Superfund Research Paper
Not So Super Superfund
Published: February 07, 1994
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It is hard to think of a government program with a wider gulf between ambitions and results than Superfund, the program enacted in 1980 to clean up thousands of toxic waste dumps across America. The Clinton Administration now advances a promising plan to redo that law. With health care on the agenda, Congress may not have the political stamina to address Superfund. But it should; every day that the present law is in operation represents another day of misdirected resources.
Hastily written by Congress in response to the Love Canal disaster in upstate New York, where 20,000 tons of chemical wastes buried by the Hooker Chemical Company were suspected of causing …show more content…
But along came the laissez-faire attitudes of Ronald Reagan and his feckless E.P.A administrator, Anne Gorsuch, and Ms. Gorsuch's pliant Superfund director, Rita Lavelle. Apart from throwing some cleanup money at a few favored Congressmen, the Gorsuch-Lavelle team let one industry after another off the hook. In Mr. Reagan's eight years, according to a G.A.O. report, only 16 of the 799 Superfund sites then identified were cleaned up, and only $40 million of a potentially $700 million in recoverable cleanup funds from polluters were collected.
A justifiably furious Congress then allowed anger to override common sense. In 1986, it amended Superfund so that the E.P.A. was virtually required to approach every dump as if it were a Love Canal, to be dug up and transported elsewhere. The Administration would now change that pathology.
The second big change would reduce wasteful transaction costs. Under Superfund's existing liability provisions, every company that dumped wastes into a Superfund site, at any point in the site's history, can be held responsible for the entire cleanup. This has encouraged companies to sue one another or their insurance carriers in an attempt to shift the blame and the cleanup costs
Published: February 07, 1994
• Sign In to E-Mail
It is hard to think of a government program with a wider gulf between ambitions and results than Superfund, the program enacted in 1980 to clean up thousands of toxic waste dumps across America. The Clinton Administration now advances a promising plan to redo that law. With health care on the agenda, Congress may not have the political stamina to address Superfund. But it should; every day that the present law is in operation represents another day of misdirected resources.
Hastily written by Congress in response to the Love Canal disaster in upstate New York, where 20,000 tons of chemical wastes buried by the Hooker Chemical Company were suspected of causing …show more content…
But along came the laissez-faire attitudes of Ronald Reagan and his feckless E.P.A administrator, Anne Gorsuch, and Ms. Gorsuch's pliant Superfund director, Rita Lavelle. Apart from throwing some cleanup money at a few favored Congressmen, the Gorsuch-Lavelle team let one industry after another off the hook. In Mr. Reagan's eight years, according to a G.A.O. report, only 16 of the 799 Superfund sites then identified were cleaned up, and only $40 million of a potentially $700 million in recoverable cleanup funds from polluters were collected.
A justifiably furious Congress then allowed anger to override common sense. In 1986, it amended Superfund so that the E.P.A. was virtually required to approach every dump as if it were a Love Canal, to be dug up and transported elsewhere. The Administration would now change that pathology.
The second big change would reduce wasteful transaction costs. Under Superfund's existing liability provisions, every company that dumped wastes into a Superfund site, at any point in the site's history, can be held responsible for the entire cleanup. This has encouraged companies to sue one another or their insurance carriers in an attempt to shift the blame and the cleanup costs