Everyone knows that former President George W. Bush is no friend of the environment. Under his administration, animal species facing extinction were kept off the endangered species list, the Environmental Protection Agency was sued by 16 states to force it to regulate emissions, and only 38 cleanups of contaminated waste sites were completed per year. So it may come as a surprise to some that under the Obama administration, the EPA only plans to complete cleanups at 20 sites in 2010 and 22 sites in 2011.
|
The EPA cleans up toxic waste sites under the authority of the “Superfund act,” the common name for the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act, a U.S. federal law designed to clean up abandoned hazardous waste sites. “Superfund” also refers to the trust fund that pays for the cleanup of abandoned sites where the company responsible for the pollution no longer exists or cannot be found.
Congress passed the Superfund act in 1980 in response to the Love Canal and Valley of the Drums environmental disasters. Love Canal was a suburban neighborhood in upstate New York that was built on top of toxic waste. By 1978, it had become a national scandal due to the tragic health problems of the families living there. The Valley of the Drums in Kentucky was a 23-acre dumpsite in Kentucky where barrels of waste were abandoned. To this day, the soil nearby is contaminated with carcinogenic PCBs.
The Obama administration must be held accountable for continuing the work of cleaning up toxic waste sites. At the same time, it has been argued that there is an explanation for the administration’s failure to surpass the Bush administration’s track record for Superfund cleanups. First, as the cleanup process continues, the sites remaining incomplete represent the more difficult and complicated projects.
Budget calls for more cleanup funds but not until ‘after economy recovers’
