By JOSEPH A. DAVIS
of Society of Environmental Journalists

Superfund sites contain a wide variety of hazardous materials — not only toxic, but sometimes corrosive or flammable. All of them can hurt people, moreso when they seep into drinking water.

Society of Environmental Journalists

Historically, there were few to no state or federal laws forbidding the disposal of those hazardous materials in places where they could poison or harm people. They might have been buried in unstable terrain or left in 55-gallon drums that would rust and leak. This happened for decades.

The Superfund story began with Love Canal in the southeast corner of Niagara Falls, N.Y. Starting in the 1940s, the Hooker Chemical Co. had used the upstate site as a dump for harmful chemical waste. Then it was covered over, and a housing development was built on top of it. In the 1960s and 1970s, people living there got sick with diseases like leukemia. Eventually, the health harms were traced to the toxic wastes mobilized by shallow groundwater. Neighbors organized and demanded help. In 1980, Congress finally passed the Superfund law to deal with similar problems all over the United States. That law held hazardous waste dumpers strictly liable for the damages they had caused. Once those “responsible parties” were identified, victims and governments could go after them in court to recover cleanup costs.

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In cases where danger was immediate, the EPA could step in and do immediate stabilization of the site. This was called “removal,” although it was rarely so simple as merely trucking away some drums. This was paid for by the multibillion-dollar Superfund, which was originally paid for by a tax on petrochemical companies. What followed was a complex array of lawsuits against (and between) companies.

There are currently about 1,342 contaminated sites on the EPA’s Superfund National Priority List. These are the worst of the worst. There’s at least one in almost every state. The EPA estimates that some 78 million people live within three miles of a Superfund site. That’s almost a quarter of the U.S. population. Many more are not on the list.

Although normally Superfund cleanups have been slow, the EPA under Trump 1.0 and 2.0 has made a big deal over efforts to speed up the process. One worry that has arisen is that faster cleanups will be superficial, temporary and less clean.