Without Superfund Tax, Stimulus Aids Cleanups

[Pirate Smile]

Source: The New York Times


Dredging at a Superfund site in Vineland, N.J., that will get up to $25 million in stimulus money.

VINELAND, N.J. — The Superfund program to clean up the nation’s most contaminated industrial sites was established nearly 30 years ago on the principle that those responsible for toxic pollution should pay for it.


Ronald Naman, Environmental Protection Agency site manager, says the money will mean jobs.

So why is the government spending $600 million in stimulus money to work on sites like the defunct arsenic-fouled Vineland Chemical Company plant here in South Jersey?

Environmental Protection Agency officials and environmentalists say the Superfund program has been chronically underfinanced since a tax that supported it expired in 1995.

What is more, the old Vineland plant, like hundreds of other toxic dumps, is a so-called orphan site, meaning that either no responsible party has been found or money from the original polluter has been exhausted. So the taxpayer is on the hook for the remedial work.

Vineland’s former owners, now deceased, paid $3 million toward a cleanup that began a decade ago and has already cost more than $120 million. The site will get $10 million to $25 million in stimulus money to speed a continuing project to purge arsenic and other chemicals from soil and water on the site’s 54 acres.



Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/26/science/earth/26superfund.html?ref=politics