A Problem That Cannot Be Buried

By Ed Magnuson

The great toxic-waste mess oozed its way into the nation's consciousness, and its conscience, a little more than five years ago. "An environmental emergency," declared the Surgeon General in 1980. "A ticking time bomb primed to go off," warned the Environmental Protection Agency. The reaction was typically all-American: Congress created a grand-sounding "Superfund," a $1.6 billion, five-year crash program designed to clean up thousands of leaking dumps that were threatening to contaminate much of the nation's underground water supplies.

Last week that law expired, a victim of wrangling among the Senate, the House and President Reagan over how much more should be dedicated to the cause and who should pay the bill. During its existence, the Superfund dribbled away most of its money on a mismanaged effort that served only to reveal the almost unimaginable enormity of the task ahead. Though Congress is likely to reach an agreement by next month on a new infusion of money, anywhere from $10 billion over five years (the House proposal) to $5.3 billion (the Reagan Administration's figure), for now the once ambitious program lingers in limbo.

Meanwhile, fears about toxic wastes continue to grow. Each day more and more communities discover that they are living near dumps or atop ground that has been contaminated by chemicals whose once strange names and initials--dioxin, vinyl chloride, PBB and PCB, as well as such familiar toxins as lead, mercury and arsenic--have become household synonyms for mysterious and deadly poisons. "The problem is worse than it was five years ago," contends New Jersey Democrat James Florio, who as a Congressman from one of the most seriously contaminated states became the key author of the 1980 Superfund law. "It's much, much greater than anyone thought." Concedes Lee Thomas, the third director of the scandal-tarnished EPA during the Reagan Administration: "We have a far bigger problem than we thought when Superfund was enacted. There are far more sites that are far more difficult to deal with than anybody ever anticipated." That comes as no surprise to Barry Commoner, the venerable environmental gadfly. Says he: "We are poisoning ourselves and our posterity."

The growing awareness of the vast scope of the toxic-waste problem has bred much public anguish but precious little remedial action. The Office of Technology Assessment, a research arm of Congress, contends that there may be at least 10,000 hazardous-waste sites in the U.S. that pose a serious threat to public health and that should be given priority in any national cleanup. The cost, OTA estimates, could easily reach $100 billion, or more than $1,000 per U.S. household. Eventually, predicts the General Acccounting Office, which also does studies for Congress, more than 378,000 waste sites may require corrective action. So far the EPA has put only 850 dumps on its priority list (see map). In its five-year effort, it managed to clean up only six sites and, critics protest, not very thoroughly at that.

The U.S. faces other grave environmental risks: acid rain, smoggy skies, radioactive wastes and lethal gases escaping from industrial plants. Over the past five years, the EPA reported last week, mishaps in the handling or production of chemicals have caused some 1,500 injuries and 135 deaths. But the disposal of dangerous wastes is clearly the most pressing concern. Toxic dumps where steel drums have been left to rust and leak, letting poisons seep into the earth for decades, are scattered in virtually every county of every state. They present a potentially irreversible threat to water supplies, public health and the economy.

Why has so little been accomplished in attacking the chemical-dump mess? "If we're looking for people to blame, well, the woods are full of them," says William Ruckelshaus, who helped launch EPA as its first director during the Nixon Administration, and who was recalled by Reagan in 1983 to try to repair the agency's image.

Most critics direct their anger at the current Administration. William Drayton, chairman of a Washington-based environmental-safety group, says it took "an enormous movement in American history" to develop a national consensus that "this country is going to provide public health protection against chemical contaminants." But what followed, charges Drayton, who served as assistant EPA administrator under President Jimmy Carter, was "a classic Greek tragedy: enter stage right the Reagan revolution with its enormous ideological antagonism to regulation of any sort. You have a leader who just doesn't understand what all those Latin-named chemicals are and what they do. On this subject he just stopped learning." Says Douglas Costle, Carter's EPA director, of his successors at the agency: "They just flat-out didn't realize they had a tiger by the tail until it bit them in the ass."

In the Administration's defense, Ruckelshaus argues that "the Government had never done anything like it before, starting from absolute scratch to deal with this terribly emotional mix of issues. The fact that there were mismanagement, false starts and mistakes was inevitable." But even he admits that the agency's performance on toxic wastes "didn't have to be as bad as it was."

There is little doubt that EPA has seemed feckless and confused. For one thing, its critics contend that less than 20% of the original $1.6 billion Superfund allocation has been spent on actual cleanup of waste sites. The National Campaign Against Toxic Hazards, an umbrella group of grass-roots activists, claims that less than 10% of the 850 sites on EPA's current priority list have received any remedial attention at all in the program's first five years. At that pace, according to the group, "millions of Americans will wait decades for the EPA to clean up their poisoned communities."

Apart from actual cleanup, EPA is responsible for monitoring sites suspected of endangering underground water supplies, so that the citizens who draw such water can be warned of the health dangers. But a congressional research team concluded last April that of the 1,246 hazardous-waste dumps it surveyed, nearly half showed signs of polluting nearby groundwater. The EPA's monitoring of these sites, the study charged, was "inaccurate, incomplete and unreliable."

The congressional watchdogs claim that when EPA finally does tackle a waste site, it seeks only a stop-gap solution to the chemical seepage. When a dump is cleaned up, its wastes are often merely shifted to other locales, "which themselves may become Superfund sites," the OTA report says. "Risks are often transferred from one community to another and to future generations."

A poll taken last month for TIME by Yankelovich, Skelly & White, Inc., shows that 79% of Americans say that "not enough" has been done to clean up toxic-waste sites. More surprising, when asked, "Would you be willing to pay higher state and local taxes to fund cleanup programs in your area," 64% answered yes (34% said no, 2% were unsure).

This attitude toward the slow pace of dump cleanups is part of a broad public sense that Government is failing to respond adequately to environmental concerns in general. Some 45% of those polled said that current laws to protect the environment do not go far enough, while 29% are satisfied with them and 16% think they go "too far." Fully 63% feel that even the inadequate governmental protections are not being enforced strictly enough by the agencies involved.

Some critics contend that putting off the admittedly expensive cleanup effort will mean greater expense in the future. "Delay not only prolongs the time that people are exposed to toxic hazards," says Michael Podhorzer, director of the National Campaign Against Toxic Hazards. "But every day it means that more toxic chemicals are released into the soil, air and water. The longer we wait, the greater the damage will be and the higher the final cleanup cost will be."

Consider the meager six sites deemed to have been cleaned through the Superfund. After a nine-month-long spill of chemicals into the Susquehanna River starting in 1979, it was found that a small Pennsylvania company had / been systematically, and illegally, dumping toxic wastes into shafts that fed into the Butler Tunnel, an outlet for waste water from abandoned coal mines near Pittston, Pa. Three men were convicted of violating the state's Clean Streams Act, and one was sent to prison. The three and their company were fined $750,000. EPA supervised the cleanup of the river pollution, and in 1982 it took the site off its priority list. But heavy rains from Hurricane Gloria sent 100,000 gal. of oily, smelly chemical wastes rushing back up to the surface of this presumably cleaned-up site and into the Susquehanna. "There was an extremely strong odor that would burn your nostrils," said City Clerk Paul McGarry, who went to investigate after residents began phoning with complaints. "It looked like liquid tar."

Another of the six sites that EPA claims to have successfully cleaned is in Baltimore, where strong acids and aqua regia, one of the most corrosive liquids in existence, had been stored throughout the 1970s. For years, residents in 20 row houses along Annapolis Road complained of eye, nose and throat irritation; eight people were burned in July 1979 when chemicals leaked into a playing area. EPA removed 1,500 drums and scraped off up to twelve inches of topsoil. The land was sloped and sodded and declared fit for a playground. But critics cite tests showing that the contamination had worked its way as far as 15 feet below the surface. No attempt was made to prevent seepage of these deeper chemicals into the groundwater or a nearby river.

For some 40 years, beginning in the 1930s, the Velsicol Chemical Co. (formerly the Michigan Chemical Co.) had dumped and burned toxic industrial chemicals on a 3.5-acre site along the Pine River near St. Louis, Mich. A county golf course was developed beside the dump. By the mid-'60s, fish in the river contained high levels of such known or suspected carcinogens as PBB, PCB and DDT. Working with EPA, the company in 1982 agreed to spend $38.5 million to clean up the area. At the golf course, all soil was removed to a depth of 3 ft. below any signs of contamination. That involved hauling 68,204 cu. yds. of dirt away. Fully l.25 million gal. of contaminated groundwater were pumped into a 3,400-ft. well lined with two cement walls. EPA considers the golf course cleaned up, as indeed it seems to be. In one sense, however, the problem was merely transported across the river. All that soil has been deposited on the plant's property, where a bigger cleanup job has been completed.

Two of the six sites chosen by the EPA for quick action should probably not have been on the top-priority list in the first place. In Greenville, Miss., Walcott Chemical Co. had stored 226 drums of such chemicals as tetrasodium pyrophosphate and formic acid in a warehouse that the state of Mississippi had seized for failure to pay taxes. The state considered the chemicals a fire hazard (rather than a contamination threat) and asked EPA to put the site near the top of its list. The agency merely had the drums hauled off to an approved landfill in Emelle, Ala. Problem solved. Similarly, about 700 drums of chemicals had been stored in a Cleveland warehouse used by Chemical Minerals Recovery Co. Another 700 were piled outside the building. None had sprung significant leaks. But EPA gave the site priority and had the drums carried to an EPA-licensed landfill in Geneva, Ohio. Another site cleared.

However, what about the residents of Emelle and Geneva? Have they inherited the old headaches of Greenville and Cleveland? Perhaps not immediately, since the dump at Emelle sits atop hundreds of feet of clay, and the one at Geneva at least has the now mandatory clay liner. But most experts consider any landfill only a temporary solution to the chemical-waste problem. Eventually, all will develop cracks or gradually give way to the corrosive action of the potent chemicals.

Six California environmental groups recently surveyed seven landfills in that state. Though the EPA was monitoring them for leaks, the groups reported, "every one of the sites examined is leaking, without exception; and every one is out of compliance with currently applicable regulations." Wastes placed in them from other failed sites may soon have to be picked up and moved once again. The result is a bleak game of chemical leapfrog.

The spreading realization that there is no easy way simply to bury the toxic-waste problem has fed the ever present NIMBY (not in my backyard) syndrome. "Something's got to give," protests Christopher Daggett, EPA administrator for New York and New Jersey. "Either we aren't going to have cleanups, or someone's going to bite the bullet and start accepting wastes. But Lord knows, no one wants to be first." Daggett and his boss, EPA Director Thomas, contend that there is no ready technology that can promptly solve the disposal problem. "We can't wait around until we have the ultimate answer," says Daggett. "This stuff is still being generated, and we have to deal with it today. So, yes, we are going to put it into landfills that may leak someday. But give me an alternative. Do you want me to store these wastes in drums all over the country?"

Critics accuse EPA of being too cautious in failing to rely more heavily on such destruction technologies as high-temperature incineration and in failing to back innovative approaches for detoxifying chemical wastes (see box). EPA has projects under way in these fields, but the pace is slow, the funding inadequate, and there is little sense of urgency. Barbara Vecchiarelli, a citizens'-group leader in Marlboro Township, N.J., admires Daggett's dedication to his work but, nonetheless, complains about EPA in general: "They don't have the technology to handle chemical pollution. The problem is bigger than they are, and they're afraid to admit it to the American people."

Part of the problem with EPA's management of the Superfund over the past five years stems from Reagan's initial choice of top officials who were ill- prepared to handle the difficult mandate. Anne Burford, a Colorado lawyer and Republican Party fund raiser, was tapped in 1981 to head EPA; at White House urging, she approved the selection of Rita Lavelle, a California publicist who had worked for a chemical company (Aerojet General Corp.), to direct the Superfund start-up. In the mismanagement that followed, Lavelle was convicted of perjury for denying any involvement in EPA's dealings with the Stringfellow Acid Pits, a notorious waste dump in California, where Aerojet General, along with many other companies, had dumped tons of caustics, cyanides and heavy metals over the years. Burford was also charged with contempt of Congress for refusing to give it some internal EPA documents; the charge was dropped after she quit in March 1983.

While EPA was floundering, the White House imposed drastic funding cuts, resulting in the loss of 23% of its budget and 19% of its employees by 1983, even though the toxic-waste work load was multiplying. When Ruckelshaus was named EPA chief after Burford's resignation, he managed to rebuild the staff's morale, restore some of its funding and give his successor a stronger hand. Thomas, the former head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, has worked hard at getting EPA into gear. "He kicked the tires and punched the fender and said, 'Let's get this thing moving,' " notes former EPA Chief Costle.

But where is EPA going on toxic wastes? "We've learned that we have a far bigger problem than we thought when Superfund was enacted," Thomas concedes. "But we have a good bit of momentum now. I don't see how anybody could come into this agency and run it faster than we've tried to run it over the past couple of years." He can point to the fact that EPA is currently trying to stop the spread of pollution at about 200 sites and is preparing to tackle a cleanup of about 200 others. By next year, he predicts, "we'll be managing nearly a thousand sites at the same time."

The new emphasis at EPA has been logical enough: stop the seepage of pollutants and protect drinking water first, get rid of the toxic stew later. When a number of wells in Sag Harbor, on New York's Long Island, were found contaminated, EPA moved swiftly to have two dozen affected homes hooked up to a city water system. "The longer-term problem isn't solved," says EPA's Daggett. "But we were able to remove the immediate threat." In 1981 poisons were discovered in 27 of 30 wells serving Battle Creek, Mich. An elaborate system of purge wells was created to pump the contaminated water out of its underground plume and purify it. Now Battle Creek has 16 clean wells from which to drink.

Finally, acting on a law passed by Congress in 1976, EPA has issued tough regulations designed to trace the flow of toxic chemicals from their manufacture to their eventual disposition, creating a paper trail that should discourage illegal dumping and pinpoint responsibility when contamination occurs. The agency has also vastly tightened its licensing requirements for anyone operating a landfill that is permitted to accept hazardous wastes. By early next month, all such landfills can continue to operate only if they have double liners to prevent seepage. Already, wells must be bored in the surrounding area to detect any signs of spreading contamination. Although clearly a necessity, the new rules may take half of the nation's 2,000 licensed disposal sites out of operation, further aggravating the problem plaguing chemical-waste planners: nowhere to go.

A prime example of a modern disposal facility is the one operated by Waste Management, Inc., at its C.I.D. Hazardous Waste landfill in Chicago. A giant excavation 35 ft. deep covers two acres. A floor of compacted clay approximately 40 ft. thick has been laid below the bottom of the hole. On top of this virtually impermeable bed, workmen are placing a plastic liner to be topped by a plastic-grid system that will collect and direct any seepage into a series of sump pumps. Above the grid will be another plastic liner, another layer of clay and yet more plastic. A plumbing system will pump rainwater out of the area. Nearby, the company is spending $1.6 million to improve its large surface collection tanks, made of concrete lined with epoxy, that receive waste from steel-processing plants. New fiber-glass liners are being placed inside the cylinders. In the past, such wastes were merely poured into noxious surface lagoons. (In other ways, Waste Management is no ideal disposer. It agreed to pay $2.5 million last April to settle an EPA charge that it had illegally disposed of toxic chemicals in Ohio.)

Such techniques are, of course, expensive. But the increasing cost of getting rid of dangerous chemicals provides a powerful incentive for manufacturers who use them to find ways to recapture and recycle them. While Government pressure and supervision of toxic-waste sites are vital, the disposal problem will remain intractable unless industry does most of the job itself. By one estimate, 96% of all hazardous wastes never leave the property of the companies that produced them. A number of companies have made some headway in curbing a generation of the poisons. Minnesota Mining & Manufacturing Co., for example, cut its volume of toxic wastes in half, partly by switching from solvent-based glues to water-based glues in its manufacture of adhesive tape. It also burns nearly all of the remaining wastes in a huge incinerator at Cottage Grove, Minn. "In the past five years, there has been a tremendous change in the attitude of the chemical industry about hazardous waste," says Larry O'Neill, an environmental official with Monsanto Co. in Missouri. "We are now generating less and recycling more." Still, the recovery techniques are just being developed. "When we talk about recovery, we're only talking now about l% of all the material that's generated," claims James Patterson, director of industrial-waste-elimination research at the Illinois Institute of Technology. Even 1%, however, does add up.

If the public clamor for quicker, more effective action in the war on toxic wastes is fully justified, the expectation of easy or fast fixes is not. Some 66,000 chemicals are being used in the U.S.; EPA has classified 60,000 of them as potentially, if not definitely, hazardous to human health. They have been dumped or buried for years on the plausible but, as it turned out, ! tragically wrong theory that they would lose their toxicity during the decades it would take them to drift through layers of soil and rock into deep water supplies. There is no way to remedy in a few years at least a century of such misguided, if innocent, practices.

Shuffling wastes from one leaking site to another that may soon turn porous may seem absurd, but there is no way to eliminate all landfills as short-term disposal necessities. The same is true of the use of hazardous- waste incinerators. While they risk befouling the air, they are nonetheless a necessary temporary expedient.

Much more might be done, however, to find new methods of taking the poisonous punch out of hazardous chemicals. The EPA spent only $43 million in the first five years of the Superfund program on basic research and development of such techniques. According to the Office of Technology Assessment, as much as $50 million a year could be spent usefully on R. and D.

In the end, only a vast effort by the industries that profit from the chemicals can get the waste mess under control. That would undoubtedly mean added costs passed on to the consumer, but the basic fact is that the effort must be made. Wondrous chemical potions have been a great aid to mankind, easing pain, alleviating disease, prolonging life, spurring food production and serving as the catalyst for countless useful products. But once discarded, many of these concoctions, or their by-products, turn killer, and the U.S. has no choice but to curb their lethal ways.

With reporting by J. Madeleine Nash/Chicago, Peter Stoler/New York and John E. Yang/Washington