Word: superfund
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...into the nation's consciousness, and its conscience, a little more than five years ago. "An environmental emergency," declared the Surgeon General in 1980. "A ticking time bomb primed to go off," warned the Environmental Protection Agency. The reaction was typically all-American: Congress created a grand-sounding "Superfund," a $1.6 billion, five-year crash program designed to clean up thousands of leaking dumps that were threatening to contaminate much of the nation's underground water supplies...
Last week that law expired, a victim of wrangling among the Senate, the House and President Reagan over how much more should be dedicated to the cause and who should pay the bill. During its existence, the Superfund dribbled away most of its money on a mismanaged effort that served only to reveal the almost unimaginable enormity of the task ahead. Though Congress is likely to reach an agreement by next month on a new infusion of money, anywhere from $10 billion over five years (the House proposal) to $5.3 billion (the Reagan Administration's figure), for now the once...
...lead, mercury and arsenic--have become household synonyms for mysterious and deadly poisons. "The problem is worse than it was 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...
...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...
...Ruckelshaus urged action to reduce the impact of acid rain, but when he was overruled by the White House, he stoutly defended the Administration's decision merely to order more studies of the problem. Critics also note that Ruckelshaus opposed early renewal of the $1.6 billion waste-cleanup superfund. "He leaves almost nothing of permanence as a legacy," says Jonathan Lash, a spokesman for the Natural Resources Defense Council...