The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is adding 10 new hazardous waste sites that pose risks to human health and the environment to the National Priorities List (NPL) of Superfund sites.
The NPL is a listing of priority sites that EPA investigates to determine if actions are needed to clean up the waste. Superfund is the federal program that cleans up the most complex, uncontrolled or abandoned hazardous waste sites in the country–protecting the health of nearby communities and ecosystems from harmful contaminants.
Contaminants found at these sites may pose a wide range of health effects. The contaminants found include arsenic, benzene, chromium, copper, creosote, cyanide, dichloroethene (DCE), lead, mercury, perchloroethene, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) and selenium, among others.
The 10 sites are:
- Salt Chuck Mine (Outer Ketchikan County, Alaska)
- JJ Seifert Machine (Ruskin, Fla.)
- Kerr-McGee Chemical Corp – Jacksonville (Jacksonville, Fla.)
- Chemetco (Madison County, Ill.)
- Lake Calumet Cluster (Chicago, Ill.)
- Gratiot County Golf Course (St. Louis, Mich.)
- Kerr-McGee Chemical Corp – Navassa (Navassa, N.C.)
- Gowanus Canal (Brooklyn, N.Y.)
- Black Butte Mine (Cottage Grove, Ore.)
- Van Der Horst USA Corporation (Terrell, Texas)
The following eight sites have been proposed:
- Sanford Dry Cleaners (Sanford, Fla.)
- St. Clair Shores Drain (St. Clair Shores, Mich.)
- Vienna Wells (Vienna, Mo.)
- ACM Smelter and Refinery (Cascade County, Mont.)
- Wright Chemical Corporation (Riegelwood, N.C.)
- Black River PCBs (Jefferson County, N.Y.)
- Dewey Loeffel Landfill (Nassau, N.Y.)
- Smokey Mountain Smelters (Knox County, Tenn.)
To date, there are 1,279 sites on the NPL (including the 10 new sites). In addition to the new sites, EPA is also proposing to add eight additional sites. With the proposal of the eight new sites, there are 61 proposed sites awaiting final agency action.
With all Superfund sites, EPA tries to identify and locate the parties potentially responsible for the contamination to pay for the clean up. For the newly listed sites without viable potentially responsible parties, EPA will investigate the full extent of the contamination before starting significant cleanup at the site. Therefore, it may be several years before significant cleanup funding is required for these sites, EPA said.
Contaminated sites may be placed on the NPL through various mechanisms, including numeric ranking established by EPA’s Hazard Ranking System and designation by states or territories of one top-priority site.
The EPA and the Nagional Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) recently announced an initiative to study the feasibility of deploying renewable energy systems on Superfund sites and othe brownfields.
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