The Huffington Post has concluded a three part series on the environment and public health crisis that has taken over the 35th Avenue Birmingham Superfund site. The three articles cover the history of the Superfund site and examine the current health crisis that remains for residents still exposed to contaminants left by a legacy of production in North Birmingham.
Read Part One
Read Part Two
Read Part Three
Tag: Superfund
By Liz Goodiel, CHEJ Science and Tech Fellow
Take a moment and imagine your dream home. Maybe your dream home is set on a beautiful ocean front with large windows that overlook the rolling waves and the pink summer sunsets. Perhaps your dream home is located in the mountains, surrounded on all sides with towering trees where you can step outside and instantly breathe in the fresh pine. Or maybe your dream home is right where it is now, filled with family, laughter and memories. Wherever your dream home is, you worked hard for it. You managed the home repairs, paid the bills, supported the family, and you made a house a home.
Now take a moment to imagine that an uninvited visitor came and damaged that home. The house that you worked so hard for is now broken, the windows are shattered, the front lawn is destroyed, and your house now has a gaping hole that you didn’t ask for. What is even more unfair is now that outsider isn’t even going to pay to repair your home. He is going to drive away, with the rubble in his rearview mirror, and leave you to clean it up. This visitor damaged your property, so why isn’t he going to be the one to pay for the repairs? Why has he left you standing there to figure out how to fix what is broken? You’re left with your checkbook in one hand and a hammer in the other, forced to undertake the repairs that will take a lot of time, money and hard work.
Across the United States, nearly 53 million Americans are overwhelmed by contamination and health concerning pollution in their own communities created by corporations and facilities. To combat this problem, the Superfund program was created in 1980 to manage the cleanup of the most toxic waste sites where the responsible party was not identified or went out of business. Throughout the course of the program’s history, Superfund has received its funding in two different ways. The first is through budget appropriations the Environmental Protection Agency receives yearly based on the federal budget sourced by American tax dollars. The second source of funding was through polluter taxes, also known as the Polluter Pays Fees. Polluter Pays Fees were taxes enforced on companies that produced chemicals, oil, or other hazardous waste. These fees were designed to make polluters monetarily responsible for the cleanup of any damage they created in the process of production.
The Superfund tax fees ended in 1995, relieving polluters of the responsibility to pay for the cleanup of contaminated sites. The sole success of the Superfund program currently relies on the Environmental Protection Agency’s budget which is currently at its smallest in two decades. Polluters are not required to pay for the damage they have created and, in effect, American’s have been forced to compensate for this loss in the form of tax dollars. In the last two decades, American tax dollars have paid for more than $21 billion in Superfund site cleanup. Polluters have torn down the “dream home” and walked away, leaving the residents behind to pay for the mess they didn’t ask for nor create.
In July of 2019, Representative Earl Blumunaer of Oregon proposed the Superfund Reinvestment Act (H.R. 4088) to bring the cleanup burden back to polluters. Sponsors of the bill include Representatives Gerry Connolly (VA), Jerry McNerney (CA), Terri Sewell (AL), Raul Grijalva (AZ), Matt Cartwright (PA) and Eleanor Holmes Norton (D.C.). The proposed bill will require polluting companies to pay an excise tax of 0.12 percent on the amount of a company’s modified environmental tax taxable income that exceeds $3,735,000. In other words, for a company that makes over $3,735 million in net income, each additional profit will be taxed at a rate of 0.12 percent. For example, if a company that makes an additional $10,000 over the $3,735 million threshold, its taxable amount will be equivalent to the cost of one cheese pizza ($12.00). If a company does not meet the threshold of $3,735 million, it is not required to pay any additional tax.
Currently, polluters escape billions of dollars in cleanup costs for damages they created. With Representative Blumenaur’s proposed legislation, the cleanup burden will be transferred from American taxpayers back to the parties responsible for pollution. Polluters are the ones responsible for creating unhealthy hazardous sites, why are they not the ones responsible for cleaning it up?
The Portland City Council approved an ordinance on Wednesday, September 11 to appropriate $2 million towards a cleanup plan for the Willamette Cove Superfund Site. Established as a Superfund site in 2000, the contaminated river has experienced slow cleanup, despite having a total of 150 known potentially responsible parties. City officials have predicted that the plan will take three to four years to complete and a total of $8.1 million that will be divided evenly among at least four of the responsible parties. The city hopes this plan will create greater collaboration with the EPA and encourage other responsible parties to get involved in the cleanup. Read More.
The Environmental Protection Agency announced the completion of the Superfund Task Force and issued the Task Force’s report on Superfund work within the last two years. The announcement was made on Monday at a sight visit to Superfund site, American Cyanamid, of Bridgewater, New Jersey. Present at the site was EPA Assistant Administrator, Peter Wright, and Regional Administrator, Pete Lopez, who presented the Task Force’s targets for continued site cleanups. Read More.
The Environmental Protection Agency has paused operations at three Superfund sites in North Carolina that are projected to be in the direct path of Hurricane Dorian. Cherry Point Marine Corps Air Station in Craven County, and Camp Lejeune and ABC One Hour Cleaners in Onslow County all pose potential health risks with the coming storm. The EPA is taking precautionary steps to prevent further toxic release accidents, similar to those resulting from Hurricane Harvey in 2017 and Hurricane Florence in 2018. Read More.
Times Beach made national headlines in December 1982 when state and federal health officials declared the town uninhabitable because its unpaved roadways were polluted with dioxin, a toxic chemical. “Everything that was near and dear to the people in this community. All the houses and the city equipment. Everything that they didn’t take with them that was left in their homes is buried here,” said Marilyn Leistner, the last mayor of Times Beach. Read more.
Photo: A copy of the promotion for Times Beach that was published in the St. Louis Times newspaper in 1925.
CREDIT ST. LOUIS TIMES
The way scientists think about how chemicals cause their toxic effects is changing. Recent scientific research tells us that the traditional notion of how chemicals act is being replaced by a better understanding of the actual features of exposures to environmental chemicals. These features include the timing and vulnerability of exposures, exposures to mixtures, effects at low doses and genetic alterations called epigenetics.
Traditional thinking tells us that how much of a chemical you are exposed to (the dose) determines the effect. This principle assumes that chemicals act by overwhelming the body’s defenses at high doses. We’re learning now that this principle is not always accurate and its place in evaluating risks needs to be reconsidered. What we now know is that some chemicals cause their adverse effects at low exposure levels that are not predicted by classic toxicology.
Recent research has shown that environmental chemicals like dioxin or bisphenol A can alter genetic make-up, dramatically in some cases. These changes are so powerful that they can alter the genetic material in eggs and sperm and pass along new traits in a single generation, essentially by-passing evolution.
It wasn’t too long ago that scientists believed that the DNA in our cells was set for life, that our genes would be passed on from one generation to the next, and that it would take generations to change our genetic makeup. That’s no longer the case.
This new field – called epigenetics – is perhaps the fastest growing field in toxicology and it’s changing the way we think about chemical exposures and the risks they pose. Epigenetics is the study of changes in DNA expression (the process of converting the instructions in DNA into a final product, such as blue eyes or brown hair) that are independent of the DNA sequence itself.
What researchers are learning is that the “packaging” of the DNA is just as important as a person’s genetic make-up in determining a person’s observable traits, such as blue eyes, or their susceptibility to diseases such as adult on-set diabetes, or to the development of lupus.
The environment is a critical factor in the control of these packaging processes. We may be born with our genes, but epigenetics changes occur because of environmental influences during development and throughout life. These influences include chemicals in the food we eat, the air we breathe, the water we drink, and they appear to contribute to the development of cancer and other diseases.
Epigenetics may explain certain scientific mysteries, such as why certain people develop diseases and others don’t, or why the person who smoked for 30 years never developed lung cancer. There is still much to learn, but an early lesson to take away from this emerging science is that we need to rethink our traditional ideas of how chemicals affect our health.
For more information see
https://www.healthandenvironment.org/environmental-health/social-context/gene-environment-interactions
EPA has almost finished clearing arsenic-contaminated soil at a Superfund site in Southern Minneapolis. The soil became contaminated after an industrial pesticide storage site leached into local soil, affecting 600 homes. This represents the conclusion of EPA’s $25 million project to clean the Superfund site. <Read more>
A mining company involved in the Bonita Peak Mining District Site by the Animas River in Colorado is rejecting EPA’s order to participate in the clean up of the area. The Superfund Site in question is made up of several inactive mines that have been leaching waste into the nearby Animas River. The site was first established in 2015, when EPA inadvertently triggered a spill from Gold King mine, contaminating river systems with 3 million gallons of toxic wastewater.
Sunnyside Gold Corp, the company EPA initially ordered to conduct a groundwater assessment of the area, is now refusing to take action to clean up the area, saying that they are not responsible for the polluting spills. EPA said they would review the company’s leader before taking further action. <Read more>
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This is the question that journalist Jim Daley raised recently in an article published in Scientific American. According to the article, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is substantially changing the program that evaluates the toxicity of chemicals by shifting staff and program emphasis from the Integrated Risk Information System (IRIS) to duties related to implementation of the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA). Daley writes that “Former EPA officials contend that the shake-up takes chemical assessments out of the hands of career scientists, potentially to the detriment of public health.”
As evidence of this shift, Daley writes that that the agency has reduced the number of its ongoing chemical toxicity assessments from twenty to three.
The IRIS Program began in 1985 to support EPA’s mission to protect human health and the environment by identifying and characterizing the health hazards of chemicals found in the environment. The IRIS program has become the most respected scientific program in the agency. Its health assessments are the backbone of EPA risk analysis work and is the preferred source of toxicity information used by EPA to determine public health risks. It is also an important source of toxicity information used by state and local health agencies, other federal agencies, and international health organizations.
The TSCA program on the other has a much narrower focus which is primarily on reporting, record-keeping and testing requirements, and restrictions relating to chemical substances and/or mixtures, according to EPA’s website. Certain substances are not covered by TSCA including food, drugs, cosmetics and pesticides. While the 2016 amendment to TSCA greatly improved this regulation, it did not address its narrow focus. This shift began with the leadership of Andrew Wheeler who took over for a beleaguered Scott Pruitt as administrator of EPA in July 2018.
One EPA official who declined to be identified was quoted in the Daley article saying that IRIS and TSCA are “very different” in their approaches to evaluating the public health risks posed by exposure to chemicals. “One could make the argument that this is political interference, in that high-level people are saying which methodology we should be using to assess the safety of a chemical. “And the policy’s pretty clear that they’re not supposed to do that.”
Bernard Goldstein, Professor Emeritus at the University of Pittsburgh School of Public Health, who served as EPA Assistant Administrator of the Office of Research and Development (ORD) from 1983 to 1985, summed it up this way in the Daley article, “I really see this as part of a restructuring of EPA in such a way that science will have very little to do with what EPA is basing its regulation on, and that we will end up with much weaker regulations in terms of protecting public health. “It’s troubling, in large part because it’s very consistent with an overall approach – a very astute approach – to take out the inconvenient facts.” Also cited in the same article was a comment by Thomas Burke from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, a former EPA lead scientist adviser and Deputy Administrator of ORD from 2015 to 2017, “’any reduction’ of the number of IRIS chemical assessments ‘is a loss for public health and, unfortunately, puts populations who are exposed at risk.’”
Read the full article here.