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Saturday, February 21, 2004

Environment - Interesting "Circa WWII" CERCLA Opinion; Reports of Superfund Funding Concerns

Western Properties Service Corp. v. Shell Oil (2/13/04 USCA 9th Cir.) is a CERCLA contribution case where the appellants were found to have arranged, during the early years of World War II, for the disposal of wastes from aviation fuel production. An introduction to this 25-page opinion:

The property at issue, near Corona, in Riverside County, California, was once a ranch owned by the Wardlows. Gravel had been excavated from the property in 1938 for a nearby dam, leaving four gravel pits. For $2,000, the Wardlows sold the right to dump “acid tar”—petroleum waste consisting in substantial part of sulfuric acid—into those pits. Oil refineries, for over a decade by then, had been going farther and farther afield from their Long Beach locations for disposal sites because the stink of acid tar was notoriously offensive to neighbors. This sludge could be smelled from almost a mile away. Burning did not solve the problem, and the fumes were so bad that they killed flowers and fruit trees. Runoff from the waste made farmland useless and killed fish in nearby streams.

Among the central difficulties in this case is that it is hard to say what the facts are, as the parties could find no living person who knows what happened, and documentary evidence supports nothing more than inferences. The actions giving rise to the claim were performed (if indeed they were) in 1941 and 1942.

Yesterday (2/20/04) the Washington Post reported here that:
A steady decline in Superfund funding has alarmed lawmakers and some Environmental Protection Agency officials, who argue dangerous sites are not being cleaned up because of a lack of funds. Sens. James M. Jeffords (I-Vt.) and Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) released an updated General Accounting Office report yesterday showing that in inflation-adjusted dollars, the Superfund program has seen a 35 percent decline in funding, or $633 million, since 1993. Jeffords and Boxer are pushing for reauthorization of an environmental tax that expired in 1995 on all corporations. * * *

The report came as the National Environmental Trust released a rash of internal memos by EPA officials warning the lack of resources are impeding their ability to complete critical work. In one Aug. 12, 2002, memo, for example, a regional official wrote, "I am very concerned about mortgaging the program's future in favor of relatively small gains today." EPA officials countered that they are tackling more complex, larger sites than they did in the past. Last year, for example, 50 percent of the EPA's long-term cleanup budget was concentrated at eight sites. Seventy percent of all cleanup costs are paid for by the companies responsible for the pollution, EPA officials said.

Here is the updated GAO report referred to above. The highlights of the original, July 2003 report may be found here, along with a link to the full report.

Posted by Marcia Oddi on February 21, 2004 08:53 AM
Posted to Environmental Issues