Cleaning up the U.S. Environmental Superfund

by Creators Syndicate, Inc.

TORRANCE, Calif. -- U.S. Environmental Protection Agency officials recently met with homeowners who are concerned about plans to clean up a Superfund site in their community of Torrance, Calif. Their yards are contaminated with residues of DDT that are left over from two old industrial sites dating back to the 1940s. The EPA plans to dig up the yards and move the contaminated soil to a hazardous-waste dump. Residents are concerned about stirring up toxins and trucking them through their neighborhood. The EPA says there's no immediate danger. The dirt is simply being moved to eliminate any possible long-term health effects.

It's the Superfund at work, and it's not working all that well. Seventy million Americans live within four miles of a Superfund site. In the 14 years since the fund was established, 200 designated sites have been cleaned up. Another 1,100 sites are in various stages of cleanup. That's the good news.

The bad news is that the entire Superfund effort is mired in litigation, regulation and delays. The original Superfund law was supposed to force polluters to clean up hazardous sites, including the infamous Love Canal in New York, where chemical wastes are suspected of causing miscarriages, birth defects and cancer.

Many of Superfund's problems spring from the best of intentions. In 1986, Congress revised cleanup standards, requiring that each site be made so safe that a child could eat dirt from it without harmful effects. That may have looked good on paper, but the effect was to raise cleanup costs five-fold. Litigation became the cheaper way to go. Meanwhile, the work on the sites goes undone. The law itself encourages this nightmare. It draws no clear distinction between those who polluted the site and those who used it legally and safely. Everyone involved is liable for the cleanup costs. In addition, the law's joint and several liability provision allows the government to hold any one company responsible for the mess created by hundreds of individual parties. The law is also retroactive, meaning that companies can be held responsible for any and all dumping prior to 1980, even though such dumping may have been legal at the time.

These provisions virtually guarantee that every Superfund assessment is going to end up in court as polluters try to lay off the responsibility on each other and their insurance companies. This endless litigation is now costing about a billion dollars a year -- money that is not going toward paying for cleanup.

A coalition of chemical and insurance companies has put together a proposal to share the cleanup costs and eliminate most of the litigation now pending in the courts. Like all good compromises, this one has something in it for everyone. The companies and insurance carriers each pay a fair share of the costs. Taxpayers are spared additional funding for cleanup. And urban neighborhoods near the waste sites benefit from a safer environment and the potential for economic development on land that is now vacant and useless.

But this whole agreement will probably go down the tubes unless Congress acts this year to rewrite the Superfund law, adopt the industry proposal and enact more realistic cleanup standards. I understand that Congress has a lot on its plate this year. But if this opportunity slips by in the rush, a lot of money will be wasted, and a lot of people will go on living in contaminated neighborhoods, wondering what ever happened to Superfund.

COPYRIGHT 1994 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.