up their toxic messes," said Carl Pope, executive director of the Sierra Club, another member of the network. "Americans are paying twice: once with their health and again with their taxes."

Local groups are distributing "polluter pay" stickers at over 40 events around the country, for taxpayers to place on their envelopes to the IRS. "We're reaching out to our neighbors this Tax Day," said Kendra Kimbirauskas of the Sierra Club in Oregon, "to let people know that whether or not there is a Superfund site in your backyard like we have in Portland, all taxpayers are now footing the bill for toxic waste cleanups."[3]

As reported by BushGreenwatch (Mar. 1, 2004), Congress established Superfund in 1980. It empowered the Environmental Protection Agency to order polluters to clean up sites contaminated by their business activities or other ventures. Polluters also funded a trust to pay for cleanup of sites where a responsible polluter could not afford to pay, could not be found, or was no longer in existence. These mandates constitute the "polluter pays principle."

The Bush administration is opposed to restoring industry fees to Superfund. U.S. PIRG and Sierra Club report that under the Bush administration, funding to the program has dropped by 25% in the last three years compared to levels during the 1990s; the rate of cleanups has fallen by over 50%; and, the number of sites being listed has declined from an average of 30 per year from 1993-2000 to an average of 23.[4]

###

TAKE ACTION
Send a letter to the editor or your senators through Be Safe or
attend a Polluter Pay Tax Day event in your area.

###

SOURCES:
[1] Sierra Club Press Release, April 14, 2004.
[2] U.S. PIRG, Cost of Superfund to Taxpayers 2004.
[3] Sierra Club Press Release, op. cit.
[4] BushGreenwatch, Mar. 1, 2004.

April 8, 2004
Ex-federal Superfund official indicted
Associated Press
LOS ANGELES (AP) - The former head of the federal Superfund environmental cleanup program was indicted on charges she concocted an elaborate scheme to defraud a client who had hired her consulting firm to clean up a contaminated site. Rita Marie Lavelle, 57, who served as an assistant administrator in the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency during the Reagan administration, was charged Wednesday with wire fraud and making false statements to federal agents. Robert Cole, 67, also was indicted for wire fraud.

Lavelle forged documents to make it appear that the owner of a company ordered by the EPA to clean up a contaminated site owed Cole's hazardous waste storage company, DeNova Environmental, more than $52,000, prosecutors said. Lavelle owns NuTech Enterprises, an environmental consulting firm.

Lavelle and Cole allegedly used the forged documents to obtain $36,441 from Capital Partners USA Inc., which advances money to clients based on expected accounts receivable.

Lavelle was previously convicted of perjury for lying in testimony to Congress in December 1982. She was fired two months after the testimony in a scandal that also forced the resignation of the agency's chief.

Prosecutors in that case said Lavelle lied when she told Congress she did not know her former employer, Aerojet-General Corp., was involved in a toxic waste enforcement case. She was sentenced to six months in prison and fined $10,000.

For several years, the infamous Love Canal has been about as clean as it's going to get. The houses adjacent to the upstate New York site have found new buyers more than two decades after toxic chemicals dumped there by industry after World War II seeped into houses and a school, leading to the creation of the Superfund to clean up this and other badly contaminated sites across the nation. The Love Canal toxins have long been capped and vented; all that remains is continued monitoring.

The Environmental Protection Agency now proposes taking Love Canal off the Superfund list -- a successful cleanup, rightly paid for by polluter Hooker Chemical Co. (now Occidental Chemical Corp.) and a feather in the EPA's cap. The question is how many more success stories the Superfund can produce.

As with Love Canal, a majority of the current 1,200 Superfund cleanups are funded under the "polluter pays" principle. But a trust fund for "orphan sites," where it's hard to pin down a responsible party, has run out of money after Congress allowed an excise tax on oil and chemical companies to expire in 1995. Now those cleanups are paid for by taxpayers out of general revenues.

The Bush administration didn't create this problem, but it hasn't done much to help either. Unlike the Clinton administration, it has not proposed bringing back the excise tax. Instead, it has used the excuse of less funding to propose adding fewer sites to the list -- less than half the number averaged during the Clinton administration.

Legislation by Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) to renew the excise tax until 2014 has been languishing in committee for a year. Congress should pull it from obscurity and get it passed, with or without the president's help.

Nor should the lack of money keep the EPA from adding new noxious sites to the Superfund roster. It is impossible to gauge how badly the nation is falling behind the intent of the original Superfund law without knowing how many poisoned sites still threaten communities. The sickened residents of Love Canal were forced to fight with authorities as well as industry to recognize their plight; no neighborhood should have to do that again. A full return to the business of toxic cleanup would be an even more heartening symbol of Love Canal's rebirth than taking it off the list.

April1, 2004
12 defendants settle case, agree to clean up N.Y. Superfund site
Waste News

OYSTER BAY, N.Y. (April 1) -- The federal government has settled a civil environmental case with 12 defendants to clean up the Liberty Industrial Finishing Superfund site in Oyster Bay, N.Y.

The defendants have agreed to pay $32.8 million to remediate the former metal finishing site. The total cost of cleanup activities, which includes past costs, is expected to exceed $46 million. With the Sept. 30 settlement, the defendants will pay more than 90 percent of those costs.

During World War II and through 1957, the predecessors of two of the defendants, Coltec Industries and Goodrich Corp., and the U.S. government made airplane parts at the site.

From 1957 to 1984, a variety of operations, including a metal plating and finishing business and a fiberglass product manufacturer, used the industrial park. The companies that owned property or operated at the site during that time were Coltec, Goodrich, Koch-Glitsch LP, Beazer East Inc., Liberty Associates and William Heller. From 1980 to 1986, Jefry Rosmarin, Jan Burman and Jerome Lazarus owned property or operated at the site. Since 1987, the defendants Cubbies Properties Inc., 55 Motor Avenue Co., J. Jay Tannenbaum and Jefry Rosmarin owned property or operated at the industrial park.

March 29, 2004
EPA deems Love Canal cleanup complete
By: Bruce Geiselman, Waste News

The federal government has completed cleanup work at Love Canal - the toxic site that spawned the creation of the Superfund program - and officials want to remove the site from the program's National Priorities List.

``This is a landmark day for Niagara County,'' Jane M. Kenny, an Environmental Protection Agency regional administrator, said March 17. ``By taking the Love Canal site off the Superfund list, we will mark a turning point for the nation.''

The EPA continues to monitor sites deleted from the National Priorities List, and they remain eligible for cleanups in the unlikely event that a change in site conditions would warrant such an action, the agency said.

However, at least one former Love Canal area resident who originally organized neighbors to demand a cleanup said she believes the cleanup is not complete and that people should not be living in the area.

The 70-acre Love Canal site encompasses a hazardous waste landfill at which 20,000 tons of toxic chemicals were dumped between 1942 and 1952. After the dump closed, homes, buildings and schools were constructed nearby. In the 1960s and 1970s residents began complaining of odors, and studies showed that numerous toxic chemicals were migrating from the landfill and contaminating nearby waterways.

Dioxins and other contaminants migrated from the landfill to the sewers, which had outfalls into nearby creeks. Beginning in 1978, 950 families were evacuated from a 10-block area around the Canal.

And in 1980, Congress passed the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act, which created the Superfund program.

The program has spent hundreds of millions of dollars installing a synthetic liner and clay cap, a drainage system, and a leachate collection and drainage system.

Occidental Chemical Corp., the successor company of Hooker Chemicals and Plastics, has reimbursed the federal government for more than $129 million and the state of New York for $98 million. Hooker Chemicals disposed of more than 21,000 tons of chemicals including halogenated organics, pesticides, chlorobenzenes and dioxin on the property, according to the EPA.

Lois Gibbs, a resident of the Love Canal section of Niagara Falls at the time, helped organized the group of residents who demanded the cleanup of the property. She believes the decision to delist the site is political.

The answer, she said, is that the EPA wants the positive publicity to counteract a backlash stemming from the administration's controversial decision not to back a proposal to reinstate the Superfund tax on chemical and oil companies.

As part of the cleanup effort, about 200 homes on the north end have been rehabilitated and sold to residents. The EPA describes it as a thriving community. But Gibbs said she doesn't believe families should be living there.

``There's no way they're going to be able to contain this [remaining pollution], and putting people in there is just asking for a repeat of what we've already seen,'' Gibbs said.

The public comment period on the EPA's proposal to delete Love Canal and two additional Niagara County sites from the Superfund list will run until April 16.

Additional information is available by viewing the Federal Register for March 17 online at www.epa.gov/fedrgstr or calling the Superfund Hotline at (800) 424-9346.

Contact Waste News government affairs editor Bruce Geiselman at (330) 865-6172 or bgeiselman@crain.com

March 28, 2004
Pollution and the Slippery Meaning of 'Clean'
By Anthony DePalma, The New York Times

When the outrage over Love Canal was at its height, more than 20 years ago, hundreds of families had to be evacuated from their homes after 21,000 tons of chemicals buried beneath them started oozing into their basements and contaminating their groundwater.

Today, families are once again settled in the same neighborhood in upstate New York, now rechristened Black Creek Village. They live in neat, new ranch houses and federal officials recently announced that they now consider this notorious symbol of industrial pollution clean.

But what does clean mean when the pollutants that rendered Love Canal dangerous to humans remain exactly where they were? In fact, there is no accepted standard, and clean, in practical terms, often means still polluted - but in a different and less dangerous way.

The Environmental Protection Agency, for example, has deleted 278 sites from the 1,200 on the Superfund national priorities list (the fund itself was created partly in reaction to Love Canal). Each has been defined as clean in a different way, and with few exceptions the offending pollutants were never removed.

What makes the notion of clean so slippery is the relative newness of the idea of decontaminating industrial sites and the unpalatable truth that treating pollution, even rendering it harmless, almost never means getting rid of it. The sin, once committed, cannot be entirely undone, and this is something no one really wants to hear.

Politicians "can't politically make the jump to telling the public that they have to accept a certain amount of contamination," said Michael B. Moore, an environmental consultant from Vermont who is chairman of the Superfund task force of the National Ground Water Association, a professional group with a special interest in cleaning up contaminated sites.

When federal officials put Love Canal on the Superfund list, some residents thought they knew what clean meant.

"We were led to believe that they were going to go in with bulldozers, take 20,000 tons of waste out of Love Canal and clean up the neighborhood so we could live there," said Lois Marie Gibbs, whose home had to be demolished because the ground beneath it dripped with chemicals.

Never having undertaken a project like Love Canal, federal officials had no idea how much contamination was buried there until they started testing the soil. They quickly realized that the volume of hazardous waste was enormous, and that removing the rusting and dented chemical drums was riskier than leaving them there.

Then, in a pattern followed at many other sites, the government and the Hooker Chemical Company (now the Occidental Chemical Corporation), capped the chemical swamp with a thick layer of clay, installed pumps and drains to control runoff and ripped up miles of contaminated sewer pipe. The chemicals themselves were left in the ground, surrounded by a cyclone fence.

Jane M. Kenny, the E.P.A. regional administrator, insisted that no standards were lowered in removing Love Canal from the Superfund list. Even though the chemicals haven't been removed, she said, the $400 million cleanup has contained the pollution and reduced the health risks, which is the cleanup standard the agency aims for.

"I know that saying clean makes people crazy," she said, "but in terms of Love Canal, the area is now protective of the environment, the site is contained and we believe that we have eliminated the exposure."

The chasm between the government's definition of clean and community expectations hasn't narrowed in 20 years.

"If she says Love Canal's cleaned up, that's just a blatant lie," said Ms. Gibbs, now executive director of the Center for Health, Environment and Justice, which works with communities facing environmental problems."

When Congress established the Superfund in 1980, it deliberately refrained from setting a single standard, insisting only that the E.P.A. protect health and the environment in a cost-effective way.

The gold standard was a level of cleanliness where there was only a one in a million chance that there would be more cancer in the area than normal. But that was not a practical goal at many cleanup sites, including Love Canal, where the level of risk of additional cancers is now reckoned at one in 10,000.

The E.P.A. will not certify a site as clean in which the risk of additional cancers exceeds one in 10,000.

The term brownfields is another way of defining clean and saying the politically unspeakable - that a certain amount of contamination will always be with us. Brownfields are former industrial sites that are cleaned just enough so the remaining risk is compatible with the way the land will be reused. Owners get to define clean one way if they intend to build, say, a parking lot, and another if they plan to build homes.

March 29, 2004
The lessons of Love Canal
All these years later, a mother is back urging Congress to strengthen the Superfund and clean up toxic waste
The Oregonian, Editorial

L ois Gibbs' work ought to be done. The federal government has just declared Love Canal, where Gibbs organized her neighbors 25 years ago to demand the cleanup of toxic waste that sickened their families, safe and ready to be taken off the nation's Superfund list.

Yet the "mother of the Superfund," as Gibbs is known, was in no mood to celebrate during a visit to Portland last Monday. Speaking to students at the Environmental Middle School, she criticized Congress for failing to reauthorize the corporate taxes that once helped pay for many toxic cleanups.

The Superfund was born from public revulsion over the toxic cesspool at Love Canal, N.Y., which caused Gibbs' children and hundreds of other people to suffer from epilepsy, asthma and urinary tract infections. President Jimmy Carter declared an emergency evacuation and moved 900 families out of Love Canal in 1980.

The Superfund was designed to ensure that corporations were made to pay to clean up their toxic wastes. For two decades, the fund worked as Gibbs and other early advocates intended. Polluters who could be identified and tied to specific toxic sites were required to pay for the cleanup. The Superfund, supported by taxes on corporations, paid for the cleanup of "orphaned" sites, where no one could be held responsible for the pollution.

Those corporate taxes expired in 1995, however, and now there's no money left in the fund. In a close vote on March 11, the U.S. Senate rejected legislation that would have reinstated the corporate taxes and rebuilt the trust fund. Sen. Gordon Smith, R-Ore., was among the 52 senators who refused to reauthorize the Superfund taxes.

Smith argues that there are other, fairer ways to pay for orphaned Superfund sites, including the polluted Portland harbor of the Willamette River. Smith also vows that when the time comes to pay for cleaning up orphaned pollution in the harbor, he will make sure that federal funding is available.

That's a significant commitment, but the harbor cleanup remains years away. When the bill comes due for the orphaned pollution in Portland, Smith may not have the political leverage he has now, or he may not even still be in the U.S. Senate.

In our view, the corporate taxes that have made the Superfund so effective in recent years are better than the most likely alternative -- using general tax dollars to pay for cleanups. The Superfund was built on the proper principle that those most closely associated with creating toxic waste sites should bear the financial burden of cleaning them up. As Gibbs says, it's wrong to stick the public with those costs.

There's irony in the federal government's announcement that it is prepared to remove Love Canal from the Superfund list just as Congress failed to renew support for the successful toxic waste cleanup program.

Love Canal is a symbol not only of the dangers of toxic waste but also of the need for the government to protect ordinary citizens, like Lois Gibbs and her family, from corporate misbehavior. Just as the Love Canal is declared safe, its lessons seem to be fading.

March 23, 2004
Sierra Club ads target Bush on toxic waste cleanup
By Sam Hananel, Associated Press

WASHINGTON - The Sierra Club has launched a new series of ads charging the Bush administration with failing to make corporations clean up abandoned toxic waste sites.

The ads, running on television or radio in four cities, blame Bush for not supporting reinstatement of the so-called "polluter pays" tax that funded expensive cleanup of federal Superfund sites. The tax levied on the manufacturers of toxic chemicals expired in 1995 and the Superfund, which boasted $3.6 billion in reserve at its peak, ran out of money last year.

Sierra Club spokeswoman Annie Strickler said that forces ordinary taxpayers - not polluters - to foot the bill for cleaning up some of the worst toxic waste sites. There are nearly 1,300 Superfund National Priority sites in the United States.

"The advertising is just an effort to make people more aware of these Bush administration policies that threaten their health and safety," Strickler said. "If President Bush supported the polluter pays principle, we could get the money back into this polluter trust fund and the money wouldn't be coming from taxpayer revenues," she said.

Television ads began running Monday in Philadelphia, Detroit and Tampa, Fla., and a radio ad debuted Tuesday in Omaha, Neb. The ads highlight several toxic waste cleanup sites: the former Velsicol Chemical Co. plant site in St. Louis, Mich.; the Franklin Slag Pile in the Port Richmond section of Philadelphia; the Coronet Industries plant site in Plant City, Fla.; and the lead contamination site in eastern Omaha.

The Bush administration has said it will not support the tax until Superfund is overhauled. Critics of the tax are concerned that it's not linked to a company's actual environmental record.

The Sierra Club, the nation's largest and oldest environmental organization, ran ads earlier this year before Bush's annual State of the Union address, highlighting what it claims is Bush's dismal record on policies involving toxic mercury.

The environmental group also spent at least $350,000 on ads last year in New Hampshire, Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Florida, Nevada and Nebraska criticizing Bush's environmental record.

Also this week, the activist group Moveon.org will release a television and print ad campaign critical of the president's plan to give power plants more time to install new technology aimed at reducing mercury pollution.

The TV ad will feature a poison symbol morphing into a happy face on a child's lunchbox to highlight the dangers children face from mercury emissions. In December, the Bush administration placed mercury under a less stringent category of the Clean Air Act, so it can be regulated using a program allowing companies to buy pollution credits from other plants

March 23, 2004
Polluters, not taxpayers, should foot the bill
By Carl Pope, Maimi Hearld.com

Earlier this month, the U.S. Senate missed a golden opportunity to hold polluters accountable for cleaning up their toxic messes under the Superfund toxic-waste cleanup program. The measure, an amendment to the Budget Bill to reinstate the ''polluter pays'' fees, lost 44-52, but gained strong bipartisan support. Florida Senators Bob Graham and Bill Nelson voted yes because they recognize the importance of cleaning up toxic-waste sites. This vote increases the pressure on the Bush administration to put the health and safety of communities before corporate polluters.

The landmark program ran out of polluter-contributed funds last year, and the amendment would have relieved taxpayers of the significant financial burden of cleaning up abandoned toxic-waste sites. Since the Superfund cleanup program came into existence in 1980, every president has collected or supported the polluter-pays principle - until now.

The rate of site listings and cleanups will continue to spiral downward under this administration without a dedicated source of funding like the Superfund Trust Fund. With the current trust fund bankrupt of polluter funds, even the nation's worst toxic waste sites must now compete with other important environmental programs for scarce resources.

Take, for instance, the Anodyne Inc. site in North Miami, a manufacturer of anodized aluminum products, which filed for bankruptcy in 1977. Today, the EPA considers the site an ''orphan'' in need of Trust Fund monies. Chemical discharges are reaching the Biscayne Aquifer, the sole source of drinking water in South Florida, and the toxic plume is within three miles of the water supply of 150,000 people. Volatile organic compounds in the underground toxic plume have been linked to a variety of health impacts, including liver and kidney damage and harm to the immune systems.

With more than 1,200 toxic-waste sites nationwide still in need of cleanup, a dwindling polluter trust fund to clean them up puts our communities and environment at risk. Already, one in four Americans, including 10 million children, lives within a short bicycle ride of a toxic-waste site. The polluter-funded trust ran out of polluter-contributed funds in October 2003, according to a recent General Accounting Office report. Taxpayers are now stuck footing the entire bill, leaving communities to pay not only with their health when they live near one of these sites but with their taxes too. The underfunding of the Superfund toxic waste program leaves communities across the country at a higher risk due to declining cleanup rates.

Once a site is listed on the Superfund National Priority List, it takes, on average, 11 years before the cleanup is complete. And, without the polluter-funded trust fund, the cleanup program will now have to compete with other cash-strapped federal environmental programs. The rate of completed cleanups has fallen by 50 percent during the Bush administration, compared to 1997-2000, and site listings have slowed down as well. The Bush administration has added an average of 23 sites a year to the Superfund list compared with an average of 30 sites from 1993 to 2000, a drop of 23 percent.

This year, American taxpayers will pay about $1.1 billion for the Superfund program, an increase of about 400 percent since the fee expired in 1995. According to a Congressionally-mandated study concerning the future of the Superfund program, the cost of implementing the program between 2000 and 2009 ranges from $14 billion to $16.4 billion. Underfunding the cleanup program for America's toxic-waste sites is yet another example of corporate financial gain trumping public health and safety under the Bush administration's watch.

We teach our children that they are responsible for cleaning up the messes that they make, and the Bush administration should demand no less of corporate polluters. Instead, they are letting wealthy corporations off the hook, strapping taxpayers with the cleanups depriving us of the tools necessary to do the cleanups, and saddling future generations with a legacy of toxic waste, disease and economic hardships. Is it fair to make Americans pay twice for toxic cleanups -- once with their health and again with their taxes?

There is a better way. Polluters should pay to clean up abandoned toxic-waste sites -- as they did from 1980 through 1995. It is a sound fiscal measure that would enhance revenues and help cut the skyrocketing deficit. The Bush administration should relieve taxpayers of the unnecessary financial burden and move forward to protect the health and safety of families and communities.

March 20, 2004
Guest Opinion: Superfund shrinks while polluters don't pay
By Sandy Weiss, State Representative, Billings Gazette

As a Montana state legislator, I am concerned about the continued environmental and public health effects of National Priority List Superfund sites throughout our state. However, I am writing as a taxpayer who lived in a Superfund site in Billings - the Lockwood Solvents Site. Sites like this depend on polluters contributing to the cleanup, but the Superfund Trust has been almost depleted since the "polluter pays" fee expired in 1995. On March 11, the U.S. Senate had an opportunity to renew the fee but chose to side with industry rather than public health.

Sen. Baucus' clear and unyielding support for the "polluter pays" program should be commended. His vote to renew the fee as a means to ensure that Superfund sites in Montana and across the nation are cleaned up in a timely and effective manner demonstrates that public health is important to him. I thank Baucus for again voting in favor of the "polluter pays" fee and making toxic waste cleanup a priority.

Voting against Montana

Montana has 14 National Priority List sites at various stages of cleanup. This list of unfinished projects includes Libby, Tenmile Creek, East Helena, Carpenter-Snow Creek site near Niehart, Barker Hughesville Mining District, the Anaconda Smelter, Basin Mining Area, Milltown Reservoir Sediments, Burlington Northern Livingston Complex, Silverbow Creek/Butte Area, and Lockwood Solvent Ground Water Plume near Billings. With less and less money in Superfund, the likelihood of timely and effective cleanup of these sites and sites all across our nation is greatly diminished.

The Lockwood Solvent Ground Water Plume Site is located on the outskirts of Billings and consists of chlorinated solvent contamination in soils and groundwater. The primary contaminants of concern are the volatile organic compounds tetrachloroethene (PCE), trichloroethene (TCE), dichloroethene (DCE), vinyl chloride (VC) and carbon tetrachloride. Based on current data, the contaminated groundwater plume is estimated to extend from Rosebud Lane to the south and Klenck Lane and Maier Road to the east and the Yellowstone River to the north and west.

Lockwood contamination

Considering the potential health threats toxic waste sites pose, proper and timely cleanup should be a priority. However, Superfund's mounting fiscal shortfall will likely delay cleanup and prolong the potential danger to the community. According to a recent report by the Environmental Protection Agency's inspector general, the cleanup of Superfund sites has slowed down in recent years due to lack of funding. During late 1990s, an average of 80 Superfund sites were cleaned up per year, while in the past three years this number has been cut in half.

Without additional Superfund money, communities in need of cleanup will be competing against one another for funds from the dwindling trust. In many cases, taxpayers may have no choice but to absorb cleanup costs, which is unacceptable in this time of deficits and tight budgets, especially when polluting industries can afford to contribute their share. Adequate funding for Superfund would help ensure that this does not happen and that our communities are provided comprehensive cleanups in a suitable timeframe.

Industry responsibility

Unfortunately, Superfund may not have another chance this year. I'm confident that Baucus will continue to make Montanans' health a priority. I hope Burns sees fit to make toxic waste and public health a priority also, because future generations of Montanans depend on it.

March 22, 2004
Delisting Love Canal
The New York Times, Editorial

Last week, the Environmental Protection Agency announced that it was proposing to remove Love Canal from its Superfund list, the federal roster of the most contaminated toxic waste sites in the country. This is in many senses a historic moment because Love Canal is the most historic of those sites. It is synonymous with many things besides toxic waste, including corporate negligence, governmental neglect and community activism. It is above all synonymous with the establishment of the Superfund itself, which was designed to make sure that corporations were made to pay to clean up sites that they had contaminated.

There is now a landfill -- a green mound perforated by pipes -- over the canal itself, and New York began selling houses more than a decade ago in the then-vacant neighborhood north of the site, a place now called Black Creek Village. Delisting Love Canal is a way of saying that the area is clean, the event over, history done, though the agency has promised to monitor the site and intervene with additional cleanup if necessary.

The irony of delisting Love Canal is that it comes at a time when the Superfund has been seriously weakened. Polluters continue to pay for a majority of the cleanups, but only when the polluter can be clearly identified. Congress has allowed to lapse the special corporate taxes that once underwrote the "orphan fund" used to clean sites whose pedigrees were historically and legally obscure. That, plus the Bush administration's lack of aggressiveness, has dramatically slowed the rate at which sites are being cleaned up.

Removing Love Canal from a federal list should not mean removing it from our historical memory. It should be made a kind of national historic toxic waste site, a reminder of just what can go wrong -- and what can go right -- when corporate, governmental and community interests collide. Love Canal represents one of those moments when ordinary Americans discovered that they would have to fight for their own welfare against corporate interests and against the governmental echo of those interests. The law that established the Superfund is a monument to that moment, and a reminder of a time when the federal government was still willing to side with ordinary citizens.

March 21, 2004
Superfund cleanup - live and close-up
In Toms River, the public can view the removal of drums of chemical waste.
By Jacqueline L. Urgo, Philadelphia Inquirer

TOMS RIVER , N.J. - From a 20-foot pit of deep-orange earth on the sprawling Ciba-Geigy Chemical Corp. grounds, 35,000 rusted drums containing chemical waste are being pulled out one by one.

This is a 1,350-acre Superfund site - one of about 150 in New Jersey that are considered by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to be priority for cleanup.

Here, electronic monitors measuring air quality abound, and two dozen workers are covered head-to-toe in breathing masks and white Tyvek suits because they are not sure what will come out of the ground.

But this place, once home to the largest and most revered employer in Ocean County , is probably the most high-profile of all the sites on the New Jersey list.

For the first time in the history of Superfund cleanups in the region, the public has a front-row seat for the drum-remediation process, which began in January.

It is an EPA-ordered cleanup that is expected to take more than eight years and cost Ciba Specialty Chemicals, formerly Ciba-Geigy, more than $94 million, officials said.

"We've had sections of other sites open in the past, but we have gone out of our way to make this one accessible because Ciba has always been such a huge part of the community and we felt it was needed to tell the full story here," said Romona Pezzella, EPA Region 2 site manager, who is overseeing the project.

It is a story that has had a lot of twists and turns but has always been at the forefront of whatever has gone on in the Toms River section of Dover Township , according to Township Commissioner Len Colica.

"For a long time, Ciba-Geigy was a giant in this community," said Colica, who volunteers on the township's environmental commission. "Just about everybody had some relationship to it in some way, whether they worked for the company or some member of their family did or they just lived near it."

Colica said just what would become of the Ciba property once the cleanup was finished was now a concern for local officials because it is the largest open tract of land left in Dover Township .

On what was once a rural site, the company formerly known as Toms River Chemical began in 1952 to produce dyes, epoxy resins and specialty chemicals used in the manufacture of clothing and household textiles.

The company buried solid and liquid wastes from the manufacturing process on the site, which are suspected of causing extensive soil and groundwater contamination on the property and in the wells of homes in the surrounding neighborhoods that grew up around the plant over the years.

Toms River Chemical was merged into Ciba-Geigy Chemical Corp. in the 1970s, and by then, the factory employed more than 4,000 workers - many of them residents of the Toms River area, where the population hovered then at around 10,000 people.

But in the 1980s, Ciba scaled back its production operations, and hundreds were laid off. And as the area's relationship with - and dependency on - Ciba cooled, the state Department of Environmental Protection discovered that the company had for years been burying drums of chemical wastes on 20 acres at the plant.

By the early 1990s, some residents were trying to link a high incidence of childhood cancers with Ciba and other companies that had been operating in Toms River .

In the mid-1990s, operations ceased at Ciba. In 2001, Ciba, along with Union Carbide Corp. and United Water Resources - without admitting fault - settled a $13.27 million lawsuit brought by some of the families of the affected children.

While statisticians have found other areas of the country with anomalous data, Toms River has ultimately become one of the few substantiated "cancer clusters" in the nation. The findings of a five-year study released in 2001 by the federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry found that prenatal exposure to polluted air and water in Toms River was associated with unusually high levels of leukemia in girls.

Ciba officials would not comment on the study or the lawsuit, saying only that no link between the chemical giant and the cancer cluster had ever been proved.

But Shelley Lynnworth, whose son died of brain cancer at age 18, cannot help but wonder whether the contamination at Ciba had something to do with her son's death.

The Lynnworth family used to live on Cardinal Drive , the closest neighborhood street to the area of the plant where the drums were buried.

Seventeen years after Randy Scott Lynnworth's death, his mother returned recently to see the remediation in progress.

"It was just as I thought it would be," Shelley Lynnworth said. "Just deteriorated drums that once held dangerous chemicals."

Lynnworth was among those who recently climbed to the top of a primitive, open-air two-story platform that has been built several hundred yards away from the giant pit where the rusty chemical barrels are being removed.

From the decades of decay, some of the drums literally fell apart at the seams as a crane delivered them to workers standing on the edge of the pit. Many onlookers were surprised that the drums were not oozing liquids but seemed to contain nothing more than clumps of dirt or chunks of mud, the EPA's Pezzella said.

Pezzella explained that might be because the drums never actually contained pure liquid chemicals, but instead were used to dispose of solids that had built up on machinery used in the production of the chemicals.

Additional viewing areas are expected to be opened on the property so the public may see how the approximately 150,000 cubic yards of contaminated soil found inside the drums and in the pit will be cleaned, or bioremediated.

Construction of the huge bioremediation facility is expected to be completed in April.

Nearby, a groundwater-treatment facility - built in 1996 at the start of the cleanup - is treating water on the site found to contain volatile organics created from the decades of chemical manufacturing. The system prevents untreated water from seeping into the groundwater, the nearby wetlands or the Toms River .

March 19, 2004
EPA: Job finished at Love Canal
The former chemical dump that inspired the Superfund should be taken off the list of worst sites, the agency said.
By Carolyn Thompson, AP, Philadelphia Inquirer

NIAGARA FALLS, N.Y. - Cleanup work at a former chemical dump that gave rise to the Superfund list has been completed, more than two decades after the environmental disaster forced the evacuation of an entire neighborhood, federal officials said.

The Environmental Protection Agency said that Love Canal should be taken off the Superfund list now that its cleanup work was done.

"By taking the Love Canal site off the Superfund list, we will mark a turning point for the nation," said Jane Kenny, the EPA's regional administrator. "This was the site that really started Superfund."

The Niagara Falls neighborhood had been built on and around a former chemical dump, and by the 1960s and '70s contaminated groundwater was leaching into backyards and school grounds.

President Jimmy Carter declared a federal emergency in 1978 and 1980, which led to the evacuation of about 900 families and the bulldozing of an elementary school and two streets built on the canal and the 21,800 tons of World War II-era chemical byproducts it holds.

Passage of the 1980 Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act, known as Superfund, soon followed.

The cleanup at Love Canal has centered on containing the waste under a thick clay cap and high-density polyethylene liner and surrounding it with a barrier drainage system. Areas deemed safe again have since been resettled as "Black Creek Village."

Under the new EPA proposal, the 70-acre site would continue to be monitored and remain eligible for any cleanup that might become necessary. The EPA's recommendation started the clock on a 30-day comment period.

Lois Gibbs, a former Love Canal homeowner and environmental activist, questioned the timing of the EPA proposal. Gibbs said the Bush administration was seeking to deflect criticism after a March 11 Senate vote against reauthorizing an expired user fee on corporations to fund environmental cleanup.

"This is a way for them to talk about how this is a turning point and that we're cleaning up these sites when in fact there's no money to clean up these sites," Gibbs said. "We have less cleanup and I think it's a big [public relations] thing and they're using Love Canal to cover their tracks."

EPA spokesman Mike Basile said the proposal's timing was related to last year's dissolution of a government-created agency that completed its mission to refurbish and sell off abandoned homes, and the completion in September of a five-year review of the site.

Occidental Chemical Corp., formerly Hooker Chemical & Plastics Corp., used the abandoned canal for its waste in the 1940s and 1950s. The company has paid more than $233 million since 1995 to cover cleanup costs and medical expenses for victims of the contamination and continues to pay for the site's monitoring.

March 18, 2003
EPA proposes removing Love Canal from Superfund
By Carolyn Thompson, AP Writer, News-Herald, FL

NIAGARA FALLS, N.Y. -- Federal environmental officials on Wednesday proposed removing Love Canal from the Superfund list it gave rise to more than 20 years ago.The Environmental Protection Agency said cleanup work has been completed at the site, which taught an unnerving lesson about hazardous waste when chemicals buried in an abandoned canal seeped into homes built around it.

"By taking the Love Canal site off the Superfund list, we will mark a turning point for the nation," said Jane Kenny, EPA's regional administrator. "This was the site that really started Superfund."

Under the proposal, which started the clock on a 30-day public comment period, the 70-acre site - the 16-acre canal and a buffer zone - would continue to be monitored and remain eligible for any cleanup that might become necessary.

Emergency declarations by President Jimmy Carter in 1978 and 1980 led to the evacuation of some 900 families and the bulldozing of an elementary school and two streets which had been built directly on the canal and the 21,800 tons of World War II-era chemical byproducts it holds.

Passage of the 1980 Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act, known as Superfund, soon followed.

Sen. Hillary Clinton called the completion of work at Love Canal "a sign of significant progress," but urged the EPA to pick up the pace of cleanups, which she said has fallen by roughly half under the Bush administration.

"While Love Canal marked the beginning of the Superfund, its successful clean up should, by no means, mark its demise," Clinton, D-N.Y., said.

Cleanup efforts have centered on containing the waste under a thick clay cap and high-density polyethylene liner and surrounding it with a barrier drainage system.

Areas deemed safe again have since been resettled as "Black Creek Village."

Lois Gibbs, a former Love Canal homeowner and environmental activist, questioned the timing of the EPA proposal to delist the site, suggesting the Bush administration was seeking to deflect criticism after a March 11 Senate vote against reauthorizing an expired user fee on corporations to fund environmental cleanup.

"Love Canal hasn't changed over the last five years. There's no more cleanup, everything has been status quo," said Gibbs, founder of the Center for Health, Environment and Justice. "I think what's changed is the recent Senate vote."

"This is a way for them to talk about how this is a turning point and that we're cleaning up these sites when in fact there's no money to clean up these sites," Gibbs said. "We have less cleanup and I think it's a big (public relations) thing and they're using Love Canal to cover their tracks."

EPA spokesman Mike Basile responded that the timing of the delisting was related to last year's dissolution of the government-created Love Canal Area Revitalization Agency after completing its mission to refurbish and sell off abandoned homes, and the completion last September of a five-year review of the site.

"This is very typical for EPA to delist sites once we've completed our work at the sites," Basile said.

Former Love Canal resident Barbara Quinby harbors doubts that the area is again safe to inhabit. "If it was safe I'd be living there," said Quinby, who grew up in Love Canal and links her daughter's mental retardation to chemical exposure. "How much longer before what they've contained leaks back out?"

Occidental Chemical Corp., formerly Hooker Chemical and Plastics Corp., used the abandoned canal for its waste in the 1940s and 1950s. The company has paid more than $233 million since 1995 to cover cleanup costs and medical expenses for victims of the contamination and continues to pay for the site's monitoring.

Exactly how the crisis has affected the long-term health of former residents remains unknown. The results of a five-year state study tracking birth defects, illness and deaths are expected in the near future.

March 18, 2004
First Superfund site, Love Canal , now said to be clean
USA Today

NIAGARA FALLS , N.Y. (AP) - Cleanup work at a former chemical dump that gave rise to the Superfund list has been completed, more than two decades after the environmental disaster forced the evacuation of an entire neighborhood, federal officials said. The Environmental Protection Agency said Wednesday that the Love Canal should be taken off the Superfund list now that its cleanup work is done.

"By taking the Love Canal site off the Superfund list, we will mark a turning point for the nation," said Jane Kenny, EPA's regional administrator. "This was the site that really started Superfund."

The Niagara Falls neighborhood had been built on and around a former chemical dump, and by the 1960s and '70s contaminated groundwater was leaching into back yards and school grounds.

President Carter declared a federal emergency in 1978 and 1980, which led to the evacuation of some 900 families and the bulldozing of an elementary school and two streets built on the canal and the 21,800 tons of World War II-era chemical byproducts it holds.

Passage of the 1980 Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act, known as Superfund, soon followed.

"This is a way for them to talk about how this is a turning point and that we're cleaning up these sites when in fact there's no money to clean up these sites," Gibbs said. "We have less cleanup and I think it's a big (public relations) thing and they're using Love Canal to cover their tracks."

EPA spokesman Mike Basile said that the proposal's timing was related to last year's dissolution of a government-created agency that completed its mission to refurbish and sell off abandoned homes, and the completion last September of a five-year review of the site.

"This is very typical for EPA to delist sites once we've completed our work at the sites," Basile said.

"If it was safe I'd be living there," said Quinby, who grew up in Love Canal . "How much longer before what they've contained leaks back out?"

Occidental Chemical Corp., formerly Hooker Chemical and Plastics Corp., used the abandoned canal for its waste in the 1940s and 1950s. The company has paid more than $233 million since 1995 to cover cleanup costs and medical expenses for victims of the contamination and continues to pay for the site's monitoring.

Exactly how the crisis has affected the long-term health of former residents remains unknown. The results of a five-year state study tracking birth defects, illness and deaths are expected in the near future.

"While Love Canal marked the beginning of the Superfund, its successful cleanup should, by no means, mark its demise."

The Bush administration recently proposed adding 11 new toxic waste sites to the priority cleanup list under the federal Superfund program. Unfortunately, these sites and others continue to threaten the health and safety of American communities and burden taxpayers with the cost of cleanup unless the Bush administration supports the "polluter pays" principle. Here in Pennsylvania, the West Ryeland Road Project, an arsenic-contaminated site in Berks County, was one of those just listed.

Although it is important to continue to recognize sites like West Ryeland Road, the rate of site listings and cleanups will continue to spiral downward under this administration without a dedicated source of funding like the Superfund Trust Fund. With the current trust fund bankrupt of polluter funds, even the nation's worst toxic waste sites must now compete with other important environmental programs for scarce resources.

By refusing to push for the renewal of the polluter-pays tax that expired in 1995, President Bush becomes the first president to oppose the principle that polluters should pay to clean up their messes since the Superfund toxic waste cleanup program came into being in 1980.

This year, American taxpayers will pay about $1.1 billion for the Superfund program, an increase of about 400 percent since the fee expired in 1995. We teach our children that they are responsible for cleaning up the messes that they make, and the Bush administration should demand no less of corporate polluters.

The toxic-cleanup news is better in South Florida than in Washington, where the Senate on Thursday refused to reinstate the Superfund polluter-pays tax. Crying "energy crisis," opponents said that oil and chemical firms should not have to pay into the fund, or that companies should pay only for sites at which they are proved to have been directly responsible. Meanwhile, hundreds of industrial-waste sites, cleanups delayed since Congress let the tax lapse in 1996, just slipped further into the toxic cesspool.

The Superfund cleanups that have been successful make the vote all the more frustrating. In Martin County, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Florida Department of Environmental Protection have worked together to clean up a Solitron plant site in Port Salerno. The two agencies paid the county $1.2 million to extend water lines to a mostly African-American neighborhood where plant chemicals similar to toxic dry-cleaning solvents had fouled the groundwater. Contaminated soil was removed at a cost of $350,000. The EPA will spend $400,000 monitoring groundwater over the next decade.

EPA and DEP also recovered an estimated $500,000 of cleanup costs when Solitron sold the property to Port Salerno Industrial Park, which tore down the buildings and helped deal with the dirt. EPA is trying to recover more money from Solitron, said project manager Bill Denham. Similarly, Riviera Beach has persuaded EPA to rethink the idea that the best way to clean up massive underground contamination of the city's water supply would be to do nothing. EPA now backs the city's plan for the Blue Heron Boulevard site where Honeywell and manufacturing subsidiary Solitron leaked cancer-causing industrial chemicals into the city's aquifer. That solution is the best one: a permanent cleanup of the poisoned underground, for which Honeywell would pay.

EPA also has agreed to serve as middleman in mediation between Honeywell and the city. Honeywell still can reject EPA's recommendation and go to federal court. With U.S. Rep. Clay Shaw, R-Fort Lauderdale, urging a non-litigation approach, however, and saying Honeywell should provide compensation, the long-delayed cleanup is the smart and right thing do. Riviera wasn't on the Superfund list, but only because residents already were paying to clean their drinking water. Given Thursday's vote, Riviera may consider itself lucky.

March 14, 2004
Superfund gets squeezed,pollution goes untreated
Editorial, Pensocola News Journal

Neither Congress nor the White House appears much interested in maintaining an effective Superfund cleanup program, aimed at cleaning up the nation's worst polluted sites.

The White House has submitted the lowest Superfund cleanup budget in years, and the Senate has rejected reinstituting the "polluter" tax that would assess a small fee on oil and chemical companies to pay for Superfund cleanups. These industries' chemicals are the ones most likely to end up polluting our ground and water.

Without the tax, there's nowhere to turn to clean up sites abandoned by companies that don't even exist anymore.

Industry says the tax will hurt their competitiveness. But supporters point out that the tax on oil companies would equate to about two-tenths of a cent per gallon of gasoline, and of course it would be paid for by motorists.

No one likes to pay more for anything. But Superfund sites are dangerous and need to be cleaned up. In Pensacola and elsewhere they have polluted groundwater and led to the evacuation of entire neighborhoods.

Without the tax, cleanup depends on general revenue at a time of rampant deficits. When the Bush administration -- which usually spends like there's no tomorrow -- does look to cut, it focuses on environmental budgets. But then that's probablynot about budgets anyway. March 15, 2004
This favor may backfire for industry
Missoula Missoulian, MT

It may be a pay-now-or-pay-more-later proposition for industries opposed to pollution trust fund.

The U.S. Senate last week declined to reinstate a tax on industry that for nearly two decades paid for cleaning up hazardous waste. The tax is opposed mostly by Republicans, who say it isn't fair to make industries pay for the clean air and clean water that benefits everyone.

That's one way of looking at things. But there's another way of looking at the matter - a way that likely will make greater sense to industrial leaders and Republicans with each passing year. That special tax, instituted in 1980 but eliminated in 1995, was the basis for Superfund, a special trust fund created to bankroll cleanup of some of the nation's most polluted sites. The idea for the trust fund was rooted in the concept of user fees, once championed by Republicans, based on the notion that people who use a service or cause an expense ought to pay for it.

Montanans are pretty familiar with Superfund. The Clark Fork River basin, the town of Libby and the ASARCO smelter in East Helena are among more than a dozen places being cleaned up with the help of Superfund. Superfund projects tend to be complicated and challenging to address, and the first years of the program were plagued by bureaucracy and litigation. Over time, however, the program has accomplished a great deal of good.

The program is supposed to work in a couple of ways. Most commonly, the law requires the parties responsible for waste in need of cleanup to pay for the work. But in cases where the responsible party won't do it or the responsible party is impossible to identify, the work could be paid for with money from the trust fund. Since the tax expired in 1995, that fund has pretty much run out of money.

The Bush administration says it's still committed to cleaning up messes, but it believes general tax revenues should be used instead of the tax on industry. Critics contend this approach is inequitable because it forces everyone to pay for something for which one sector of society is responsible. A more obvious flaw in the administration's position is, with the budget running $500 billion in deficit next year, there really isn't any general tax revenue available to do the work. The choice is to borrow the money, pushing the cost to future taxpayers.

What's likely to happen over time, however, is that government agencies and citizens are going to get more aggressive in finding companies to blame for past pollution and more resistant in preventing pollution in the future. In effect, the price of slightly lower taxes for industries is likely to be a more hostile business climate.

The Superfund trust fund operated like a no-fault insurance policy. The trust fund created the ability to clean up messes first and ask questions later. Eliminating the tax didn't put an end to public expectations about a clean and healthful environment. And undercutting the ability to conduct no-fault cleanups certainly will do nothing to improve public trust in polluting industries. That erosion of trust may not loom large under the industry-friendly Bush administration and in the current economic climate, but these things have a way of changing and changing fast. The effects of eliminating the Superfund tax may not be apparent for some time to come, but there's certainly the potential for a public backlash that puts elimination of the tax in a different light for industry.

President Bush should follow precedent and urge Congress to reinstate the polluter tax to pay for environmental cleanup. Under the Bush administration, the Superfund has become a super bust.

The two-decade environmental cleanup program that was supposed to be financed largely with a special tax on polluting industries now relies solely on general tax dollars.

Last week, the Senate continued polluters' free ride when it failed to reinstate the polluter tax.

Citing budget constraints, the Bush administration has moved at a slower pace than previous administrations in recommending new abandoned toxic waste sites for cleanup.

As a cost of doing business, companies that endanger the environment should pay to clean up their mess, not taxpayers. Congress should quickly restore the corporate tax on oil and chemical companies, among others, and rebuild the Superfund so that it can sufficiently achieve its intended purpose.

The program was established in 1980 on the sound premise that industries that pollute the environment should pay for its cleanup.

President Reagan and the first President Bush backed the tax and led Congress to renew it. President Clinton supported it, but the Republican-led Congress in 1995 defeated the extension, allowing the corporate tax to expire and shifting more of the cleanup burden to taxpayers.

The corporate-friendly Bush administration has made no effort to appeal to Republican congressional leadership to replenish the trust fund.

Over the past decade, the program drew down the balance of polluter-contributed fees in the trust fund until last fall, when they were depleted. As a result, the Superfund is financed exclusively from general tax revenue.