January 29, 1979
Page 1327
ABANDONED CHEMICAL DUMP SITES WARRANT URGENT ATTENTION
Mr. MUSKIE. Mr. President, toxic waste from abandoned and illegal dump sites continues to percolate to the topsoil of various dumping grounds and to the top of the front pages of our newspapers across the Nation. In that process, the public health continues to be endangered, and the public demand that something be done to rectify the situation has been intensified.
During the congressional adjournment alone, it was reported that three more chemical dump sites in the Love Canal area had been found which could be as potentially dangerous as the first site found; we heard that more than 600 steel barrels filled with industrial waste were found floating in flood waters near Louisville, Ky.; and we have seen the problems that the State of North Carolina has had in trying to safely bury more than 40,000 cubic yards of soil contaminated with toxic PCB's when the public is alarmed.
In my own State of Maine, citizens of the town of East Gray are unable to drink water from their wells because of toxic chemicals. The chemicals found in the well water were also found at a waste oil disposal site in the same community. The town had to appropriate $600,000 in order to extend public water lines to the affected area.
Siting hazardous waste facilities and expanding State and local roles in the planning and management of hazardous wastes are topics which the 96th Congress will have to monitor through the implementation of the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act in this session. But we also will not be able to ignore the question of who should be responsible for the damages caused by abandoned industrial dump sites. The tough question of who will pay for the mitigation made necessary by the years, sometimes decades, of careless solid waste disposal must be addressed.
An article in the New York Times and two pieces from the Washington Post, printed during adjournment, touch upon many of the significant problems we will encounter as we begin implementing the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act and trying to determine the liability of careless dumping.
Mr. President, I ask that the articles entitled "Niagara Finds New Love Canals," "A $6 Million Hassle Over Spilled Poison," an editorial entitled "Those Deadly Dumps," and from the Maine Sunday Telegram, "Environment, Dumps and Drinking Water" be printed in the RECORD.
There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in the RECORD, as follows:
[From the New York Times]
A $6 MILLION HASSLE OVER SPILLED POISON
(By Joanne Omang)
WOODRIDGE, N.J.— Exhibit B-40/40 appears to be a jar of black earth, but if you tilt it you can see small silvery globules and rivulets of mercury rolling back and forth in the dirt.
The spot this dirt came from is so contaminated with the toxic metal that it allegedly contains more mercury than any place on earth outside a mercury mine. A mercury processing plant made fungicides and mercury compounds here for years under a series of owners prior to 1974, slopping as much as 4 pounds a day of the metal onto the floors and washing it into the swampy field out back. Eventually much of it drained into Berry's Creek and now sits in the sedimenton the bottom of the stream.
The jar can be found in a file cabinet along with mountains of documents at the New Jersey Superior Court at Hackensack.
Nearby, as more evidence in the tangle of lawsuits that have sprung up around this case, are several cardboard boxes of dirty, broken bottles, plastic jugs and grimy trash from the field, all enclosed in tightly knotted plastic bags.
"One of the expert witnesses told me we shouldn't be breathing the air around that stuff so I ordered the bags put on," said Judge Sherwin D. Lester.
Judge Lester will rule sometime next spring on what kind of cleanup will take place at the Wood Ridge site and who will pay some or all of the estimated $8 million cost. His decision could set precedents for dealing with the growing number of old hazardous waste sites that are being discovered almost daily, their sources and owners lost in a fog of corporate buck-passing.
"If there are 1,000 hazardous waste sites around the country — and that's not an unreasonable figure — and if we assume $5 million to clean each one up, and that's not unreasonable either, then that's $5 billion that has to be found somewhere," said Steffen Plehn, head of the hazardous waste program at the Environmental Protection Agency.
The EPA last week estimated that 32,000 sites nationwide may contain hazardous wastes in the form of pesticides, acids, caustics, nuclear residues and other chemicals, many of them carcinogenic, from some 425,000 companies. An estimated 80 to 40 million tons of hazardous stuff is produced and is disposed of every year, up to 90 percent of it in ways we will probably regret later, the EPA said.
"WE CAN'T BE TOO CAREFUL"
Mercury in its various forms, for example, can be nasty stuff, causing blindness, nerve decay, birth defects and death. The New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection wants 3,000 feet of Berry's Creek to be dredged out and the entire 40-acre Wood Ridge field to be blacktopped and then surrounded by an impermeable wall reaching 20 feet underground to a natural layer of clay. Along with a monitoring program, the cleanup would cost $6 million.
"This site is the major source of mercury contamination in the Meadowlands and everything else is insignificant by comparison," said Ronald P. Heksch, deputy attorney general of New Jersey.
He does not try to present Berry's Creek as some kind of pristine brook full of jumping trout that must be saved from the mercury. Much of the swampy, tidal area called the Jersey Meadows has been grossly polluted for decades from dozens of industrial sources, and there have been no oxygen and no fish in Berry's Creek as far back as anyone can remember. That is one of the complications.
Heksch cannot produce a horror story of dead or dying people or hundreds of fish bellyup in the water as evidence of damage, but must rely, he said, "on the potential for what could happen" because of the mercury now in the ground and in the sediment of the stream.
Two miles downstream from the Wood Ridge site is the new Giants' stadium and sports complex, built on mercury-polluted land. Further along is the Hackensack River, which flows into New York harbor. None of the murky water is now used for drinking. "But when the stream gets cleaned of other pollutants and the fish begin to come back, they will spend more time here and will stir up the bottom and pick up the mercury," Heksch said.
"We take the position that we can't be too careful. There are a million ways for the stuff to leave the site."
Much of the 50 days of courtroom testimony has involved experts arguing about the relative dangers of one kind of mercury over another, the total tonnage of the metal present in the field and the chances of it moving downstream. These issues of quality and technology recur in virtually every hazardous waste case nationwide. Even when all sides agree, as they do here, that there is in fact a pollutant present, it may still be hard to fix the blame and harder yet to get the cleanup paid for.
In many cases the disposal was perfectly legal at the time it occurred and in others the firms have vanished or been absorbed in a corporate merger.
Some examples cited by EPA's Plehn:
Salisbury Laboratories, a veterinary pharmaceuticals plant in Charles City, Iowa, has been dumping arsenic and other chemical sludge onto an 8-acre site since 1953. The arsenic is now leaking from the landfill into the Cedar River, a major waterway, and the estimated cost of digging up the landfill and moving it is $30 million. But the company's total net worth is only $5 million. Who pays for the repairs?
Pesticide chemicals in the water supply of Hardeman County, Tenn., are identical to those in 80,000 leaky drums of waste that the Velsicol Chemical Corp. buried nearby from 1965 to 1972.
There is no other apparent source for the toxic stuff, but even if the drums are the cause, burying them there was perfectly legal when it was done. Should Velsicol have to pay?
The area around New York's Love Canal has been declared a federal disaster area with the discovery that at least 82 different chemicals, including radioactive and carcinogenic compounds, are simmering in leaking drums in a dump that the city of Niagara used legally for 25 years. At least nine chemical producing companies used the dump before it was deeded over to a school district, allegedly against the companies' will, and the chemicals are turning up in basements and back yards. Cleanup may cost $8 million plus whatever it takes to move about 235 families to new homes. Who will pay?
REGULATION BY HINDSIGHT
On top of all these cases is the feeling that pollution control watchdogs should have spoken up earlier when the dangers were first realized. Robert M. Wolf, the New Jersey realtor and developer who now owns part of the Wood Ridge site, insisted he knew nothing about any mercury on the property when he bought it for $90,000 an acre in 1974 from the Ventron Corp., and if he had, "I wouldn'thave touched it with a 10-foot pole."
The contamination was first documented when Wolf began tearing down the old chemical processing plant in order to build warehouses to rent. Wetting the structures for demolition produced a silvery runoff and environmental experts soon overran the place. They found concentrations of mercury up to 123,000 parts per million in the surrounding land and in the stream bed. Nationwide background mercury levels rarely exceed one part per million, and EPA limits mercury levels in drinking water to two parts per billion. A dose of 160 parts per million can be lethal.
Under some state laws, Wolf could be liablefor cleaning up the mercury on his portion of the area simply because he now owns the property. But New Jersey wants him merely to be responsible for maintaining and monitoring a containment tank it required him to build under one of his warehouses for the 10,000 cubic yards of topsoil he was forced to scrape off the site. The various requirements, Wolf said, have cost him more than $2 million.
"Ventron ought to pay for this," he said "They put the stuff there and they can handle the expense of removing it."
Ventron, a subsidiary of the chemical and aerospace giant Thiokol Corp. of Beverly, Mass., and Newton, Pa., has maintained in turn that any mercury emitted during its period of ownership, from 1968 to 1974, was in accordance with federal guidelines and that new, tougher laws cannot be applied retroactively.
The plant, said Ventron attorney Harry R Hill Jr., was making a mercury-based fungicide and compounds for resale, obtaining the mercury from mines in Spain and Italy and from old battery casings and thermometers. At the time it was one of the largest such operations in the country, selling several hundred thousand pounds of the compounds each year. But three or four pounds of mercury per day were sloshing into the field and the stream when Ventron took over. Hill said Ventron managed to reduce that to about one-tenth of a pound per day by the fall of 1971, substantially complying with a goal set by the EPA.
"But they were hollering about mercury in effluent to the point where there was some feeling there would be none at all allowed in the future . . . and rather than get to that point, which would be uneconomical, we shut it down." Hill said. No mercury ha been produced at the site since 1974 and the emission law now being cited passed in 1976
Ventron disclaims responsibility and wants the state to go to the people who owned the site before 1968 or to the special Spill Compensation Fund of New Jersey to pay for the cleanup.
For eight years before 1968, the mercury compound plant was owned and run by the Wood Ridge Chemical Corp., a wholly owned subsidiary of the Velsicol Chemical Corp. Velsicol is the Chicago-based firm involved in the Tennessee leakage case and in several other pollution controversies, and Velsicol also denies any responsibility.
"We did not conduct any mercury operations of any kind there," said Velsicol attorney John F. Neary. But didn't the conglomerate have total control of its subsidiary, Wood Ridge Corp.? "We had the usual control of 100 percent stockholders, but no control of the day-to-day operations," Neary said.
"If we lose on this and get liability for ownership, anybody who owns property in New Jersey and finds out that 40 years ago someone put pollutants on their property . . . could be hit with a substantial judgment for something they didn't know about and had no part in," he said.
Velsicol also wants the state to use its Spill Compensation Fund to pay for any containment wall or other cleanup.
Attorneys for the fund argue in their turn that the fund was set up in 1977, long after the Wood Ridge plant closed down, and was intended anyway to finance mop-up operations for oil spills off the New Jersey coast. To use it as Wood Ridge, they say, would be taxing the oil companies to pay for the chemical companies' sins.
The oil companies, unsurprisingly, support that view. "You just have to know New Jersey. There's no way to calculate the numbers of oil, chemical and liquid waste companies here ... you could have thousands of this kind of claim," said Marvin J. Brauth, attorney for Exxon, Mobil, Chevron and Texaco in this case. "If the state wants to clean this up it should pay for it out of a general revenue fund."
NOBODY FELL OVER
So there is the buck again, having gone round the circle and been passed back to the state. Going back further than Velsicol's subsidiary to the original site owner, F. W. Berk & Co., is probably pointless since Berk is out of business. Velsicol still owns the polluted field of swamp grass behind Wolf's warehouses and maintains that, if anything, it is a victim there of others' waste.
Unraveling all this, Judge Lester is expected to make some kind of finding on the applicability of the pollution laws to events that occurred before they were passed. He will look at Velsicol's "corporate veil" and decide whether the firm is liable for what its subsidiary Wood Ridge may have done. He will consider whether the state has obligations under its tidal waters responsibilities, and whether the spill fund is at all involved, and whether the various parties owe damages to one another. And then he will decide how the mercury is to be dealt with, trying to balance the degree of danger to public safety against progressively higher costs of various remedies. The case is certain to be appealed.
While he ponders, Wolf's warehouse tenants try to ignore the problem. "We were upset when we found out about it, but we've had everybody in the world here to check the plant and there's no mercury anywhere." said Jerry Rosenblum, head of the J. Rosenblum & Sons Inc. food distributors warehouse.
"Well, we used to ask each other how we felt and all, and we were pretty upset at first," echoed Jill Thielmann, office manager of the neighboring Gailyn Packaging Corp. "But when nobody fell over in the first few days, well, you know how it is, you forget about it."
[From the Washington Post, Jan. 9, 1979]
THOSE DEADLY DUMPS
The rising concern about dangerous industrial wastes has made officials more aware of how much toxic junk becomes hot cargo, transported and dumped illegally. "Gypsy hauling" and "midnight dumping" have been widespread and presumably lucrative covert business for years. In a report last year, the magazine Chemical Week cited examples from all over — 50 barrels of nitrocellulose (gun cotton) found under a freeway in Newark, caches of waste-filled drums "in the South Carolina pines," 80,000 gallons of waste oil that "just disappear" in Hawaii each month, and 25,000 barrels of wastes abandoned in Minnesota when a disposal site was closed by a court.
Kentucky officials and the Environmental Protection Agency are now trying to deal with300 to 600 drums, containing an array of dangerous chemicals, that were stored on a farm and swept into an Ohio River tributary by a flood last month. Some of the drums have started to leak. An even more blatant case is causing a furor in North Carolina, where officials are trying to decide how to dispose of some 40,000 cubic yards of soil contaminated with PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls) contained in wastes illegally dumped, apparently from tank trucks, along 250 miles of rural roads last August.
The most immediate problem in such cases is removing the threat to public health. These hot cargoes are like time bombs whose fuse may be very short or very long. That was proved, of course, by the Love Canal tragedy that gained national attention last summer when foul wastes from an old (and, when it was established, legal) industrial dump bubbled to the surface in Niagara Falls, New York. Authorities found high rates of birth defects and miscarriages among residents of the neighborhood. A number of families had to be relocated — too late. The cleanup there is costing millions of dollars; the human damage can never be repaired.
Nobody wants any more Love Canals. That's why EPA and many states are now trying to identify and cope with other potentially dangerous dumping grounds. That's why stringent controls are being imposed on future transporting and dumping of dangerous wastes. And that's why it's disheartening to see North Carolina officials seeking a waiver of three EPA safety rules in order to bury the PCB-contaminated dirt in rural Warren County — where many residents, understandably, hotly oppose the plan.
We don't mean to suggest that the North Carolina agencies involved are taking a cavalier approach or deliberately trifling with the problem. They face a very real difficulty: cost. Disposal in Warren County might cost the public $2.5 million. Trucking the massive amounts of waste to an EPA-approved site in Alabama would take around $12 million. The difference is not insignificant. In our view, however, securing this toxic stuff where it is less likely to seep into groundwater or otherwise pose a future threat is worth the added expense.
That gets back to the heart of the matter — the immense burdens imposed on the public by people who break the pollution and health laws and spread this potentially lethal litter around. They are the ones who ought to pay, as much as possible, for the damage already done. And vigorous prosecution of such scofflaws is the best way to keep the problem from exploding all around us as the costs of lawful waste disposal continue to rise. In the North Carolina case, three men, charged with a number of state and federal offenses are scheduled to be tried later this month. Elsewhere, other midnight dumpers are being pursued. Those found guilty of such contempt for public safety should be made to pay a lot.
[From the Maine Sunday Telegram, Jan. 29, 1978]
DUMPS—AND DRINKING WATER
(By Bob Cummings)
It's been a spotty month for Maine dumps and for those who dream of better and less wasteful disposal of the trash society creates.
Portland's controversial trash baler began operations — after a final week delay because of the weather.
Shops and stores gradually got geared up to comply with the State's returnable bottle law — which supporters say will reduce the volume of wastes at municipal dumps six percent.
The legislative committee on Natural Resources voted unanimously to allow the giant sawmills of the state to continue to burn wood wastes capable of generating millions of kilowatt hours of electricity a year.
A $300,000 "sanitary landfill" dump in York may not be so sanitary after all. A Department of Environmental Protection report says the dump threatens underground water supplies in the community.
And a Solid Waste Management Advisory Committee issued a comprehensive report urging that the state double its efforts to help Maine cities and towns dispose of their wastes without polluting the air and water of the state.
The solid waste committee concluded that safe and sane dumps are possible, but conceded the task of creating them isn't easy.
"Few environmental problems are as difficult and controversial to solve as finding satisfactory ways of disposing of, or utilizing our solid wastes," the committee concluded.
"Maine's geology is not hospitable to solid waste landfills and Maine's location is not near enough to markets to make reuse or recycling as attractive as in some other states.
"Communities face large capital and operating expenditures to find and implement solid waste practices that will be environmentally acceptable."
The warnings proved prophetic.
For as the DEP board began to ponder the implications of the report, word came from the Town of York that test wells around its new landfill dump show water levels three feet higher than is considered safe.
The board last week ordered the town to take corrective action or close the dump down. The town said it would appeal.
Dump specialists employed by the department had warned last summer that the abandoned gravel pit used by York probably wouldn't be suitable.
But they reluctantly recommended that the board give its okay anyway, when engineers hired by the town said they were confident no water problems would develop.
Less than six months later, however, problems did show up. Corrections could prove expensive and perhaps impossible.
The DEP staff suggested the town try putting another three feet of clay and fine sand on the bottom of the dump in hopes of bringing it above the level of the water.
Town officials complained that this would cost another $200,000.
The appeal procedure will delay a final decision, but if the fears of the DEP staff are borne out time won't help and even the extra dollars may not be enough.
"Another three feet at this time is a reasonable compromise," one DEP geologist commented. "But eventually considerably more fill may be necessary to protect ground water."
Mary Sottery, one of two DEP board members who had opposed using the gravel pit, thinks the site never should have been used.
She argues that ground water supplies are among the state's most precious resources. "If we can keep our water clean, a big industry in the future may be selling clean water to other states," she argues.
No dump, Sottery believes, should be located on top of an aquifer — the underground sand, gravel and rock deposits that hold the drinking water supplies used by thousands of Maine families.
Scientists estimate these underground reservoirs store two-thirds of the world's supply of fresh water.
As such they represent a tremendously valuable resource, but a resource that can be destroyed by pollution.
There is no known way for a polluted underground reservoir of water to be cleaned of wastes from misplaced municipal dumps or poisonous industrial wastes — as has occurred at Gray.
Most wastes normally decay into harmless substances eventually. But in cool, below ground temperatures, this can take centuries. Poisons allowed to seep underground because of poorly placed dumps may eventually become diluted to harmless levels. But this also may require many decades.
Residents of Gray, where industrial solvents have seeped into about 30 wells, have been told they may never be able to use them again.
A similar dilemma faces Provincetown on Cape Cod, where a leaky gasoline storage tank seeped 3,400 gallons of gasoline into the underground water that supplies the town-owned wells.
The town is drilling test wells to monitor how rapidly the gasoline is drifting towards adjacent swamps and ocean waters, in hopes that the town water may be turned on again by the time summer visitors arrive.
York isn't the first Maine community to have dump-polluted ground water.
The solid waste committee report says several privately-owned wells and a pond are threatened in Saco from rain water that has seeped through that community’s old dump and into underground reservoirs.
The Norridgewock town dump on the Kennebec River was closed when water tests indicated that wastes were seeping into the town water there also.
And tests at Hartland and Rockland suggest wastes from a tannery and the town dump, respectively, are polluting underground supplies of potentially important drinking water.
No one knows how many other dumps may be causing ground water problems, because no one has ever looked to find out.
The Department of Environmental Protection only recently began a comprehensive inventory of environmental conditions at Maine dumps.
The surveys "will undoubtedly reveal many more examples of environmental pollution," committee members believe.
"One of the most serious concerns is that poorly located dumps will pollute ground water sources virtually forever because groundwater may flush at an extremely slow rate. Pollutants may persist for years."
The committee, however, thinks the state as well as local communities must share the blame.
Members say the $63,000 the legislature has appropriated to manage the dump laws is "woefully inadequate."
The DEP has used its money to enforce the laws, rather than to educate local officials about what has to be done, the committee insists.
"This has led to hard feelings among municipal officials who feel that they are being asked to do things that are unrealistic or confusing."
Because of generally poor soils for burying wastes, the committee thinks top priority should be given to reducing the volumes that have to be buried.
"We are consuming more as a society and as a result, we have more waste" the panel says.
"Fortunately, we in Maine have adopted bottle bill legislation as a first step in reducing our waste at its source."
The bottle bill is expected to eliminate about six per cent of the wastes that have until now been placed in dumps.
Recycling of paper, bottles and cans, and miscellaneous other scrap can reduce the waste load on the state's dumps another 40 per cent, the committee thinks.
But there may be other uses for some dump wastes. The solid waste committee cites efforts by the City of Auburn to burn its wastes to produce energy for an industrial plant.
But ironically, as the report was being pondered, the Natural Resources Committee of the Maine Legislature was approving an amendment to the air pollution laws that would permit waste wood from saw mills to be burned without collecting the energy.
A bill to make "teepee burners" again legal in Maine was approved by the legislative panel unanimously after wood mill owners said they couldn't find a market for any energy produced.
The "teepees" are actually huge cone-like structures, where wood wastes are burned in a controlled bonfire.
The DEP says seven cone burners within one 50-mile radius are capable of burning the equivalent of 30,000 gallons of fuel oil a day.
But owners said there is no market for this amount of energy, even if it could be efficiently produced.
Portland's new baler doesn't produce any energy either, but like the cone burners it reduces the volume of wastes to more manageable levels.
The baler cost $3.2 million to buy and install, but it squeezes wastes to about half their normal volume, making dumps last longer.
The Portland baler will be used by Portland, South Portland, Scarborough and Cape Elizabeth. The baled wastes will be buried in an abandoned gravel pit in Scarborough.
Some fear the compressed wastes may also cause ground water pollution. But the Greater Portland Council of Governments doesn't think so. It has spread an inch-thick plastic liner on the floor of the gravel pit to catch any water that may seep through.