From the U.S. Government Accountability Office, www.gao.gov

Transcript for: Watchdog Report:  Superfund Costs and Cleanup

Audio interview by GAO staff with John Stephenson, Director, Natural
Resources and Environment

Associated Report Number: GAO-10-380

Released on: June 22, 2010

[ Background Music ]

[ Narrator: ] Welcome to GAO's Watchdog Report, your source for news and
information from the Government Accountability Office. It's June 22,
2010. The Environmental Protection Agency established the Superfund
Program to address waste sites that are hazardous to human health or the
environment. The agency puts the most hazardous sites on the National
Priority List or NPL. A group led by John Stephenson, a Director in
GAO's Natural Resources and Environment Team, recently reviewed the
cleanup and funding status of the NPL sites. GAO analyst Jeremy Cluchey
sat down with John to learn more.

[ Jeremy Cluchey: ] What is the Superfund Program?

[ John Stephenson: ] The Superfund Program is a program that was
established in 1980 by Congress to clean up some of the most hazardous
and dangerous sites in the country. And these sites were former mines or
chemical sites and contamination put on the ground, leaking into ground
water, contaminating drinking water aquifers, and presenting a danger to
human health and the environment, quite frankly. There’s some 47,000
sites that were evaluated, and of those, about 1,200—the most egregious
sites, the most dangerous sites—were listed in the National Priority
List, about a 1,000 of them are privately owned sites and about another
200 are federally-owned at Department of Defense military bases and the
like. And the cleanup process for each of these, after they get on the
listing, and the listing’s based on the hazardous ranking scale, consist
of a long-term assessment of the contamination, and then they design a
cleanup process. It could be moving soil. It could be setting up ground
water filtration system. It could be a number of things to get these
sites cleaned up so they no longer pose a risk to human health and the
environment.

[ Jeremy Cluchey: ] How is this clean up process generally financed?

[ John Stephenson: ] In the past, when it was established, there was a
Superfund tax that was established, which was a tax on certain
industries, petroleum-based chemical industries, and it had actually
grown to about $5 billion in 1997. However, that tax expired in 1995 and
has not been reinstated since, and it has shrunk to about 582 million
today. And so, now, it is funded through general appropriations to the
tune of about 1.2 billion per year.

[ Jeremy Cluchey: ] In this report, what did GAO find as the current
cleanup and funding status of the most hazardous nonfederal NPL sites.

[ John Stephenson: ] There's actually 1,111 of those private sites, and
we focused our attention on the 75 sites with unacceptable human
exposure and another 164 sites with unknown exposure. And we found
basically that we have spent 1.2 billion on the 75 most dangerous sites,
which is about 16 million per site, and they're still not cleaned up
yet. So there's a lot of work to do. And based on the current annual
appropriation, the needs for the Superfund program exceed the resources.

[ Jeremy Cluchey: ] This report also looks to the future of the NPL.
What did GAO find with regard to the likely status of sites listed on
the NPL over the next 5 years?

[ John Stephenson: ] It does, and surprisingly, there are not good
projections coming out of EPA or the federal government as to how many
sites might likely be listed. So what we did is we surveyed 10 regions
and 10 states, and then used that as a basis for projecting how many new
sites might be listed over the next several years. And based on their
responses, about 20 to 25 new sites will be listed each year, and that
will, of course, further exacerbate the limited funding that already
exist.

[ Jeremy Cluchey: ] What steps is GAO recommending be taken in order to
address these issues moving forward?

[ John Stephenson: ] The value of this report is that for the first time
in a long time, presents a really good picture on the status of the
program and the funding that exist for sites on the list today, and
those that potentially will be listed. We do have one small
recommendation that involves vapor intrusion, which is a form of
contamination for indoor air. If there is a petroleum-based substance
that leaks under a home, for example, reaches into the house, it's an
indoor air problem. And right now, the listing process for the Superfund
program doesn't include those kinds of sites. We expect that the
Congress, probably next year, will begin to debate reinstatement of the
Superfund tax that expired in 1995, and we think this report will make
important contributions to that congressional debate.

[ Background Music ]

[ Narrator: ] To learn more, visit GAO's Web site at gao.gov, and be
sure to tune in to the next edition of GAO's Watchdog Report for more
from the congressional watchdog, the Government Accountability Office.