March 30, 2007—The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is adding five new hazardous waste sites that pose risks to human health and the environment, to the National Priorities List of Superfund sites—the federal program that investigates and cleans up the most complex uncontrolled or abandoned hazardous waste sites in the country. EPA is also proposing to add five other sites to the cleanup list, it says.
With the proposal of the five new sites, there are 61 proposed sites awaiting final agency action: 56 in the general Superfund section and five in the federal facilities section. Altogether, there are 1,306 final and proposed sites. To date, there have been 1,562 sites listed on the NPL, with 317 of these sites deleted, and 1,245 on the current cleanup list.
With all Superfund sites, EPA tries to identify and locate the parties potentially responsible for the contamination. For the newly listed sites without viable potentially responsible parties, EPA says it will investigate the full extent of the contamination before starting significant cleanup at the site. Therefore, it may be several years before significant cleanup funding is required for these sites.
The following sites have been added to the National Priorities List: Elm Street Ground Water Contamination, Terre Haute, IN; Sonford Products, Flowood, MS; Bandera Road Ground Water Plume, Leon Valley, TX; East 67th Street Ground Water Plume, Odessa, TX; and Lockheed West Seattle, Seattle, WA.
The following sites have been proposed to the National Priorities List: Halaco Engineering Company, Oxnard, CA ; Eagle Zinc Co Div T L Diamond, Hillsboro, IL; Eagle Picher Carefree Battery, Socorro, NM; Formosa Mine, Douglas County, OR; and Five Points PCE Plume, Woods Cross/Bountiful, UT.
For more information on the current and proposed sites, visit EPA’s National Priorities List Web page.
