A study by the Associated Press finds that over 300 Superfund sites could be subject to flooding as climate change ushers in rising seas and stronger storms.
The Obama administration assessed some of these at-risk places and planned to gird them from harsher weather and rising seas. EPA’s 2014 Climate Adaptation Plan said prolonged flooding at low-lying Superfund sites could cause extensive erosion, carrying away contaminants as waters recede.
But Trump has gone beyond expressing climate change denial. He’s forbidden the military to plan for climate change in assessing national security, removed climate data from the EPA, and intentionally removed both language and planning meant to address the threats of climate change.
“Site managers had started reviewing climate and environmental trends for each Superfund site, including the potential for flooding,” said Phyllis Anderson, who worked for 30 years as an EPA attorney and associate director of the division that manages Superfund cleanups until her retirement in 2013. “The current administration appears to be trying to erase these efforts in their climate change denials, which is a shame.”
With Trump already issuing orders to ignore climate change on infrastructure projects, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that he’s also willing to allow the nation’s worst toxic messes to be inundated and spill poisons into rivers, streams, and the ocean. He loves the idea. Because he thinks you hate it.
And, as with every other subject, Scott Pruitt is determined to make it worse.
Like Trump, Pruitt rejects the consensus of climate scientists that man-made carbon emissions are driving global warming. His task force’s 34-page report makes no mention of the flood risk to Superfund sites from stronger storms or rising seas, but eight of the 21 sites on EPA’s priority list are in areas of flood risk.
That 34-page report was produced by a crooked-banker friend of Pruitt’s who had no experience in environmental issues at all. It completely rewrote the rules for dealing with Superfund sites after only two weeks of “research.” But how that research was done is a mystery, since a Freedom of Information Act request to Pruitt’s Superfund task force produced the response …
… a lawyer for EPA has written PEER to say that the task force had no agenda for its meetings, kept no minutes and used no reference materials.
No reference materials. They looked at nothing when determining how to make these rules. They simply made it up.
Because exposing Americans to the worst toxic waste sites in the nation and irrevocably ruining efforts to remediate these sites is so much better than admitting that climate change is real, climate change is happening now, and climate change represents a massive threat to the nation.
The air around the fenced site hangs heavy with the nose-stinging odor of solvents. Testing found that soil and groundwater under the site contained a witch’s brew of highly toxic chemicals, including PCBs and pesticides.
That’s a site near New York City.
Testing showed the 130-acre lot’s soils were contaminated with radium, the long-banned pesticide DDT, arsenic, lead and other pollutants that over the years have fouled the area’s groundwater and the river.
That one’s in Florida.
Tests afterward measured the toxins at 2,300 times the level that would normally trigger a new cleanup. Pruitt has since ordered an accelerated cleanup of the site.
And that’s a site in Texas that leaked wastes into the San Jacinto River after downpours from Hurricane Harvey. Because this isn’t a threat that’s coming in some distant future. It’s a threat to the nation right now.
