Word: epa
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Part of the problem with EPA's management of the Superfund over the past five years stems from Reagan's initial choice of top officials who were ill- prepared to handle the difficult mandate. Anne Burford, a Colorado lawyer and Republican Party fund raiser, was tapped in 1981 to head EPA; at White House urging, she approved the selection of Rita Lavelle, a California publicist who had worked for a chemical company (Aerojet General Corp.), to direct the Superfund start-up. In the mismanagement that followed, Lavelle was convicted of perjury for denying any involvement in EPA's dealings with...
...that receive waste from steel-processing plants. New fiber-glass liners are being placed inside the cylinders. In the past, such wastes were merely poured into noxious surface lagoons. (In other ways, Waste Management is no ideal disposer. It agreed to pay $2.5 million last April to settle an EPA charge that it had illegally disposed of toxic chemicals in Ohio...
...public clamor for quicker, more effective action in the war on toxic wastes is fully justified, the expectation of easy or fast fixes is not. Some 66,000 chemicals are being used in the U.S.; EPA has classified 60,000 of them as potentially, if not definitely, hazardous to human health. They have been dumped or buried for years on the plausible but, as it turned out, ! tragically wrong theory that they would lose their toxicity during the decades it would take them to drift through layers of soil and rock into deep water supplies. There...
Much more might be done, however, to find new methods of taking the poisonous punch out of hazardous chemicals. The EPA spent only $43 million in the first five years of the Superfund program on basic research and development of such techniques. According to the Office of Technology Assessment, as much as $50 million a year could be spent usefully...
...paper Santa Claus dates the cataclysm that drove everyone away: just before Christmas 1982, the people of Times Beach discovered that their town had been drenched in dioxin, a poison so potent that one drop in 10,000 gal. is considered a dangerous concentration. Under political pressure, the EPA agreed to pay off all property owners; homeowners got between $8,800 and $98,900 apiece. And the town died. On one street remains an ex-resident's bright white graffito: GOODBYE TIMES BITCH...