=======================Electronic Edition========================
RACHEL’S HAZARDOUS WASTE NEWS #166
—January 30, 1990—
News and resources for environmental justice.
——
Environmental Research Foundation
P.O. Box 5036, Annapolis, MD 21403
Fax (410) 263-8944; Internet: erf@igc.apc.org
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SUPERFUND–PART 4: SUPERFUND REMEDIES:
COMMUNITIES SUFFER WHEN POLLUTERS DO THE CLEANUP STUDIES.
[Continuing our series on Superfund cleanups. Page numbers in our
text refer to pages in the latest report from Congress’s Office
of Technology Assessment (OTA), cited in our last paragraph,
below.]
When he took office in early 1981, one of Ronald Reagan’s
personal goals was to derail the EPA (U.S. Environmental
Protection Agency). Sure enough, within two years, most of the
programs in the agency had had their purchasing power cut by 20%
to 40%. The agency’s funding remained cut throughout the decade.
In 1987, 1988 and 1989, the agency’s purchasing power was less
than it had been in 1975; meanwhile, the agency’s
responsibilities had doubled compared to 1975, as Congress passed
new laws (for example, Superfund and Community Right to Know) and
beefed up older ones (for example, the Clean Water Act).[1]
As a consequence of budget cuts and new responsibilities, the
agency became much less effective than it had been during the
1970s. Many professionals quit the agency–driven out by
inadequate operating budgets and poor working conditions, or
attracted away by offers of much higher salaries. With its
professional staff dwindling, the agency was less able to conduct
its own business itself, and it began to farm out more and more
work to contractors. This suited Mr. Reagan just fine–the
private sector can always do a better job than government, he
believes (even private foxes guarding public chickens).
This attitude has deeply affected the Superfund cleanup program.
To understand the problem, recall how Superfund works (see RHWN #160).
When a site comes to the agency’s attention, first a rough
Preliminary Assessment is done; then a cursory Site Assessment is
made; then the site is ranked by the Hazard Ranking System; at
that point, 90% of the sites are dropped and 10% are added to the
NPL (National Priorities List, the official Superfund list).
Once a site is on the official Superfund list, then it is subject
of a major study called an RIFS (Remedial Investigation,
Feasibility Study). This is the key study; it is the RIFS that
determines how bad the problem is and what could be done about
it. The RIFS presents the community with a range of options (from
“do nothing” to “excavate the whole mess and truck it to
Alabama”). After the RIFS is completed and has gone to a public
hearing, then a ROD (Record of Decision) is issued, announcing
which option the government has selected from the RIFS.
It must be obvious that, once a site is on the Superfund list,
the key work is the RIFS; the RIFS is where the nature and size
and urgency of the problem is defined. The RIFS is where someone
decides what the cleanup goals should be (how clean is clean?)
and the RIFS is where someone decides “here’s what we could do to
achieve our cleanup goals”. The RIFS is where the evidence is
gathered and presented, telling the community “No problem, not to
worry” or, on the other hand, “Your next child is likely to be
born damaged and you should move out of your home immediately,”
or something in between these two extremes.
Starting under Ronald Reagan, and escalating under George Bush,
official EPA policy has sought to have more and more RIFS done by
responsible parties–that is to say, by the people who created
the problem in the first place. In 1988, one third of all RODs
covered sites where responsible parties did the RIFS; from June,
1988 to June, 1989, half of all RIFS were done by responsible
parties.
EPA has looked at the consequences of having responsible parties
study the cleanup of their own messes; an EPA-funded study
concluded that “Many of the RMSs [EPA managers responsible for a
particular Superfund site] believe that the PRPs [potentially
responsible parties] often seek the least expensive, rather than
the best, clean-up techniques and are willing to expend
considerable amounts of money in attempts to establish
justification for the less expensive clean-up procedures.” (pg.
52)
OTA (Congress’s Office of Technology Assessment) believes the
consequences are even worse: when PRPs do the RIFS work, instead
of EPA doing it, non-permanent land disposal and containment
techniques are used in place of permanent destruction
technologies, untested technologies are selected, and less
stringent cleanup goals are selected (clean isn’t quite so clean).
OTA studied cleanups at four kinds of sites: wood preserving
sites, PCB sites, lead battery sites, and big landfills. OTA
said, “…we conclude that there is substantial difference in
cleanup technology for sites in the enforcement program [where
the work is done by PRPs] compared to sites in the fund program
[where EPA is doing the work].” (pg. 163) For example, during
fiscal year 1988, land disposal or containment was selected as a
remedy in 42% of sites where PRPs did the work, vs. 12% where EPA
did the work. OTA then observes, “There has been wide agreement
for some time that land disposal and containment are not
permanent remedies, are bound to fail eventually, and pose
uncertain long-term costs and threats to health and environment.
Indeed, many of EPA’s RODs that have rejected land disposal and
containment cite these reasons for doing so.” (pg. 163)
The other side of this coin is that during the same period,
permanent destruction techniques (incineration and biological
treatment) were selected in 14% of the cases where PRPs did the
work and in 44% of cases where EPA did the work.
OTA has suggested that Congress consider restricting the role of
responsible parties to implementation of remedies and paying for
remedies. After the social and political decisions are made (How
clean is clean? Is non-permanent land disposal good enough for
this community?), then it may be appropriate for a responsible
party to perform the selected remedy. But the responsible party
has a clear conflict of interest in deciding what should be done
at a site they must pay to clean up; their goal, generally, will
be to minimize their own costs, at the expense of the community.
OTA considers this idea “ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT THAT IT HAS
OFFERED IN THIS REPORT FOR CONGRESS’S CONSIDERATION” (pg. 54;
emphasis in the original). OTA says “A key goal of this
[suggestion] is to BALANCE THE PARTICIPATION BY RESPONSIBLE
PARTIES PRIOR TO RODS WITH THAT OF SITE COMMUNITIES” (pg. 55,
emphasis in the original). The responsible party that conducts an
RIFS has a major advantage over the community–the responsible
party gets to control what information is collected, evaluated,
and presented, and in what way. A responsible party doing an RIFS
gains an inside track in the decision-making process leading up
to the ROD. This is obviously unfair to the community that must
live with decisions that are made on the basis of the RIFS.
Furthermore, says OTA, the current EPA oversight process, whereby
EPA tries to see that responsible parties are doing a good job on
RIFS, lacks accountability and provides “nearly no information to
affected communities (e.g., critiques of responsible party
contractor work)” (pg. 53).
–Peter Montague, Ph.D.
===============
[1] The crippling of EPA under the Reagan-Bush administrations
has been cataloged by William Drayton,
“Environment–Environmental Protection Agency,” in Mark Green and
Mark Pinsky, editors, AMERICA’S TRANSITION: BLUEPRINTS FOR THE
1990S (New York: Democracy Project [215 Park Avenue South, Room
1814, NY, NY 10003; phone (212) 674-8989], 1989), pgs. 212-232;
see also Jonathan Lash, A SEASON OF SPOILS: THE REAGAN
ADMINISTRATION’S ATTACK ON THE ENVIRONMENT (NY: Pantheon, 1984).
Get: U.S. Congress, Office of Technology Assessment, CLEANING UP:
SUPERFUND’S PROBLEMS CAN BE SOLVED (Washington, DC: U.S.
Government Printing Office, 1989). Available for $10 from U.S.
Government Printing Office, Washington, DC 20402-9325; request
GPO stock No. 052-003-01166-2. Phone (202) 783-3238. Charge it
to Visa, Mastercard or Choice.
Descriptor terms: superfund; landfilling; studies; remedial
action; how clean is clean; ota;