Superfund Efforts to Clean Waterways Come With a Risk

The following is an excerpt from an article in 

The New York Times
Tuesday, August 14, 2012

Superfund Efforts to Clean Waterways Come With a Risk

By ANTHONY DePALMA

LYNDHURST, N.J. — This is not what a Superfund site is supposed to look like. There are no rusting barrels, no antifreeze-green slime oozing up from the ground. There’s just a deep bend in the serpentine Passaic River, a gaggle of pushy Canada geese and a lone rower in a single scull making good time on the calm, dark waters.

Yet Mile Marker 10.9 on the Passaic is most definitely a toxic hot spot. Testing late last year showed that five acres of shallow mud flats in the river here were highly contaminated with mercury, toxic chemical compounds called PCBs and dioxin, which is known to cause cancer. The discovery has sent environmental officials and a small army of corporations scrambling to remove thousands of cubic yards of sediment with plans to seal the rest beneath a permanent cap, all within the coming year.

That the hidden dioxin deposit was detected at all and the remediation put on such a fast track are results of an ambitious effort by the Environmental Protection Agency, which runs the federal Superfund program, to zero in on toxic targets that had been passed over for decades because they were too big, too costly and just too difficult to tackle.

More than three decades after the program was established by Congress to clean up the most heavily polluted sites in the country, either by forcing those responsible to pay or by covering the cost with money from a special fund, the agency is now taking on the most expensive and most technically complex cleanups ever attempted — large stretches of urban waterways where the pollution is out of sight.

But there are lingering doubts about the best ways to handle such immense cleanups. “The public wants this stuff picked up and hauled away,” said Michael A. Barbara, the technical consultant for the businesses that are being held responsible for cleaning up the Passaic. “But the reality is that sometimes the process of stirring up this stuff does more harm than leaving it in place.”

Even the most notorious hazardous-waste dumps on land pale beside the prospect of cleaning up miles of riverbed — in which the slightest movement can stir up long-buried wastes that tides, floods, even motorboat traffic can spread upstream and down. Trying to predict how everything will work is so complicated that preliminary planning alone can cost more than an entire land-based cleanup.

But after years of study and some smaller pilot projects that met with varying degrees of success — and failure — the E.P.A. is finally tackling some of the most heavily polluted waterways. Many are in the New York-New Jersey area, which, since the beginning of Superfund, has had the greatest number of polluted sites.

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