Word: toxicity
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...wrong with the extensive government cleanup program known as Superfund. Though nearly $1 billion has vanished in litigation, damages and other costs, virtually nothing has been done to the Brio mess in the way of actual cleanup. The pattern has been regularly repeated nationwide: instead of redressing the worst toxic-dumping problems, the program has become a vast legal nightmare, one that has turned interested parties against one another in a frenzy of litigation...
...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...
...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 are being cleaned up. Only 180 of the 1,202 sites now on the list have been officially cleaned up. And the total cleanup bill -- with hefty litigation costsincluded -- is projected by some to reach$1 trillion over...
...courthouse that could accommodate the burgeoning stream of lawyers. An old building was converted to a courtroom just to house them. Although a number of corporate defendants have settled with plaintiffs, the site has never been cleaned up; it still contains a residue of 34 million gal. of toxic waste...
Still other sites show why lawsuits proliferate so quickly around a toxic site. In Naugatuck, Connecticut, when the EPA targeted Uniroyal Chemical and 18 other companies for dumping waste, they turned around and sued 24 municipalities and more than 1,000 individuals and small-business owners...