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...five years ago," contends New Jersey Democrat James Florio, who as a Congressman from one of the most seriously contaminated states became the key author of the 1980 Superfund law. "It's much, much greater than anyone thought." Concedes Lee Thomas, the third director of the scandal-tarnished EPA during the Reagan Administration: "We have a far bigger problem than we thought when Superfund was enacted. There are far more sites that are far more difficult to deal with than anybody ever anticipated." That comes as no surprise to Barry Commoner, the venerable environmental gadfly. Says he: "We are poisoning...
...given priority in any national cleanup. The cost, OTA estimates, could easily reach $100 billion, or more than $1,000 per U.S. household. Eventually, predicts the General Acccounting Office, which also does studies for Congress, more than 378,000 waste sites may require corrective action. So far the EPA has put only 850 dumps on its priority list (see map). In its five-year effort, it managed to clean up only six sites and, critics protest, not very thoroughly at that...
...congressional watchdogs claim that when EPA finally does tackle a waste site, it seeks only a stop-gap solution to the chemical seepage. When a dump is cleaned up, its wastes are often merely shifted to other locales, "which themselves may become Superfund sites," the OTA report says. "Risks are often transferred from one community to another and to future generations...
...toxic wastes into shafts that fed into the Butler Tunnel, an outlet for waste water from abandoned coal mines near Pittston, Pa. Three men were convicted of violating the state's Clean Streams Act, and one was sent to prison. The three and their company were fined $750,000. EPA supervised the cleanup of the river pollution, and in 1982 it took the site off its priority list. But heavy rains from Hurricane Gloria sent 100,000 gal. of oily, smelly chemical wastes rushing back up to the surface of this presumably cleaned-up site and into the Susquehanna. "There...
Another of the six sites that EPA claims to have successfully cleaned is in Baltimore, where strong acids and aqua regia, one of the most corrosive liquids in existence, had been stored throughout the 1970s. For years, residents in 20 row houses along Annapolis Road complained of eye, nose and throat irritation; eight people were burned in July 1979 when chemicals leaked into a playing area. EPA removed 1,500 drums and scraped off up to twelve inches of topsoil. The land was sloped and sodded and declared fit for a playground. But critics cite tests showing that the contamination...