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...this will show up later in wells. "It's a perfect setup," he says. "We think what they did with some of the chemicals was just pour 'em out on the ground. Glub, glub, glub." When state and local officials failed to get results, the federal EPA declared a water emergency and took over the cleanup chore. So far, it has spent nearly $1 million and estimates that complete removal of all hazardous wastes at the site could cost more than $12 million. "They couldn't have located that dump in a worse place," says Roland Kasting...
...industry is more worried about the EPA's new rules requiring that only sites meeting federal standards be used. The companies are fearful that EPA standards will be so strict that an insufficient number of sites will be created. If that happens, predicts Roland, "companies will have two choices: they will either have nowhere to dump and they will close down, or they will go out and break the law." Conceding that "the EPA is between a rock and a hard place, with an enormous task to confront," Roland contends that the agency too often acts on the basis...
...cleanse surface water; there is no sunlight, for example, to evaporate it and thereby remove salts and other minerals and chemicals. Nor can ground water be counted upon to clean itself as it moves through the earth, for it scarcely "flows" at all. Says Eckardt C. Beck, the EPA's assistant administrator for water and waste management: "Ground water can take a human lifetime just to traverse a mile. Once it becomes polluted, the contamination can last for decades...
...EPA has located 181,000 such "lagoons" at industrial and municipal waste agency sites around the country. In a study of 8,200 of them, the agency found other 72% were just holes in the ground, not lined with concrete or other materials to prevent the chemicals from leaching into the soil; 700 of these unlined lagoons were within a mile of wells tapping ground water...
Bacterial wastes, such as the effluent from the nation's estimated 16.6 million residential septic tanks and cesspools, can be filtered fairly simply out of drinking water. But chemical contaminants are another matter. Says EPA Administrator Douglas Costle: "We are not even sure if, not to mention how, chemical contaminants can be removed. It takes sophisticated testing just to determine if there are chemicals present...