Word: superfund
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Constructive solutions to the problems of toxic dumping and acid rain are in everyone's interest, and you had better believe that the average urban worker cares about them. There are 1000 Superfund dumpsites in Massachusetts alone, and only 300 towns. Local and state public-interest groups have had enormous success organizing and fundraising in working-class neighborhoods on the hazardous-waste issue, but on the national level Democrats seem either ignorant of the potential of this issue, or afraid to be seen as No-Nukes flower children. Democrats have become accustomed to expressing support for environmental cleanup with...
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...
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...
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...
...dump may indeed be part of the solution. The federal Superfund pays Casmalia Resources to take wastes collected in the cleanup of the notorious Stringfellow Acid Pits near Los Angeles. But even this up-to-date site is a problem for the 300 people who live just over the hills in the town of Casmalia. A little more than a year ago, it seems, fumes started drifting down over the town. Jim Postiff has lived in Casmalia for 20 years, and the odor was new to him. "The first few times we smelled it," he remembers, "we called the fire...