I live in the scenic Hudson Valley in the city of Beacon, NY, just a little over 60 miles north of New York City, and we are blessed here to be surrounded by much natural beauty, as well as by dedicated stewards of nature, like the organization Scenic Hudson, which has dedicated itself to preserving nature and wildlife throughout the Hudson Valley. I also live just a few blocks away from the Fishkill Creek, a 33 mile long estuary of the Hudson River. The photo above is one I took last fall at Madame Brett Park and the water from the creek eventually flows into the river at a spot that attracts multiple species of birds and aquatic life.
Now, though, come reports that the creek — like the Hudson River that it connects to — is also heavily contaminated by old industrial pollutants from now gone factories that made use of a moving water supply as a resources. The creek is being discussed as now qualifying for federal funds through the Superfund program. This is something that the EPA is currently proposing.
However, as an editorial in today’s Poughkeepsie Journal (a local paper that has a very good track record on environmental news coverage) points out, there are politically caused limited Superfund dollars available for cleanups of sites like the Fishkill Creek. As this editorial points out,
Nevertheless, the toxic legacy of old industry practices continues to haunt the county — and many other places across the country. At least the federal Environmental Protection Agency believes that, over time, it can restore the vitality of a portion of the Wappinger Creek by adding it to the list of the country’s most hazardous waste sites.
Sediment within the two-mile long tidal portion of the creek, downstream from a Wappingers Falls industrial park, is contaminated with mercury, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons and other pollutants, the agency has revealed. Federal officials say the creek is safe for paddling and other recreation, but playing in the dirt along the banks is not recommended.
The industrial site was used for textile dyeing, manufactured gas plant operations, metal plating, ammunition production, chemical manufacturing and other businesses between 1832 and 1985.
It’s an old, tired story. Throughout New York, including the mid-Hudson Valley, there are hundreds of abandoned industrial sites that are huge environmental messes that have to be cleaned up. In this case, the resources will come from the federal Superfund, the origin of which can be traced to New York in the 1970s. This program began following the public outcry over the hazardous waste dumping at Love Canal in western New York. And, over the decades, many sites have indeed been remedied. But federal budget cutbacks and lousy policy decisions over the years have taken their toll and have slowed the pace of cleanups.
Because this hits home with me and because environmental issues are among my top concerns, I wanted to review a bit of the history of the Superfund program and its politics so as to see why this program has not been able to more quickly do what it was designed to do and to oversee the cleanup of contaminated industrial sites. I was reminded that the Superfund program was created, initially, in response to the horror of Love Canal, a highly contaminated location also in upstate New York. Here’s a bit of history.
And thus, the Superfund program was signed into law by President Jimmy Carter in 1980.
But then along came the Reagan administration, and suddenly industry hacks like E.P.A administrator, Anne Gorsuch, and Superfund director, Rita Lavelle were put in charge of a program that they were not committed to. Suddenly, the pace of cleanups came, more or less to a grinding halt. And then scandal followed. The Reagan administration also had a policy of entering into agreements with corporate polluters; the corporate polluters would promise to clean up the messes that they had made, and the Reagan administration would basically shake their hand and then walk away, feeling like an agreement had been reached. But little to any federal oversight was arranged for.
As the NY Times reported back in 1984,
Last month, Miss Lavelle was found guilty of perjury and obstructing a Congressional investigation by lying to Congressional investigative subcommittees and to other officials at the Environmental Protection Agency about when she found out that her former employer, the Aerojet General Corporation, was disposing of toxic wastes at the Stringfellow Acid Pits near Riverside, Calif.
Witnesses at her trial testified that Miss Lavelle knew of Aerojet's involvement at the site well before she excused herself from official business having to do with the site, as she had promised to do.
Last February, President Reagan dismissed Miss Lavelle from her post as the environmental agency's assistant administrator for solid waste and emergency response amid Congressional investigations into how the agency's toxic waste programs were managed.
Among the charges was favoritism to business and Republican political candidates and failure to use the $1.6 billion hazardous waste cleanup fund in a timely fashion to clean up toxic waste sites. Two Congressional subcommittees are continuing their investigations.
Although Miss Lavelle was the only E.P.A. official charged with a crime, more than 20 other high-ranking officers of the agency, including the Administrator, Anne McGill Burford, resigned under pressure. At Miss Lavelle's trial, her lawyer, James J. Bierbower, told the jury that she had been made a ''scapegoat.'' He did not elaborate.
Later on, Congress tried to put some teeth into the EPA’s ability to enforce clean-ups. But these teeth were essentially removed by the Gingrich Congress, which signed an agreement with the Clinton Administration that significantly weakened enforcement. As the NY Times explains,
The legislation that was before Congress would have extensively revised the Superfund law, formally the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act, which was enacted in 1980 to control the cleanup of the most seriously polluted waste dumps in the nation. One in four Americans now lives within four miles of a site designated to be cleaned up under the law.
Although the law holds polluters retroactively liable for cleaning up polluted sites, it gets its popular name from a Federal fund used to help clean up sites where the original polluters cannot be found or made to pay. That fund is financed by a tax on oil and chemical companies, whose activities created the pollution at most of the designated sites.
Like many laws, this one is supposed to be renewed every few years, and this time Congress was expected to change it. Even without action by Congress, the current law will stay on the books. But the tax that finances the Superfund will expire late next year unless something is done by then.
For now, the real problem is that the existing, ineffectual cleanup program is still in place. Disagreements among polluters and their insurers, and disagreements over how clean the sites should be made, have bogged the program down in costly litigation, and only a few hundred of the 1,200 Federally listed sites have been cleaned up since the law was enacted 14 years ago.
It did not help that the debate about rewriting the law came about in an election year. And it did not help that hatchet men for industry, like Senator Alan Simpson were complaining about a provision which would have imposed retroactive liability on polluters for environmental damage caused before the law was enacted in 1980, though that of course missed so much of the point of the Superfund’s purpose. Cut to the present, and the bottom line is that the Superfund is substantially underfunded, such that cleanup efforts have slowed down. As a United States Government Accountability Office report in 2010 pointed out,
Since 2001, appropriations from the general fund have constituted the largest source of revenue for the trust fund. After the expiration of the tax authority, at the start of fiscal year 1997, the trust fund balance reached its peak of $5.0 billion; in 1998, the trust fund balance began decreasing. Figure 1 shows changes in the balance of the Superfund trust fund from fiscal years 1981 through 2009. At the start of fiscal year 2009, the trust fund had a balance of $137 million.
EPA’s Superfund program receives annual appropriations from the trust fund, which is in turn supported by payments from the general fund. Since fiscal year 1981, the annual appropriation to EPA’s Superfund program has averaged approximately $1.2 billion in noninflation adjusted (nominal) dollars. Since fiscal year 1998, however, congressional appropriations have generally declined when adjusted for inflation
And as the Center For Public Integrity reported in 2011,
The cost of cleaning up hazardous sites is increasing even as Superfund dollars are running out.
In 2010, the Environmental Protection Agency estimated the cost of cleanup was increasing beyond the current funding needed for Superfund sites. In the past decade, EPA allocated $243 million per year for Superfund cleanup. It estimates $335 million to $681 million per year will be needed for future cleanup.
The EPA attempts to bill the company responsible for contamination. Sometimes, the company no longer exists or is bankrupt, so the EPA pays for cleanup out of the Superfund trust, previously funded by a tax on petroleum products. The tax was discontinued in 1995.
Companies that do pay for the cleanup do not have to report to the EPA how much is spent, further complicating efforts to track costs of Superfund site cleanups.
This report also noted that the vulnerability of Superfund projects due to the elimination of the petroleum product tax.
In the meantime, I will be watching very closely to see what happens with this creek that runs through my neighborhood.