O.C. Toxic Site Part of Retooled Superfund Plan

Facing widespread criticism that Superfund is a super flop, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is mounting an experimental project designed to overhaul the massive program and expedite cleanups of the nation’s worst toxic-waste sites.

Included in the pilot program is a residential neighborhood in Westminster, where hazardous waste has been seeping into the back yards of tract homes, and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. Both sites were added to the nation’s Superfund list this week.

The attempt at streamlining, called Superfund Accelerated Cleanup Model, is the federal agency’s effort to retool its lumbering 12-year-old program, which has been ridiculed from coast to coast for creating an enormous backlog of sites waiting to be cleaned up.

The experiment aims to put many of the nation’s Superfund dumps on the “fast track,” meaning EPA officials will attempt a complete cleanup in three to five years, compared to the 12 years it now takes for an average site. From old mines and electronics plants to military landfills, California has 97 sites on the national priority list, including some that have languished there for a decade.

“The whole goal is to physically get out there and clean it up faster,” said David Jones, manager of the EPA’s regional Superfund remedial-action branch in San Francisco. “The idea is if you can skip a step, skip it. If you can get there faster, do it.”

Time and money will be saved by condensing the EPA’s usual long, rigid series of steps leading to cleanup, and eliminating the repetition that is a notorious part of the process, agency officials say. One crucial change: Instead of waiting for the full results of extensive studies before embarking on a cleanup plan, the regional teams could initiate some early remedies, such as quickly excavating the most dangerous wastes.

Environmentalists, business people, attorneys, community activists--even the EPA--have lambasted the nation’s multibillion-dollar Superfund as a bureaucratic boondoggle. The Superfund list has grown to 1,208 sites across the nation, while cleanup or containment has been completed on just 149, or 12%, since the program was signed into law by President Jimmy Carter in January, 1980.

The EPA expects the accelerated program to be not just an experiment, but a complete overhaul of Superfund that will apply to all sites by 1994, according to a representative of the EPA’s Office of Emergency and Remedial Response in Washington.

Lois Gibbs, a former Love Canal homemaker turned activist who helps people combat hazardous-waste dumps near their homes, said she is dubious that the EPA can or will turn the behemoth around.

“It’s just another piece of rhetoric out of the agency to make people feel good. I can’t believe they will start moving more quickly when they’ve moved so slowly for 10 years,” said Gibbs, whose persistence in forcing the U.S. government to evacuate her contaminated upper New York State neighborhood helped launch the Superfund program.

“You can accelerate all you want, but what does that really mean? That they’ll put only 50 lawyers before the shovels instead of 100? The law was always supposed to be shovels first and lawyers second. But it has always been the other way around in the history of the Bush Administration,” said Gibbs, who heads Citizens Clearing House for Hazardous Waste in Arlington, Va.

Old or abandoned chemical dump sites on the Superfund list are considered national priorities for cleanup because of the danger they pose to nearby residents and the environment. The multibillion-dollar Superfund is bankrolled by a tax on the nation’s industries, and the businesses that created or dumped the waste are held responsible for paying cleanup costs.

But, historically, placement on the list has meant that a site gets entangled in governmental red tape and exhaustive studies. The EPA estimates that 12 years elapses on average between the time a dump comes to its attention and completion of cleanup, and that the average cost per site has swelled to $30 million.

At the 20-acre McColl dump in Fullerton--one of the most prolonged cases in the nation--the EPA has already spent an estimated $20 million and 10 years on studies, but has yet to settle on a cleanup technique or remove a spoonful of waste.

Industry representatives, who have long complained that the bureaucracy slows cleanups and increases their costs, say they are encouraged by the EPA’s attempt at streamlining.

“This is really a dramatic transformation if the concept is implemented,” said Sue Briggum, director of government affairs at Waste Management Inc.--the nation’s largest waste-hauling and environmental-services firm--which is involved in more than 100 Superfund cleanups. “It has enormous promise because after over a decade of reflection, the agency has looked over the program and found deficiencies and procedures that wind up with a lot of paperwork and very little environmental benefit.”

But many businesses remain as skeptical as Gibbs that the EPA can pull it off.

“I’m not sure in practical terms how achievable this is,” Briggum said. “There is a reluctance or inability (within the EPA) after all these years. If they can manage to do it by 1994, I will be real impressed.”

The agency has been developing the program, dubbed “Sack-em” due to its acronym, since February, when it was approved by EPA Administrator William K. Reilly. The streamlined techniques are being used now on 13 sites, although newly listed and proposed Superfund sites are also being wrapped in.

Currently, handling of each Superfund site is broken into steps, each coordinated by a separate team. The process of formally listing a site can take a couple of years. Then, each step--such as preliminary investigation, formation of a plan and research of cleanup options--can take years, and the EPA waits for the results of one step before moving onto the next one.

For example, at Fullerton’s McColl dump, EPA officials spent three years studying the waste before choosing the option of hauling it to a Kern County landfill. But then they were sued, and new laws forced them to find a more permanent solution, which took the EPA another four years. Then, that option ran into technical problems--so they had to start all over again. Only this year has the EPA proposed a final remedy--but it will be at least three more years before it actually gets started.

The agency’s staff has always been reluctant to advance a step, or merge steps, even when they felt assured it would be logical and safe. Now, the EPA has created “regional decision teams” to break the logjam and move forward when necessary.

While the EPA has been talking for years about streamlining Superfund, previous attempts ran into internal resistance because it would alter people’s jobs and responsibilities. But this is the first consensus from EPA headquarters to change its ways, Jones said.

“What is revealing to me is a real willingness now among everybody (at EPA) to say, ‘Let’s be creative,’ ” he said. “All this came out of the frustration at the pace of cleanups and our own inability to explain to anyone outside the program what all these little boxes are for.”

Now, instead of “reinventing the wheel” at each new dump site when identifying the best remedy to clean it up, the new teams when possible will use a technology already proven viable at similar sites, Jones said. The idea is called “presumptive remedy.”

The new approach comes too late to grant much relief to residents near Superfund areas that have been lingered on the list for years, such as the McColl dump and Stringfellow Acid Pits in Riverside County.

The investigation at McColl, a Superfund site since 1982, has passed through so many of the steps and is already so late in the process that the accelerated program won’t help much, Jones said.

The accelerated techniques have already begun in the Westminster neighborhood, where the EPA initiated tests even before it was officially declared a Superfund site Tuesday. As a result, the agency hopes to decide upon a technology for waste removal by the middle of next year.

The faster decisions and condensed studies shouldn’t endanger the public, Jones said.

“There is a risk that if you do something a little quicker, you could miss something,” he added. “But we know a lot more about the technologies now, and if you were a little bit wrong, you’d probably need one additional monitoring well or something like that. It’s not going to be so wrong that it is posing a huge threat.”