=======================Electronic Edition========================
RACHEL’S HAZARDOUS WASTE NEWS #65
—February 22, 1988—
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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GAO: EPA DOESN’T KNOW HOW MANY SITES BELONG ON SUPERFUND LIST.
The size of the hazardous waste problem in the U.S. remains
unknown because EPA (U.S. Environmental Protection Agency) has
failed to maintain a proper list, according to a study released
Jan. 15, 1988, by the U.S. General Accounting Office (GAO), the
investigative arm of Congress.
Under the federal Superfund law, EPA is supposed to maintain an
inventory of all sites where hazardous materials are being
stored, treated, or disposed of, or where such materials have
been released in the past. According to GAO, as of August, 1987,
the EPA had only 27,200 sites on the list but GAO says
information from EPA and other federal agencies indicates that
the list should include somewhere between 130,340 and 425,480
sites.
GAO published a similar evaluation of EPA’s efforts to identify
hazardous waste sites back in 1985. At that time, GAO found
EPA’s list was missing somewhere between 130,000 and 378,000
sites.
The EPA list is known as CERCLIS (Comprehensive Environmental
Response Compensation and Liability Information System); it is
named for the Superfund law, which is formally known as the
Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability
Act (CERCLA).
The 1988 GAO report strongly criticized EPA for failing to
provide states with adequate funding or technical assistance to
identify sites themselves. EPA did provide $10 million to states
to find sites in 1983, but has not provided funding since then,
even though the 1984 amendments to RCRA (Resource Conservation
and Recovery Act) specifically gave EPA funds for that purpose.
“CERCLIS is becoming more a reflection of the amount of money EPA
has allocated to site assessment” than an “accurate picture of
the hazardous waste problem” in the U.S., GAO said.
Without a complete inventory of the nation’s potential hazardous
waste sites, the GAO report concludes, Congress cannot be “fully
informed about the amount of work facing EPA and the states” and
thus cannot accurately determine the “level of resources that
should be allocated to the Superfund program.”
The report criticized EPA for failing to establish criteria by
which EPA’s regional offices, and the states, should use to
determine whether a site belongs on the CERCLIS list or not.
The GAO report, entitled, “Superfund: Extent of the Nation’s
Potential Hazardous Waste Problem Still Unknown [GAO/RCED88-44],”
is free from: GAO, Box 6015 Gaithersburg, MD 20877; phone (202)
2756241.
–Peter Montague, Ph.D.
Descriptor terms: epa; sara; siting; monitoring; listing; gao;
inventories; investigations; cerclis; cercla; rcra; risk
assessment; congress;