Katrina lays bare Superfund woes

The receding floodwaters in New Orleans and other parts of the Gulf Coast are exposing hazardous chemicals and other dangerous waste. But they're also revealing the accomplishments - and the limits - of government programs designed to clean up such pollution.

Among the concerns: That natural disasters such as earthquakes and hurricanes haven't been adequately considered in fashioning safe and secure remedies; that areas tainted by toxic waste, such as rivers in the East and old mines in the West, are becoming larger and more complex; that many newly closed military bases will require considerable cleanup before they're ready for private or local government use; and that federal funding is falling behind the need.

The main program here is a bureaucratic mouthful: the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA), commonly known as Superfund.

Passed in the wake of the Love Canal episode in upstate New York 25 years ago, the law created a tax on the chemical and petroleum industries. Operating under the "polluter pays" principle, individually liable companies or property owners could be held financially responsible for cleaning up hazardous waste sites as well. The Environmental Protection Agency created a "National Priorities List" of the most serious uncontrolled or abandoned hazardous waste sites, a list that has grown to about 1,600 nationwide.

Several Superfund sites in the New Orleans area were inundated by hurricane Katrina and the flooding that followed. The most worrisome is the Agriculture Street Landfill, located about halfway between the French Quarter and Lake Pontchartrain. For nearly a century, municipal garbage and industrial wastes accumulated there. It was loaded with lead, arsenic, dioxin and carcinogenic hydrocarbons and later sprayed with the now-banned pesticide DDT. Underground fires gave it the nickname "Dante's Inferno."

The 95-acre site eventually was "remediated" under Superfund - fenced off and covered with a mat barrier and two feet of clean soil. As was the case with Love Canal, local residents continued to complain of health problems.

Today, the EPA and other agencies are investigating whether several feet of rushing floodwaters from the storm and from the collapsed Industrial Canal Levee very close to the former landfill spread the hazardous wastes from that downtown site across a much wider area. Other Superfund sites near New Orleans in Slidell, La., and Madisonville, La., also sustained flooding and there is concern two sites in neighboring Mississippi counties also have water damage.

"The potential for contaminants to rise and migrate through the flood waters to other areas is real," Solid Waste & Recycling magazine reported this week. "It's likely that the multimillion-dollar site restoration conducted a few years ago has been compromised, perhaps even rendered worthless."

Congress and the Bush administration are sure to address hazardous waste cleanup as part of the massive federal response to Katrina.

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