News of the Week
Measures set to hasten Superfund cleanups Environmental Protection Agency Administrator William K. Reilly last week announced several measures designed, he says, to cut costs and expedite the cleanup of thousands of hazardous-waste sites that dot the nation's landscape, threatening communities and underground water supplies. The massive and controversial Superf und program, begun in 1980, has spent about $4.8 billion to permanently clean up 63 sites out of 1245 designated candidates. A large percentage of this expenditure has been spent on management, or overhead, costs, which an EPA task force finds unacceptable. To correct these problems, Reilly has named EPA staffer Richard Guimond to the new position of national Superfund director, responsible for procurements and budgets as well as for measures to improve contracting and to speed up cleanups. Reilly also plans to put in place a staff of 20 to 30 people scattered around the country to act as program troubleshooters. These steps, Reilly hopes, "will encourage and promote more uniformity in the way we resolve problems across the country and a lot greater speed in moving ahead." Rather than adding a new layer of bureaucracy, he sees these measures as decreasing cleanup times—now a decade long—by two to three years, and cutting overhead costs, now at 25%, to less than 20% of total contract outlays. Based on the recommendations of another EPA task force, Reilly has set a "very ambitious target" for cleaning up hazardous-waste sites. He wants 200 sites cleaned up by the end of fiscal 1993, more than tripling the number completed so far. He believes EPA's 10 years of experience with Superfund allows it to standardize cleanup strategies. And by working more closely with polluters, Reilly believes remedial design work, the first stage of cleanup, can begin before a judge formalizes a consent decree. Despite these ambitious plans, in the next few years more sites are 6
October 7, 1991 C&EN
likely to be placed on the National Priorities List to be cleaned up under Superfund than will be deleted from the list after eliminating the hazards. "We see a rate of increase of about 900 to 1000 [new sites added] through the end of the decade," Reilly says. In an effort to streamline Superfund, EPA in 1988 set up a program in which 23 engineering companies would act as "turnkey contractors" on 45 long-term contracts. The potential total value of these contracts over 10 years is $6.6 billion, but to date only $265 million has been spent. Only 9% of the total costs were projected for overhead, but when a task force recently looked at the program, it found management costs were eating up 25%. "We didn't find any gold-plated toilets or $1000 screwdrivers," Reilly says. But the task force did find plenty of inappropriate, if not illegal, charges—for office plants and rent, and parking fees, for example. These will be eliminated.
Several of the 45 contracts will also be reduced or eliminated—two immediately. When the streamlining program was first set up, EPA envisioned more work for these contractors than actually materialized. It turned out a lot more of the cleanup work was done by polluters and by the Army Corps of Engineers than was originally anticipated. Now the program will be more closely audited, and about $2 billion will be cut from the construction portion of the remaining contracts. Reilly had an immediate opportunity to explain these changes to Congress. The day after he announced his reforms to the press, he testified before the House Public Works & Transportation Committee's Subcommittee on Investigations & Oversight, in the first of an intended series of four or five Superfund oversight hearings. During the next eight weeks, the committee also will hear from other interested parties. Lois Ember
Planes to probe ozone levels in Arctic regions As another immense ozone hole develops over Antarctica, U.S. atmospheric scientists this week will launch a mission to the Arctic to determine if, by the end of the century, such massive ozone depletion also will appear near major population centers in the Northern Hemisphere. The National Aeronautics & Space Administration's Airborne Arctic Stratospheric Expedition II (AASEII), costing about $8 million, will fly two instrument-laden aircraft over the Arctic from Fairbanks, Alaska, and Bangor, Me., through March 1992. By collecting data on temperature, winds, polar clouds, and the chemical composition of the Arctic stratosphere through the winter, the researchers hope to better understand the specific mechanisms governing ozone depletion. Satellite data from NASA show this year's Antarctic ozone hole— which began forming last month— appears to match the record depletions in 1987, 1989, and 1990. In those years, essentially all ozone in the lower stratosphere over the con-
tinent was destroyed. Expeditions to Antarctica in 1986 and 1987 established that chlorine-catalyzed chemical reactions set up during the frigid winter cause the depletion that recurs each spring. So far, the Arctic, with its relatively milder winters/has been spared the huge ozone losses that Antarctica has suffered. However, a first Arctic research mission in 1989 uncovered small but significant ozone depletion (C&EN, March 19, 1990, page 22). And atmospheric researchers discovered the stratosphere there was loaded with the active chlorine compounds that can catalyze ozone destruction. Researchers fear an ozone hole may yet form in the Arctic, since the global atmosphere's chlorine content is still rising despite international controls on chlorofluorocarbons. "How will the atmosphere res p o n d as t h e c h l o r i n e l o a d i n g reaches 5 ppb in the next decade?" asks James G. Anderson, the Harvard University chemistry professor who is AASE-II's chief scientist. Pamela Zurer
