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Monday, July 30, 2007
Environment - "Decades After a NY Plant Closes, Waste Remains"
The lead story in the business section of the Sunday NY Times is on the failure of the Superfund cleanup program, at least at one ford plant in New York. Some quotes from the lengthy story:
From the mid-1950s to the late 1970s, Ford operated an assembly plant in northern New Jersey, in nearby Mahwah, that cranked out millions of passenger cars. Ford closed the plant in 1980, after dumping what the E.P.A. describes as thousands of tons of paint sludge and other waste in Upper Ringwood, a community of about 350 working-class residents located in the foothills of the Ramapo Mountains.An interesting sidelight to this story is that it was accompanied by a Google "keyword-targeted" ad titled "BP and Lake Michigan," which led to this site about the Whiting Refinery designed to "correct inaccurate media accounts and misleading statements that we believe have caused unnecessary concern about this project.."A few years later, the Environmental Protection Agency identified Upper Ringwood for priority cleanup under its Superfund program. Ford, deemed responsible for the pollution, spent the next five years assessing and removing sludge from a 500-acre site that included 50 homes. Satisfied with Ford’s cleanup, the E.P.A. dropped Upper Ringwood as a Superfund site in 1994, having determined, according to a public notice, that “no further cleanup by responsible parties is appropriate” and that “the current risk posed by the site is within an acceptable range.”
Yet recently, based on Ford’s and the E.P.A.’s own recent follow-up studies of the soil and groundwater in Upper Ringwood, those conclusions unraveled and became fodder in what environmental experts say is now among the messiest industrial cleanup efforts in Superfund’s 27-year history.
Since the E.P.A. relisted Upper Ringwood last year as a Superfund site, cleanup experts in the area have not only removed several thousand tons of waste that crews had previously overlooked, but workers have also identified substantial amounts of potentially hazardous paint sludge in the yards of at least two private homes, according to federal regulators and Ford. * * *
SOME environmental experts and analysts say the biggest problem in cleaning Upper Ringwood, as well as the nation’s more than 1,000 other Superfund sites, stems from the depleted resources of the Superfund itself. Superfund’s budget was built on an excise tax on crude oil and chemicals used for manufacturing. The tax lapsed in 1995, and the trust fund has shrunk from $1.5 billion in 1994 to insolvency today — leaving the E.P.A. struggling to find other sources of money to identify and assess the nation’s future cleanup needs, according to several recent studies. The E.P.A. says that Superfund’s shrinking resources don’t undermine its ability to monitor corporate polluters and that companies themselves can adequately manage and police cleanups on their own.
The price tag for all of this remains large: according to a 2005 Government Accountability Office report, it will cost $20 billion to remediate the 142 largest Superfund sites.
Superfund has proved to be effective in spurring corporate polluters to pay for their own cleanups, analysts say. Rather than face fines of as much as three times the actual cost of a cleanup if the E.P.A. undertook the effort on its own, most major corporate polluters have opted to clean the sites themselves. But that, in turn, has left the E.P.A. dependent on corporate polluters to oversee and clean up problem sites.
“Funding of cleanups is a really central issue now that the tax fund has been depleted,” says Katherine N. Probst, a senior fellow at Resources for the Future, a nonpartisan economic research group in Washington. “And there are issues about money, and issues about the future of the program, and questions about what you can expect to get in a cleanup these days.”
For its part, Ford says its efforts to clean the area through the years have been nothing less than rigorous, and that the company’s voluntary decision to study the area’s ground and streams for pollutants after closing its plant reflects its overall commitment to making the area safe for residents. The company says it is doing additional cleanup work at known landfill areas, including at two abandoned mine sites.
Posted by Marcia Oddi on July 30, 2007 11:18 AM
Posted to Environment