On The Launch Pad and Ready to Go: All They Need Now Are The Funds
By Joe Crea
WASHINGTON, Nov. 14, 2002–Citing a depleted Superfund program, the Environmental Protection Agency has denied Atlas Tack Corp and six other high-priority toxic waste sites, the necessary funds required to clean up year’s worth of virulent wastes, according to various environmental groups.
The Sierra Club said the Superfund program, a trust fund that’s used to clean-up hazardous waste sites when the polluter cannot be found or refuses to pay, is not being funded properly. It once boasted an impressive 3.6 billion in 1995 when a mandatory polluter’s taxes expired. Presently, the funds have dwindled to nothing and the U.S. Public Interest Research Group projected 28 million in funds for FY03.
“Everyone knows that these are dangerous sites and you could get sick by being near them,” said Julie Wolk, an environmental health advocate for US PIRG. “It’s getting close to a crisis-type situation and becoming more obvious that they must be cleaned up.”
US PIRG said that by refusing to reauthorize a tax that placed the burden on polluters rather than citizens, the Bush administration was trying to phase out the Superfund program completely.
“This is the first administration blatantly going on the record to not support this tax and Reagan was the one who authorized it,” said Jessica Frohman, national conservation organizer for the Sierra Club. “It wasn’t reauthorized during the Clinton administration, but he was trying to get it reauthorized. We feel there’s no reason why the individual taxpayers should be cleaning up these sites.”
According to the EPA’s regional office in Massachusetts, Atlas Tack was asked to clean up their site in 2000 and they never responded. “The EPA could file a suit against then and at one point we asked for the money in phases to accomplish our three goals, taking the buildings down first, cleaning the upland areas and then the marsh but they never responded,” said Elaine Stanley, the Environmental Protection Agency’s remedial project manger.
In a profile on their website entitled, “Communities At Risk: Fairhaven, Massachusetts,” the Sierra Club said that Atlas Tack Corp left enough wastes and pollutants behind that “could threaten the health of more than 7,000 people who live within a mile of the facility and more than 15,000 people who drink groundwater from wells within three miles of the site.”
The EPA Mass office estimates that the cleanup is going to take a little over two years. The funding requested will handle what remains contaminated at the site.
According to Ms. Stanley, most superfund sites are getting less and less funding. “Once a site gets funding it’s easier to get money,” said Stanley. “It’s hard to start new sites.”
Since the beginning of 2001, the EPA Mass office has been examining how toxic the marsh is. Presently they are in the final stages of the clean up, having completed the chemical analysis and concluding the remedial design.
A priority panel, composed of managers from across the country, determines who will get funding. The sites get ranked based on cost, health, ecological risks and when it can be completed.
When Atlas Tack closed its doors in 1985, the cost for the EPA to clean up the site has been $2.8 million. Atlas Tack manufactured wire tacks, steel nails and similar items. The company discharged most of its wastes-cyanides, heavy metals and arsenic-for thirty decades into an unlined lagoon used as a settling pond. The deposits contaminated the groundwater and spread into neighboring estuaries.
“We’ve been funded for the feasibility study, which examines alternative options, and the remedial investigation which determines the nature of the risks,” said Ms. Stanley. “We are pretty much dressed up and ready to go for the construction part but we have not been funded for this.”
Published in The New Bedford Standard Times, in Massachusetts.
