Finally a Fast Track for EPA Cleanups : Speedy Assault on Superfund Messes Will Help Westminster Site but Not McColl Dump

No one expected toxic cleanups to be easy. But, 12 years after the nation’s Superfund was signed into law by President Jimmy Carter, only 149 of the nation’s 1,208 contaminated sites have made it off the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s “to-do” list.

Now the EPA is trying an experiment: putting certain sites on a fast track aimed at bypassing many of the delays that have slowed down many cleanups. The so-called Superfund Accelerated Cleanup Model, or “Sack-em,” is a new tack that is welcome, and overdue.

Among the first cleanup sites to be put on the “Sack-em” list is one named to the Superfund list only recently: a Westminster neighborhood where oily goop has been oozing into back yards.

The EPA hopes to have toxics removed from this and other designated sites around the nation within three to five years. That would be far preferable than the 12 it now takes for the average site.

To speed things up, the EPA will be making use of what it has learned since 1980 about site cleanups.

It will, among other things, establish a “presumptive remedy” on sites that are similar to others on the Superfund list. That means some actual cleanup could begin on the accelerated sites even before all of the bureaucratic I’s have been dotted and Ts crossed. That should bring faster relief to areas plagued for far too long with severe toxics problems.

Unfortunately, “Sack-em” comes too late for some sites, such as Fullerton’s McColl dump, where cleanup is still a ways off.

But the accelerated program should be able to help the 73-home Westminster subdivision now on the Superfund list.

The EPA says it believes that by mid-1993 it can decide on a way to clean up the oily residue that was dumped there in the 1930s.

When it comes to the Superfund, that’s faster than the speed of lightning.