Word: superfunded
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ENVIRONMENT: Superfund's False Promises...
...hundreds of sites around the country. In Glenwood Landing, New York, the EPA found 235 parties responsible, including not just major corporations but also a film-developing shop and a pizza parlor. One of those parties was Pat Genzale of Franklin Square, New York, a bona fide victim of Superfund's liti-gious excess. Genzale, who was going broke trying to comply with EPA orders to remove waste legally dumped 37 years ago on his family company's land, contracted to have some of the waste hauled to Ohio. The contractor dumped it instead at Glenwood Landing; so Genzale...
...original idea had seemed simple enough. Superfund, which was voted into existence by Congress in 1980 after the national outrage over toxic pollution at Niagara Falls' Love Canal, would provide federal funding for tracking down the guilty parties and making them pay. Wielding the legal doctrine of "joint and severalliability," the Environmental Protection Agency could hold any single toxic dumper responsible for a mess created by several -- and retroactively at that. If no one could be found to pay, then the site would be deemed an "orphan" and cleaned up by Superfund's own resources, gathered largely from taxes...
...result: tens of thousands of litigants, the financial effects of which are startling. About $4 billion of the $20.4 billion spent on Superfund cleanups so far has been consumed solely by lawyers and filing fees. Of the $1.3 billion paid out by insurers, nearly 90% has been eaten by litigation and related costs, according to Jan Acton, co-author of a Rand Corp. report. Companies have spent an estimated 15% of their entire Superfund expenditure, or $1.3 billion, on litigation. Meanwhile, the problem of toxic dumps is rapidly getting worse: new sites are being added faster than old ones...
...across-the-board failure of Superfund to achieve its charter is now the responsibility of Carol Browner, President Clinton's new EPA administrator. With 22% of the EPA budget, Superfund is her biggest single program, and 1 in 4 Americans now lives within four miles of a Superfund site. Browner says her agency's Superfund specialists are working around the clock to prepare a "reauthorization proposal" for Congress in November that will suggest ways to make the system work. She says one of her first priorities is to reduce the percentage of the monies flowing into lawyers' pockets in litigation...