Word: cleanups
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Uncle Sam's big toxic cleanup is a failure -- and a legal nightmare...
Fully a decade after Brio was nominated as an official cleanup site, it stands as the pre-eminent example of what has gone wrong with the extensive government cleanup program known as Superfund. Though nearly $1 billion has vanished in litigation, damages and other costs, virtually nothing has been done to the Brio mess in the way of actual cleanup. The pattern has been regularly repeated nationwide: instead of redressing the worst toxic-dumping problems, the program has become a vast legal nightmare, one that has turned interested parties against one another in a frenzy of litigation...
...result: tens of thousands of litigants, the financial effects of which are startling. About $4 billion of the $20.4 billion spent on Superfund cleanups so far has been consumed solely by lawyers and filing fees. Of the $1.3 billion paid out by insurers, nearly 90% has been eaten by litigation and related costs, according to Jan Acton, co-author of a Rand Corp. report. Companies have spent an estimated 15% of their entire Superfund expenditure, or $1.3 billion, on litigation. Meanwhile, the problem of toxic dumps is rapidly getting worse: new sites are being added faster than old ones...
...back into the rivers, through the levees it came around or over. (Yes, through. The water might go back through holes eroded in the levees or through gravity drains that are closed during floods but reopened to allow a backflow into the river.) Then comes the monumental task of cleanup. The receding waters will leave behind all manner of wreckage. Examples: the floating chicken coops and broken tree branches Paul Rice has to steer his flat-bottomed boat past to reach his submerged home in St. Charles County. Or the lumber, three ice chests and four plastic garbage cans...
...confrontation eased dramatically in May, when the sugar farmers, as part of an "environmental peace proposal," put their lawsuits on hold and agreed to pay for some of the cleanup costs. Perhaps it was the election of Clinton and Gore -- and the elevation of Browner to the EPA -- that changed their mind. Maybe they feared that they were losing the public relations battle and that their federal agricultural subsidies might be at risk. Or maybe they sincerely saw the need for compromise. Says Robert Buker Jr., a senior vice president at U.S. Sugar: "You can't shut down farming...