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An article in the New York Times earlier this
week reported on EPA's attempts under the Superfund program to
address contamination in water bodies, such as rivers, lakes
and harbors. Although the article acknowledges
that these water body sites are technically challenging,
it does not remotely capture the tortured regulatory history of
these sites or the dubious remedial approach that EPA is now
pursuing. It is not an exaggeration to say that
some of the most notorious Superfund
failures involve water body sites.
Typical of the course of water body sites under the Superfund
program is the New Bedford Harbor Site in Massachusetts.
Like virtually all of these sites, the New Bedford Site
involved manufacturing operations on the edge of a water body where
large quantities of PCBs were allegedly discharged,
causing the contamination of downstream sediments. The
Site was added to the NPL in 1983, which spawned a decade of hotly
contested litigation and two decades of a tortuous remedy selection
process with numerous false starts. At the end of that
process, EPA selected a remedy that neither
treated nor destroyed the contaminated
sediments. Instead, EPA selected the lowest of low tech
remedies -- the dredging of 900,000 cubic yards of
contaminated sediments to be shipped out-of-state for disposal
in a landfill. After thirty years of working on the
New Bedford Site, EPA recently reported that the dredging will likely take
"40 years to complete at a cost of $1.2
billion."
Again and again, EPA has been repeating the dismal history of
the New Bedford Site at other water body sites. At the Lower Fox River Site in Wisconsin, EPA's
remedy solution after years of litigation and study is to
dredge several million cubic yards of PCB contaminated
sediments at a cost in the range of a billion dollars.
Likewise, at the
Hudson River Site in New York, EPA, after epic litigation with
GE, has elected to require the dredging of 2.65 million cubic
yards of PCB-contaminated sediments. At the Diamond Alkali Superfund Site in New Jersey,
twenty five years after the site was placed on the NPL, EPA
has completed the first phase of dredging what is estimated at over
2 million cubic yards of PCB and dioxin contaminated sediments.
In the first generation of Superfund cleanups, EPA often
selected a remedy that was simply moving wastes from one
location to another. When waste began leaking at those
new locations, the importance of treatment and
destruction technologies came into focus. With respect
to water body sites, EPA seems to be returning to its earlier
approach of shuffling waste from one location to another at
enormous cost. It seems fair to ask whether it would not
be far better for EPA not to spend billions dollars
dredging and transporting contaminated sediments. Instead,
EPA could invest some of those saved costs in
developing innovative technologies that
might actually solve rather than relocate the
problem. At a minimum, EPA should be looking at a cost
benefit analysis to determine whether capping in place would be a
preferable choice to spending billions of dollars to dredging and
transporting sediments.
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