The accumulation of non-funded Superfund sites in 17 states and Puerto Rico includes an abandoned mine in Maine, where an open tailings pit is contaminated with arsenic and lead; a wood preservation facility in Louisiana contaminated with creosote and a toxic stew of volatile organic compounds; and a grain storage facility in Nebraska contaminated by a fumigant containing carbon tetrachloride. Nineteen of the 34 are threatened by climate change, the GAO found.
Kathy Setian, a former manager of the EPA Superfund website, warned that some of these unfunded sites present unknown dangers because they did not have the same sustained remediation work as fully funded cleaning sites.
“If there are threats from climate change to unfunded locations, we don’t know what they are because we aren’t even looking to remedy them,” said Setian. “Threats are not being addressed.”
Reviewing Trump’s negotiations
In addition to Whitehouse’s request for climate threat assessments at each site, a former senior EPA official said the new Biden administration should review all deals negotiated by Trump EPA at Superfund sites with cleaners.
“You will want to see if the responsible parties were receiving preferential treatment,” said Mathy Stanislaus, who served as assistant administrator for the EPA’s Land and Emergency Management Office during the Obama administration.
Stanislaus said such reviews should focus first on any deals negotiated since the election by lame duck Trump EPA. Since 2019, the agency has been managed by Andrew Wheeler, a former coal industry lobbyist, while the Superfund program is led by Peter C. Wright, a lawyer who has worked for Dow Chemical and represented the company in negotiations with Dow Chemical. EPA on Superfund sites.
Stanislaus said he is also concerned about a 2017 list of recommendations explaining ways to streamline the cleaning process suggested by a Superfund Task Force established by Scott Pruitt, Trump’s first EPA administrator. As Oklahoma’s attorney general, Pruitt was one of the EPA’s most hostile critics.
One of the incentives that Pruitt instructed the EPA to consider as a means of speeding up cleanings was to reduce the burden on “cooperating parties” or companies that are working with the EPA to decontaminate their sites, a goal that Stanislaus said could be read as a invitation to make favorable agreements with the industry. The task force also recommended reducing supervisory costs for corporations “that do timely, high-quality work”.
EPA did not respond to requests for comment.
In September 2017, Pruitt scored points with community leaders and environmental activists in Houston when he visited a famous Superfund site, the San Jacinto Waste Pits, which was flooded by floods during Hurricane Harvey.
An EPA diving team had just confirmed that damage to a concrete cover had led to a dioxin leak downstream, and Pruitt announced that the highly dangerous human carcinogen would finally be removed from the site.
But as the new Biden administration takes over the program, Trump’s removal schedule has been extended from 27 months to around seven years, and the EPA has relaxed the proposed waste disposal requirements. Environmentalists have argued that the sampling of the site was flawed and that the waste removed should be disposed of in a safer location than currently proposed.
Rock Owens, who oversaw the Harris County Prosecutor’s environmental division for more than 20 years before his retirement in October, said he expected the new team to impose stricter disposal standards.
“As they go through the design process, these things will be revised – and our hope is that these disposal issues will be deepened,” he said.
Meanwhile, the San Jacinto garbage pits remain vulnerable to future spills – especially with stronger hurricanes fueled by climate change.
In vulnerable coastal counties like Harris, Owens said, “we have to solve the problem of climate change – it is linked to everything”.
Environmental justice: years of broken promises
When the Obama EPA searched in 2009 for 10 underprivileged neighborhoods near Superfund sites to participate in an Environmental Justice Communities program, authorities selected Eastside in Jacksonville, Florida, near the Superfund site Kerr-McGee, a former manufacturing and storage of pesticides and fertilizers installation.
Each of the 10 communities, from Staten Island, New York, to Yakima Valley, Washington, received $ 100,000 donations to address environmental justice issues. The relatively small amount corresponded to the modest ambitions of the EPA’s environmental justice program at the time.
In Jacksonville, there was talk of building a comprehensive health center. But the program included just enough funding for a study of fish and crustaceans in local fishing streams, the placement of 24 signs warning of the dangers of eating fish and a seminar on how to build rain barrels, according to the EPA.
“We’ve been knocking on the EPA’s door for 20 years,” said Teena Anderson, a member of the Eastside Environmental Council, a grassroots organization formed to represent residents around the Kerr-McGee site, which advocated professional training, nutrition and aid programs for the elderly. “We don’t have much to show for it.”
Trump’s latest budget proposal included a 70 percent reduction in EPA spending on environmental justice programs, from $ 9.5 million to $ 2.7 million.
Mustafa Santiago Ali, who served as an associate administrator in the EPA’s environmental justice office under the Obama administration, said he understands the cynicism Anderson feels after years of unmet expectations.
“It will be necessary to rebuild trust between the federal government and frontline communities,” said Ali, who is now the National Wildlife Federation’s vice president for environmental justice, climate and community revitalization.
Biden proposed to elevate the EPA Environmental Justice Advisory Council and the Interagency Environmental Justice Council as White House entities, with both subordinate to the presidency of the White House Environmental Quality Council.
In addition to creating the Environmental and Climate Justice Division within the Department of Justice, Biden proposed to reform the EPA’s External Civil Rights Compliance Office to empower communities under Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act “that experience the worst impacts climate change and fence communities that are located alongside sources of pollution. “
To do this, your EPA need not go beyond the Superfund program.
An EPA study in September found that a disproportionate number of people of color lived less than 3 miles from the Superfund sites, highlighting the fact that historically underserved communities are shaded by these toxic sites.
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In Jacksonville’s Eastside neighborhood, 81 percent of residents are people of color and 30 percent of families live below the federal poverty line.
From her front yard, Carol Gafney can see a wire fence around the 31-acre Kerr-McGee Superfund site, now a vast empty lot where large amounts of fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides were manufactured and stored from 1893 to 1978.
Like many in his neighborhood, Gafney relies on food stamps and strives to pay for the car and home. She said she feels abandoned by government agencies, especially the EPA.
“We live where no one cares about us,” she said.
The cleansing of the Kerr-McGee site is moving slowly after 10 years on the Superfund program, a decade that has produced little more than resentment, fear and frustration in the East.
“This is the chance for the EPA to step up and keep its promises,” said Anderson, the Jacksonville activist.
In addition to fulfilling the idea of a health center discussed a decade ago, she said she hopes the EPA will help the community with the development of professional skills, nutrition programs and programs for the elderly.
A big first step, she said, would be for the agency to enter the community and listen.
“The community needs to participate in writing the narrative of its future,” said Anderson. “When they come to the community, they will be sending a message that they are correcting some errors.”