Bush Poisons the Superfund
James A. Chamblee
Grime pays
Bush's cuts to the Superfund reward corporate polluters for stonewalling and
leave neighbors of toxic sites frustrated and desperate.
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By Damien Cave
July 29, 2002 | FAIRHAVEN, Mass. -- Patty Estrella drives her Chrysler
Sebring convertible down a dirt road, pulls onto a small hill, turns the car
around and throws it into park. On the right, small suburban houses litter
the landscape; to the left lies the blue expanse of Buzzards Bay. And
straight ahead sprawls the subject of our tour: the abandondoned Atlas Tack
factory, a 24-acre, arsenic-laden site that's dominated by empty brick
buildings with broken windows, a smokestack and -- lying a few yards from
where Estrella and I sit -- reed-filled marshland that leaches poison into
the bay, its mud and its clams.
"You can't see pollution," Estrella says, running a hand through her frosted
blond hair. "But you can see the beauty of the ocean and the tragedy of it
being ruined."
She points to a downed strip of fence that lies in the marsh, glistening
like a silver bridge. "The fence has been down for a while," she says. Later
in the day, I see a group of kids playing nearby; Estrella's teenage son
tells me that sneaking into the site has become a Fairhaven rite of passage.
It doesn't look as though it would take much to get in. Getting the
factories and poisons out, however, is another story -- as Estrella knows.
She has been fighting for an immediate cleanup of the area ever since the
mid-'80s, when Atlas Tack abandoned the site, and when she and her husband
bought the tiny ranch house that abuts what state, federal and independent
studies have found to be contaminated property. She's complained at
community meetings, formed neighborhood watchdog groups, spied on the
company from her attic window. Her closets overflow with Atlas Tack-related
documents.
For a while, particularly during the late '90s, it looked as though
Estrella's efforts were not in vain. State officials had already cleaned up
a contaminated lagoon in the late '80s and in 1999, after the city sued,
Atlas Tack demolished one of the site's more dangerous buildings. One year
later, the EPA offered an $18 million cleanup plan.
"I thought then that it might actually happen," Estrella says.
But two years after the plan was approved by town and state officials, the
site remains nearly as dangerous as it was a decade ago. With its condemned
buildings and contaminated ground -- more than 54,000 cubic yards of soil,
debris and sediment contain "heavy metals, cyanide, polychlorinated
biphenyls (PCBs), polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) and pesticides,"
according to the EPA's most recent report -- the site is a health risk to
any human or animal who visits the area or ingests shellfish harvested
nearby. But even though the site is tainted enough to find a place on the
Superfund list -- a running tally of the nation's most polluted areas, each
of them eligible for federal Superfund money for cleanup -- Atlas Tack's
poisons won't be removed anytime soon. On June 24, the EPA told Congress
that it planned to cut funding for 33 Superfund sites. A handful of those
properties received last-minute funding July 22, but Atlas Tack, its cleanup
once scheduled to start in April, is currently destined to remain unfunded
and untouched.
Estrella and the other 7,200 residents who live within a mile of the site
are the most obvious victims of the decision. Unless more money becomes
available, their only recourse to living in the toxic shadow of Atlas Tack
is to move. Barring that, they have to derive what little comfort they can
from EPA studies showing that the site's poisons are leaking into the ocean,
not into local neighborhoods, perhaps delaying the seemingly inevitable
impact on their health.
But it isn't just the prospect of a future living next to contaminated land
that residents of Fairhaven, and other Americans affected by the Superfund
cuts, find devastating. It is the fact that the decision to leave them mired
in contaminants has huge benefits for the companies that dumped them.
Companies like Atlas Tack, and its parent company, Great Northern
Industries, are the happy beneficiaries of the Bush administration's new
Superfund policy. By refusing to clean up the sites and then collect costs
from the responsible parties, Bush and the EPA have essentially given the
nation's biggest corporate polluters a multimillion-dollar reprieve -- at a
huge personal cost to less influential citizens.
Environmental activists, local residents and politicians who have fought for
Superfund cleanup say they are not surprised by the move, crushing as it is
to all of them. The Bush administration never liked the Superfund program,
says Scott Stoermer, spokesman for the League of Conservation Voters. "They
see it as an inefficient government program that puts too much of a burden
on corporations."
But EPA officials dispute this conclusion. In a July 18 editorial in the New
York Times, EPA administrator Christine Todd Whitman stressed that the
agency remains dedicated to the Superfund cause. Designates like Atlas Tack,
Whitman argued, could get cleanup funding as early as the end of the year.
But the Bush administration has never suggested it would reinstate the
corporate taxes that fed the Superfund until 1995, and with the cleanups at
Atlas Tack and more than a dozen other sites delayed indefinitely, critics
are struggling to take the EPA at its word.
Fairhaven's residents in particular see the cuts as one more punishing
corporate perk, an extravagant handout from the nation's CEO in chief. And
in the case of Atlas Tack, they say, it is nearly impossible to rationalize
a regulatory break that so clearly endangers the well-being -- perhaps the
lives -- of an entire community.
Fairhaven's history has been intimately tied to Atlas Tack for more than a
century. Henry Huttleston Rogers, a well-known robber baron who made
millions as a vice president of Standard Oil, bought Atlas Tack and brought
it to Fairhaven in 1901. Town history celebrates the factory as a gift.
Rogers grew up in Fairhaven; he paved Fairhaven's roads and built its
schools, the library and the impressive Unitarian church, a Gothic landmark.
Atlas Tack, the theory goes, was built to ensure that the members of Rogers'
beloved community would always have a place to work.
The owners who took over Atlas Tack after Rogers died in 1909 stayed true to
his intentions. Even after Great Northern Industries bought Atlas Tack in
the mid-'60s, local residents could usually find work producing shoe eyelets
and other metal at the factory. Sometime in the '40s, wastewater laced with
chemicals from electroplating, acid-washing, painting and other activities
began to be discharged into a lagoon down by the marsh. There was occasional
chatter about the greenish-yellow liquid; but throughout the '60s and early
'70s, even as public knowledge of toxins began to rise, no one found the
courage to ask questions about the sludge.
"The town used to accept it because a lot of people worked there," says
Irving Macomber, 74, a Fairhaven resident since birth who remembers playing
near the lagoon in the '50s. "They didn't want to say anything because they
didn't want to lose their jobs."
State officials, however, had a hard time staying silent. In the '70s, for
example, the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Quality Engineering
(DEQE) tried to enforce a law mandating that polluted water be treated
before being dumped. Great Northern Industries, responsible for the routine
discharge at Atlas Tack of wastewater containing cyanide, arsenic, cadmium
and other poisonous heavy metals, simply stonewalled the effort.
"They've been very difficult from day one," says Paul Craffey, the agency's
(now called the Department of Environmental Protection) chief project
manager for Superfund sites in southern Massachusetts. "The national
pollution elimination system requires pre-treatment of wastewater before
putting it into the town sewer, but they fought that for years. They had
been putting untreated water -- throughout the '60s and '70s -- into the
lagoon and it took them a long time to comply."
Four calls to Great Northern Industries seeking comment on the company's
business practices were not returned. The company's former lawyer, Kevin
O'Connor, also refused to comment and two of the company's environmental
consultants failed to respond as well.
Craffey, in his roles as a state and EPA official, has been working with and
studying Atlas Tack for more than a decade. He says that Great Northern
finally started following the pre-treatment rules in the late '70s. But by
this time, most of the serious damage had been done. The untreated
wastewater had already been discharged from troughs in the buildings,
through leaky pipes, out into the unlined lagoon. And according to an Oct.
19, 1982, state report that was sent to Atlas Tack, laboratory analysis of
sludge samples in the area "indicate that the contents of the Atlas Tack
lagoon ... exhibit a potential harm to the environment resulting from
improper storage and disposal." Animals and people -- anyone and anything
that comes into contact with the area, state officials argued -- would run
an increased risk of health problems, cancer included.
Other documents from the early '80s -- made public through court records --
show that state officials didn't just warn Atlas Tack of the site's dangers;
they also demanded that the company clean up the mess. The company, however,
did nothing. Atlas Tack failed to respond to a series of notices in 1982 and
1983, including one showing that groundwater was potentially being poisoned
by the lagoon.
In 1984, the state decided to sue Atlas Tack for violations of
Massachusetts' pollution laws. R.L. Lewis, president of Atlas Tack at the
time, initially agreed to clean up the area. But after signing a consent
decree, the company quickly "fell behind in its compliance" according to a
story in the March 2000 edition of White Collar Crime Reporter. So the state
moved in, assuming control of the area in 1985, and selecting a contractor
who finished cleaning up the lagoon.
The state billed Atlas Tack for the work, but the company refused to pay.
Claiming that the cleanup costs were too high, Atlas Tack instead sued the
state, the contractor and even its own insurer, who refused to pay for the
cleanup because it had never been notified of the initial settlement. Atlas
lost every case; Craffey says the lagoon cleanup cost the state between
$500,000 and $1 million. Atlas Tack, at the behest of court officials,
eventually paid most of the bill.
But the state's legal costs were never recouped and Atlas Tack has paid far
less than it owes. There's still a lot of work that needs to be done. The
dilapidated buildings, an identified fire hazard, need to be demolished; the
land below and around them remains dangerously poisoned to this day. More
than 200 EPA soil samples taken over the past decade show that about half of
the marsh area is contaminated with dangerous levels of metals and cyanide,
"causing an ecologic risk to the wildlife," according to EPA reports.
Everyone who comes into contact with the area -- the kids who visit the site
for kicks, scavengers Estrella has seen stealing bricks, visitors who eat
shellfish pulled from the area -- is being exposed to toxic chemicals. Atlas
Tack, though made aware of these dangers, refuses to offer assistance.
On the rare occasions that the company did what it was told -- for instance,
when Atlas Tack put up the fence that's now fallen down -- the solutions
rarely lasted. Calls to the company's Boston office are greeted with a
mysterious "hello" rather than identification of the company, and messages
are rarely, if ever, returned. "They want to be as inconspicuous and unknown
as possible," says Jeffrey Osuch, executive secretary for the town of
Fairhaven, a city employee since 1988. "They want to avoid being held
responsible for the site."
Atlas Tack may also want to avoid the possibility of a massive tax bill.
Fairhaven records show that the company hasn't paid taxes since 1990. The
town is now owed more than $180,000 in back taxes and interest, according to
Osuch. (Atlas Tack failed to return calls on this matter as well.)
Atlas Tack gained a new enemy in 1988, when the EPA nominated the company
for Superfund status, a designation that meant its factory site was one of
the country's most polluted areas. When the nomination was approved two
years later, the site was given priority, with 1,200 others, for immediate
cleanup, with federal funds available to the polluters to expedite the
process.
Estrella's first reaction to the Superfund listing was shock. "I didn't know
it was bad enough to be put on the Superfund list," she says. But then she
remembered what it was like to live on the street a decade earlier, when she
and her parents lived a few doors down the street from where she now lives,
which runs parallel to Atlas Tack's property line. There were signs then
that pointed to environmental dangers.
"Pets used to go into the site and come back blue from the chemicals,"
Estrella recalled. "We had one cat down the street that would regularly come
back with blue paws. It looked like it was a punk rocker."
Estrella visited the site with a Great Northern representative, Osuch, and a
few other town officials in the early '90s. The tour was organized by Great
Northern "so we'd see that it wasn't as bad as the EPA claimed," Estrella
says. But after touring the main building's plating room, the source of much
of the area's waste, Estrella began to feel sick. "I came away with an upset
stomach and I had a headache for 3 days," she says. "I thought it was
obviously a biohazard."
State and federal officials agreed. After completing initial assessments,
they pressured Atlas Tack to remove asbestos from all the buildings and to
demolish the main building, which was structurally unsound. Years later, in
1998 and 1999, the company did the work -- sort of. Atlas Tack removed the
asbestos in the main building and demolished it, but never hauled off all
the debris. Asbestos in the other buildings was left in place, even though
pipes with the carcinogenic material could easily be seen through the
buildings' windows, Craffey says. The EPA had to step in again.
Even after the building was torn down, the area remained contaminated.
According to the EPA Web site description, which summarizes a series of
studies on the area, the on-site soil is contaminated with volatile organic
compounds (VOCs), heavy metals, including lead, pesticides and
polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) -- poisonous materials known to cause
cancer and other illnesses. Anyone or anything that comes into contact with
the area could be in danger.
Atlas Tack has consistently argued that the EPA studies are flawed, that the
property never should have been listed as a Superfund site in the first
place. In a Feb. 19, 1999, response to the EPA's proposed remedy, the
company claimed that tests used to determine that the site was contaminated
only focused on the most polluted areas, and never proved that the chemicals
had been flowing into the groundwater or the ocean. The proposed remedy --
demolition of the buildings, removal of polluted soil -- is nothing more
than, in the words of Atlas Tack's lawyer, "a pointless attempt to stop a
contaminant migration process that is not occurring at levels above EPA's
cleanup goals." Citing its own experts, Atlas Tack went on to argue that
"The EPA cannot proceed to implement such a plan. Doing so would be a waste
of time and taxpayers' money."
Craffey disagrees. Studies conducted at the site after Atlas Tack joined the
Superfund list confirmed that migration levels posed a threat to the
community. Atlas Tack, he argues, is just plain wrong.
"[Atlas Tack and its consultants] did a quick sampling of the plants that
found the grasses had no contamination, but look at the dirt," Craffey says.
"It's contaminated. The plant is irrelevant because the animals who eat it
don't wash it off. Ducks don't have teeth so they put gravel in their mouths
to break up their food. They're being affected."
But if people like Estrella and Long, who both live only steps from the
site, are healthy, isn't the community safe? Isn't the EPA justified, as it
claims, in directing funds to more dangerous areas?
Not necessarily. Craffey argues that Atlas Tack shouldn't fall through the
cracks simply because other sites might be more contaminated. The site, he
argues, poses a present and future danger. The fact that nothing has been
done for so long only increases the possibility of harm: Buildings are
closer to falling down, and the public is not as cautious as it should be.
Some people don't even seem to notice that the area is poisoned. "We saw
evidence of people with plates and forks over there by the water [within a
hundred yards of the poisoned area]," Craffey says.
Fairhaven kids may be the ones most at risk. They are fascinated by the
site -- many go there as a matter of local tradition. Even Brandon Estrella,
who had been warned repeatedly by his mother about the site's dangers, felt
the need to sneak in. He was 12 or 13 at the time, which is when most kids
have the urge, he says. "It's a Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn sort of thing," he
says. "Something you look back on and say, 'Wow, that was kind of stupid.'"
Stupid, but incredibly easy to accomplish.
Some residents now believe, perhaps justifiably, that the site will only be
reconsidered for cleanup if someone dies. The smokestack will eventually
come down through the powers of decay, so will the buildings. Macomber,
whose 16-year-old granddaughter lives within a few hundred yards of the
site, hopes that no one will be trespassing when they do. "It's a real
danger for the kids," he says.
And then there are the potential health risks, which might only begin to
show after years of exposure to the toxic chemicals. Once people begin to
die or become ill or detect birth defects, cleanup might come, but obviously
too late -- at least for Fairhaven residents. When one begins to consider
future harms, Craffey says, the site begins to look like an onion -- "There
are several layers and the more you pull, the more it makes you cry."
The suffering now is mostly related to fear and frustration -- and a sense
of betrayal from a company that locals served well for decades. "It makes me
mad because the government said they were going to clean it up," Macomber
says. "We" -- the nation, government and especially big businesses like
Atlas Tack -- "lived high off the hog for years; it should have been cleaned
up by now."
Now that the EPA pressure is off, however, it is unlikely that the company
will foot the bill for cleanup simply because it is the right thing to do.
Great Northern and Atlas Tack have rarely paid for the cleanup or safety
measures that weren't court-ordered and first covered by Superfund or state
funding. In fact, the company already has a large bill outstanding. Along
with the tax bill, there's the costs of cleanup activities already completed
that haven't been paid. According to Craffey's estimates, the EPA has spent
more than $4 million assessing the site and doing initial cleanup -- not a
dime of it has been paid for by Lewis, Atlas Tack or Great Northern.
Some companies take responsibility for their property: AVX, Aerovox,
Belleville Industries are just a few of the companies that have agreed, with
little argument, says Craffey, to help clean up their polluted Superfund
sites. The area that these particular companies are responsible for -- in
New Bedford, only a few miles away from Fairhaven -- is still on the
Superfund list and may never leave but the companies continue to contribute
funding.
Whitman emphasized this point in her New York Times editorial, noting that
70 percent of Superfund cleanup costs are paid for by polluters. But what
she failed to mention is that many of these polluters only paid because they
had no choice. The Superfund -- as a pool of money that allows the
government to complete massive cleanups, regardless of corporate
stonewalling -- was the EPA's greatest weapon. It was the proverbial big
stick used to beat the worst corporate polluters into submission. Without
the guarantee of funding from corporate taxes -- which expired in 1995 --
and without a steady commitment from Congress and the White House, the cuts
to Superfund create a vacuum of authority. Not only is there no real penalty
for contaminating the environment, there is also an incentive to fight any
demands to be clean.
The lesson here is that if a company delays long enough, it will get a break
from the government. There is also an implied promise of laxity for future
polluters. Why should a company spend money on clean and sustainable
production if it is cheap to pollute for a profit?
The message in the Superfund cuts frightens and depresses people like
Estrella. She's appalled by the prospect of inaction, the possibility of
more families being poisoned and the inability -- now enforced by the
government -- of communities to hold a local company responsible. But
ultimately, it comes down to what she sees every day. Back in her car, under
a summer New England sun, she still thinks about what the site might have
looked like if it were already cleaned up.
"It shouldn't be left with all these shitty fences," she says. "This could
be bird sanctuary."
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