Monday, May 12, 2008
Bush's cuts to the Superfund reward corporate polluters for stonewalling and leave neighbors of toxic sites frustrated and desperate.
Jul 29, 2002 | Patty Estrella drives her Chrysler Sebring convertible down a dirt road, pulls onto a small hill, turns the car around and throws it into park. On the right, small suburban houses litter the landscape; to the left lies the blue expanse of Buzzards Bay. And straight ahead sprawls the subject of our tour: the abandondoned Atlas Tack factory, a 24-acre, arsenic-laden site that's dominated by empty brick buildings with broken windows, a smokestack and -- lying a few yards from where Estrella and I sit -- reed-filled marshland that leaches poison into the bay, its mud and its clams.
"You can't see pollution," Estrella says, running a hand through her frosted blond hair. "But you can see the beauty of the ocean and the tragedy of it being ruined."
She points to a downed strip of fence that lies in the marsh, glistening like a silver bridge. "The fence has been down for a while," she says. Later in the day, I see a group of kids playing nearby; Estrella's teenage son tells me that sneaking into the site has become a Fairhaven rite of passage.
It doesn't look as though it would take much to get in. Getting the factories and poisons out, however, is another story -- as Estrella knows. She has been fighting for an immediate cleanup of the area ever since the mid-'80s, when Atlas Tack abandoned the site, and when she and her husband bought the tiny ranch house that abuts what state, federal and independent studies have found to be contaminated property. She's complained at community meetings, formed neighborhood watchdog groups, spied on the company from her attic window. Her closets overflow with Atlas Tack-related documents.
For a while, particularly during the late '90s, it looked as though Estrella's efforts were not in vain. State officials had already cleaned up a contaminated lagoon in the late '80s and in 1999, after the city sued, Atlas Tack demolished one of the site's more dangerous buildings. One year later, the EPA offered an $18 million cleanup plan.
"I thought then that it might actually happen," Estrella says.
But two years after the plan was approved by town and state officials, the site remains nearly as dangerous as it was a decade ago. With its condemned buildings and contaminated ground -- more than 54,000 cubic yards of soil, debris and sediment contain "heavy metals, cyanide, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) and pesticides," according to the EPA's most recent report -- the site is a health risk to any human or animal who visits the area or ingests shellfish harvested nearby. But even though the site is tainted enough to find a place on the Superfund list -- a running tally of the nation's most polluted areas, each of them eligible for federal Superfund money for cleanup -- Atlas Tack's poisons won't be removed anytime soon. On June 24, the EPA told Congress that it planned to cut funding for 33 Superfund sites. A handful of those properties received last-minute funding July 22, but Atlas Tack, its cleanup once scheduled to start in April, is currently destined to remain unfunded and untouched.
Estrella and the other 7,200 residents who live within a mile of the site are the most obvious victims of the decision. Unless more money becomes available, their only recourse to living in the toxic shadow of Atlas Tack is to move. Barring that, they have to derive what little comfort they can from EPA studies showing that the site's poisons are leaking into the ocean, not into local neighborhoods, perhaps delaying the seemingly inevitable impact on their health.
But it isn't just the prospect of a future living next to contaminated land that residents of Fairhaven, and other Americans affected by the Superfund cuts, find devastating. It is the fact that the decision to leave them mired in contaminants has huge benefits for the companies that dumped them. Companies like Atlas Tack, and its parent company, Great Northern Industries, are the happy beneficiaries of the Bush administration's new Superfund policy. By refusing to clean up the sites and then collect costs from the responsible parties, Bush and the EPA have essentially given the nation's biggest corporate polluters a multimillion-dollar reprieve -- at a huge personal cost to less influential citizens.
Environmental activists, local residents and politicians who have fought for Superfund cleanup say they are not surprised by the move, crushing as it is to all of them. The Bush administration never liked the Superfund program, says Scott Stoermer, spokesman for the League of Conservation Voters. "They see it as an inefficient government program that puts too much of a burden on corporations."
But EPA officials dispute this conclusion. In a July 18 editorial in the New York Times, EPA administrator Christine Todd Whitman stressed that the agency remains dedicated to the Superfund cause. Designates like Atlas Tack, Whitman argued, could get cleanup funding as early as the end of the year. But the Bush administration has never suggested it would reinstate the corporate taxes that fed the Superfund until 1995, and with the cleanups at Atlas Tack and more than a dozen other sites delayed indefinitely, critics are struggling to take the EPA at its word.
Fairhaven's residents in particular see the cuts as one more punishing corporate perk, an extravagant handout from the nation's CEO in chief. And in the case of Atlas Tack, they say, it is nearly impossible to rationalize a regulatory break that so clearly endangers the well-being -- perhaps the lives -- of an entire community.
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