Document G5yaMOn2QzaVna21YjBgBd0wq

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL WEDNESDAY, JUNE 17, 1992 Denying Paternity Battles over responsibility for toxic wastes are common where there are many Monsanto Case Shows possible contributors to a toxic site. But here, where there is but one likely candi date for the type of toxic waste at issue, How Hard It Is to Tie environmental regulators had thought it would be easy to make the connection Pollution to a Source between pollution and polluter. The dead lock at Dead Creek suggests the process can be as easily stymied with one alleged major polluter as with 100. PCBs Taint Site Where Firm Corporate denial of paternity for haz ardous chemicals "is one of the biggest Used to Produce Them, issues in toxic-waste cleanups," says Nich olas Valkenburg of Geraghty & Miller, an But It Doesn't See a Link environmental consulting firm working for Monsanto. The Deadlock on Dead Creek Coincidence Defense The problem isn't limited to specific industries or regions. Indeed, that the By Scott McMurray strategy should be embraced by a com Staff Reporter of The Wall Street Journal pany with as good an environmental rec SAUGET, III. - Monsanto Co. enjoys a ord as Monsanto shows how tempting it is. pretty good reputation among environ- ` Unocal Corp. has denied that it is liable for mentalists. Beginning in the mid-1980s, it toxic wastes found last year on an oil tank pledged to make sharp cuts in the amount farm in San Diego that it owned for more of pollution it emits, with "zero waste" than 60 years. The current owner of part of being the goal for many processes. the property sued the oil company in And this week, Monsanto announced a federal court in San Diego earlier this cash settlement with people who claim to year, alleging that the toxic wastes match have been hurt by some of its chemicals. It products that haven't been stored there will pay $39 million to neighbors of a since Unocal sold the tank farm. defunct Texas refinery to which Monsanto, And in Azusa, Calif., high levels of among other firms, once sold chemicals. contaminants were found in drinking-wa But here in the tiny Mississippi River ter wells just south of an Aerojet Corp. town of Sauget, Monsanto is showing an rocket plant, contaminants that matched other side of its strategy on the environ toxic solvents used by Aerojet and others mental front. It is a strategy that some in the area for decades. The same toxic other companies are pursuing as well, in solvents also were found at a Sacramento the face of potentially enormous cleanup plant site of Aerojet, a unit of GenCorp Inc. liabilities. It's called denial. But it wasn't until last October - 13 years Sauget is the home of more than a dozen toxic dump sites. The Dlinois Environmen after discovery of the contamination-that Aerojet, without admitting responsibility tal Protection Agency has been trying for for any wastes, agreed to reimburse the years to get the area designated a federal Environmental Protection Agency for a Superfund cleanup site. Dumps containing study of area water supplies. carcinogenic PCBs, or polychlorinated bi One consequence of what some are phenyls, are clustered along a stream aptly named Dead Creek. calling the "coincidence" defense could be that taxpayers will end up shouldering Sauget is also the home of a huge Monsanto plant that was the only nearby producer of PCBs. In fact, until shortly before PCBs were banned in 1979, the Monsanto plant in Sauget was the nation's largest single source of PCBs. Not Us So could the presence of the toxic waste along Dead Creek and the Monsanto plant be a mere coincidence? Monsanto's an swer to that question is an emphatic yes. "Anyone could have dumped a generator i full of PCBs along the creek," says a Monsanto environmental officer, Steven Smith. more of cleanup costs. The Superfund toxic-cleanup law requires polluters to pay for most dump-remediation costs, but the pace has been slow; only 84 of the 1.245 Superfund sites have been totally cleaned since the law was passed in 1980, even though more than Sll billion has been spent. To speed the process some critics are calling for shifting more of the burden, 1 directly or indirectly, from corporate i shareholders to taxpayers, notes Michael i Silverstein, president of Environmental I Economics, a Philadelphia consultancy. "There is a sense out there that uitiI matelv we're all rtzconsible as consumers I for the waste that has rieen produced." Mr. | Silverstein says. Company Town Though Sauget isn't a Superfund site, the delays in efforts to clean it illustrate what environmentalists are up against even in what some would consider a fairly clear-cut case. After more than a decade of studies and site investigations, state regu lators haven't persuaded the company to clean up any wastes at sites near Dead Creek or any other dumps in town. Says Mary A. Gade, director of the Illinois EPA: "It must be extremely frustrating to local citizens that this isn't moving more quickly." Sauget is such a company town that it Please Turn to Page A8, Column l DSW 136613 STLCOPCB4036574 Denying Paternity: It Isn't Easy To Tie Toxic Wastes to a Source Continued From First Page <s> santo plant a half-mile to the north. "It's even used to be called Monsanto. Over the years, most ol the area's residents either worked at the Monsanto plant or were related to someone who did. People com plained about the smell now and then; women working next door at the Sterling Steel factory jokingly referred to the fra grance as "Monsanto No. 5." Mayor Paul Sauget works for Monsanto as a part-time truck driver. He has nothing but praise for the company, and little but expletives for the GPA. Life in the shadow of a chemical plant hasn't hurt him, he says, noting that as boys he and his friends used to go ice-skating on Dead Creek and come home "smelling like aspirin tablets" from the chemical resi dues. Mr. Sauget or members of his family own several parcels of land in the area, including some toxic-waste sites. Monsanto supported changing the town's name to Sauget in 1964, honoring Mr. Sauget's father, mayor for 40 years. Monsanto also didn't like being associated with the seedy image the town had ac quired because of a cluster of late-night bars. "The people over in headquarters were getting tired of reading headlines like Woman Raped in Monsanto,' " says plant manager William Boyle. As the volume of chemicals Monsanto produced here increased, so did the wastes. Old gravel pits became convenient their wastes," Mr. Takacs asserts. Monsanto's own contractor has trouble disputing the point. When asked if the i match between wastes at the sites and | wastes produced at the nearby plant don't | suggest that Monsanto was responsible for I both. Mr. Valkenburg of Geraghty & Miller j says, "You could draw that conclusion." j Geraghty & Miller recently did a study | of a pond and the creek section where the i dog died. Mr. Valkenburg says it's too i early to comment on the results. The I Illinois EPA hasn't yet seen the study. ! Environmentalists and industry often i spar over the effect on human health of a , few parts per million of PCBs. The thresh old level above which the EPA considers i PCBs to be toxic waste and a threat to human health is 50 parts per million. But at a dump near the intersection of Dead Creek and Queeney Avenue in Sauget. state investigators found PCBs in concen trations of no less than 74,000 parts per million in surface soils. Monsanto's Mr. Smith says PCBs-oily compounds that transfer heat - once were a "ubiquitous product used by every major industry in the country." Although the Monsanto plant produced PCBs. the fact that their concentration is so high along Dead Creek doesn't prove they came from the plant. Mr. Smith says. Superfund Application dump sites. They weren't waterproofed. In Illinois has spent 12 years and S1.3 fact, ground water sometimes rose into the million studying the area to try to get it bottom of them in the spring. listed as a Superfund toxic site. It is now The pits were better than nothing, sending the federal EPA its latest Super Monsanto says. "You could argue that they fund proposal, fattened by requested addi were acting responsibly back then by not tional documentation. A Superfund listing pouring the stuff directly into the river like would give regulators much more lever a lot of companies were," says Mr. age. But a formal Superfund cleanup plan Smith. is still years away, they say. A Fire In the Creek One area polluter hasn't waited. Cerro Over the years wastes also poured into Copper Products Co. agreed with the state Dead Creek. During the dry summers EPA in 1990 to clean up a section of the of 1979 and 1980, sand in parched Dead creek next to its Sauget plant. It took that Creek spontaneously combusted on several step mainly to beat a federal deadline that occasions. Firemen recall being sum now bars sending any more toxics to moned to "put out the creek." The state special dumps; without a federal waiver, EPA said high levels of phosphorus in the these wastes now have to be Incinerated, at sandy creek bed were probably responsi much greater cost. Cerro. a unit of Mar- ble. mon Group Inc., spent 512.8 million on What triggered the first systematic cleanup and is trying to recover part of it investigation was the death of a dog. In from Monsanto, contending Monsanto con 1980 Peter Lauman reported that his wire tributed to pollution of the area it haired terrier Patches died after digging in cleaned. the creek bottom. There were chemical State regulators have had slightly bet burns around the dog's mouth. ter luck getting Monsanto to cooperate Human health is affected by so many elsewhere in town. After years of negotia factors that it's usually next to impossible tions, Monsanto signed a limited consent to link a specific illness with a specific decree in February to study treatment pollutant. Mr. Lauman, who often swam in alternatives at a dump on its own property Dead Creek and an adjacent pond as a boy, next to the Mississippi River, where rec lost a kidney to cancer in 1985 at age 33. ords show it dumped chemicals from 1954 The owner of a trucking firm near Dead to 1977. Monsanto has also agreed to Creek and his son both died of cancer pre-treat waste it sends to Sauget sewage several years ago, the Illinois EPA says, plant, which regulators identified a few but it adds that it isn't aware of any years ago as one of the worst sources of evidence linking local cancer cases to any pollution on the upper Mississippi. of the known or suspected carcinogens But chances are slim that much waste along Dead Creek. here will be removed or incinerated any Monsanto says, moreover, that there time soon. Monsanto didn't agree to study isn't any evidence that its wastes were the option of incinerating the more than iransported from the plant to the Dead one million tons of wastes at the dump on Creek sites. That's what Monsanto attor its own property, a task that it estimates ney N. Cornell Boggs III wrote to the would take 23 years and cost S540 million to Illinois EPA in 1989, and that is still the 5720 million. Monsanto clearly favors less company position. expensive treatments. "We may decide Other evidence suggests the situation that the best course is simply to monitor isn't quite so clear-cut. Monsanto said in a the site," Mr. Smith says. Meanwhile, 1980 federal filing that unspecified wastes about 13 tons of local toxic wastes leach were dumped near Falling Spring Road, into the Mississippi each year, most of it which roughly parallels Dead Creek a few from the Sauget dump, based on Illinois hundred yards to the east. It is plant policy EPA figures that Monsanto doesn't dis to destroy waste-hauling and similar rec pute. ords after four years. Monsanto says that projected toxic Paul Takacs. the Illinois EPA project waste cleanup costs are too much for manager in Sauget, visits the sites frei companies to bear. It proposes that govern quently. Parking his state truck near Dead ment, academia and industry join forces to Creek, he ticks off the chlorine-based her come up,with a better technological solu- : bicide and' chemical residues, as well as tion. Richard J. Mahoney, Monsanto's i PCBs. found in the creek area and in i chairman and chief executive, says, i surface soils of a fenced dump site. The I "Burning dirt is not my idea of high I toxic? match wastes produced at the Mon j technology at work." DSW 1 3 6 6 1 4 STLCOPCB4036575