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Jackson, Ryan[jackson.ryan@epa.gov] EPA Press Office Tue 6/13/2017 12:14:13 PM WSJ: Cleaning Up The Superfund Mess
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT
Cleaning Up The Superfund Mess Obama Put Climate Gestures Above Toxic Waste
Remedies.
The Wall Street Journal June 12, 2017
One cost of making climate change a religion is that more immediate environmental problems have been ignored--not least by the Environmental Protection Agency. New EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt plans to address that in an underreported effort to clean up toxic waste sites under the socalled Superfund program.
In a memo to EPA staff last month, Mr. Pruitt announced a plan to reform the Superfund program created in 1980 and to accelerate the clean up of hazardous waste sites such as old industrial properties or landfills. The effort is long overdue. Superfund has too often become a sinecure for the bureaucracy and a cash cow for lawyers. EPA staff offices can wait years or decades to assess a Superfund site, figure out who's liable for what, consult with the community, decide on a remedy and assign the actual work.
Take the West Lake Landfill Superfund site in Bridgeton, Missouri, which was used for quarrying in the 1930s and later as a landfill. In 1973, 8,700 tons of leached barium sulfate from the Manhattan Project was dumped there, along with soil and waste. The EPA listed the 200-acre facility as a Superfund site in 1990.
Yet it took 18 years for EPA to decide how to clean up West Lake, finally settling in 2008 on a "multi layered engineered cover and a system of new monitoring wells." In 2009 the Obama EPA ditched that solution and re-opened the file. In 2010 an underground chemical reaction ignited a fire that is still smoldering.
Another example is the Bunker Hill Mining and Metallurgical Complex in Idaho and Washington state that polluted the air and soil with heavy metals such as lead. The EPA put Bunker Hill on its original list of 406 Superfund sites in 1983, but it too remains an open case.
Or Portland Harbor, in Oregon, which was listed in 2000. The private companies EPA found responsible spent years and tens of millions of dollars on a clean-up study that the agency eventually discarded. Obama EPA chief Gina McCarthy didn't choose a remedy for the site until this January, days before President Trump's inauguration, using information that was more than a decade old.
Sierra Club v. EPA, 1:17-cv-01906
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Sierra Club v. EPA, 1:17-cv-01906
ED_O01523_00004131 -00002