Word: sites
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...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...
Consider the meager six sites deemed to have been cleaned through the Superfund. After a nine-month-long spill of chemicals into the Susquehanna River starting in 1979, it was found that a small Pennsylvania company had / been systematically, and illegally, dumping 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...
...some 40 years, beginning in the 1930s, the Velsicol Chemical Co. (formerly the Michigan Chemical Co.) had dumped and burned toxic industrial chemicals on a 3.5-acre site along the Pine River near St. Louis, Mich. A county golf course was developed beside the dump. By the mid-'60s, fish in the river contained high levels of such known or suspected carcinogens as PBB, PCB and DDT. Working with EPA, the company in 1982 agreed to spend $38.5 million to clean up the area. At the golf course, all soil was removed to a depth of 3 ft. below...
...sites chosen by the EPA for quick action should probably not have been on the top-priority list in the first place. In Greenville, Miss., Walcott Chemical Co. had stored 226 drums of such chemicals as tetrasodium pyrophosphate and formic acid in a warehouse that the state of Mississippi had seized for failure to pay taxes. The state considered the chemicals a fire hazard (rather than a contamination threat) and asked EPA to put the site near the top of its list. The agency merely had the drums hauled off to an approved landfill in Emelle, Ala. Problem solved. Similarly...
Shuffling wastes from one leaking site to another that may soon turn porous may seem absurd, but there is no way to eliminate all landfills as short-term disposal necessities. The same is true of the use of hazardous- waste incinerators. While they risk befouling the air, they are nonetheless a necessary temporary expedient...