States/EPA work toward 2020 goals

The RCRA Corrective Action program is moving toward its 2020 targets, the EPA announced in a recent update, but “significant challenges will likely prevent the program from reaching some of its goals.” 

Congress created the Corrective Action program in 1984.  As with Superfund, its close and better-known relative, the intent of Corrective Action is to identify sites that have been contaminated by industrial and military activities, isolate the contamination from nearby communities, and clean up the contamination.  According to EPA’s April 2013 RCRA Corrective Action Case Studies Report, projects classified as Corrective Action have produced results that have significantly benefitted some communities, economically as well as environmentally.  But the immense work that remains to be done under Corrective Action has frustrated many of the estimated 35 million people—most in minority or disadvantaged groups—who live within 1 mile of a Corrective Action site. 

In 2002, in an effort to accelerate the pace of Corrective Action, the EPA launched its “2020 Vision,” a set of Corrective Actions goals.  Shortly thereafter, the Agency released its Corrective Action Completion guidance.  According to the 2013 report, the 2020 cleanup goals now apply to 3,747 hazardous waste sites out of more than 6,000 sites that are potentially subject to Corrective Action.  About 1,760 sites have reached the final-remedy-construction milestone, the last goal under the 2020 program.  Reaching this goal does not necessarily—and usually doesn’t—mean that cleanup has been completed. 

Viable owners and operators

While the two programs have the same ultimate cleanup targets, Corrective Action differs from Superfund in two fundamental ways. 

• First, Superfund typically provides funding to address abandonedhazardous waste sites and sites where uncontrolled releases demand an immediate response.  Generally, Superfund comes into the picture when no viable responsible party can be found or when action is necessary before disputes over liability can be resolved.  In such cases, the Superfund program seeks to recover costs after the fact from one or more responsible parties if they can be identified. Corrective Action addresses facilities with viable owners or operators, many of whom are still engaged in manufacturing or other business operations at the site.  In all cases, even if the specific facility has closed, site owners or operators are required to fund the cleanupand provide financial assurance to cover cleanup costs in case of bankruptcy.
• Second, although states play a critical role in Superfund, cleanups are managed by the EPA through its 10 regional offices.  This means that enforcement, which can involve costly court cases that last for many years, is mainly in the hands of the EPA.  In contrast, the EPA authorizes statesto implement the Corrective Action program.  To date, 42 authorized states and one territory lead implementation at their Corrective Action facilities, with assistance from EPA grants.  EPA regional offices have work-sharing agreements with both authorized and unauthorized states, with whom they meet regularly to discuss sites and areas where states need regional help.  For example, the EPA frequently participates in bankruptcy settlements to ensure that the court requires that owners and operators of sites set aside funds for Corrective Actions.

Progress of 2020 initiative

Collectively, Corrective Action sites occupy 18 million acres—a landmass larger than the state of West Virginia—compared to  3.9 million acres covered by Superfund, 507,000 acres in the underground storage tank program, and 164,000 acres of brownfields.  Many individual Corrective Action sites are very large, with the largest owned and operated by the Department of Defense and Department of Energy (DOD/DOE).  Several former military bombing ranges exceed 2 million acres; overall, 200 DOD/DOE facilities, or 5.3 percent of all facilities in the program’s baseline, occupy 75 percent of the program’s total acreage.  Each of 90 sites comprises 10,000 acres or more.  Contaminants at some sites have been present for over 100 years and have dropped far below ground level into complicated geological formations.  Some federal sites have hundreds of individual areas of concern where different contaminants and conditions necessitate different approaches to remediation. 

“As we close in on 2020, the reality is that significant challenges will likely prevent the program from reaching some of its goals,” the EPA states in the report.  “The remaining facilities include the most complex and difficult sites, and resources are more limited.  At the same time, we continue to find new sites that require cleanup.”

But the amount of work that remains should not detract from the successes of Corrective Action as defined in the 2020 agenda, the main point the EPA seeks to make in its report.  The EPA defined its 2020 goals through three metrics, two of which are referred to as environmental indicators (EI): 

• The human exposures under control EI ensures that people near a particular site are not being exposed to unacceptable levels of contaminants.
• The groundwater under control EI ensures that contaminated groundwater is not spreading and further contaminating groundwater or surface water resources.
• The final remedy construction is achieved when the facility has completed construction of a final remedy and that remedy is fully functional as designed. The remedy may need to operate for a period of time before cleanup goals are achieved.

As of the end of 2012, the EPA reported the following for the 3,747 baseline sites:

• Met the human exposures EI at 3,041 sites (more than 81 percent), covering 13.6 million acres.  
• Met the groundwater EI at 2,691 sites (more than 71 percent), covering 7.2 million acres.
• Reached final remedy construction at 1,762 sites (more than 47 percent), covering 2.1 million acres.

Overall, the EPA is seeking to meet all three mile­stones at 95 percent of RCRA Corrective Action facilities by 2020.

Projects

The report summarizes projects that highlight the staggering scope and complexity of several Corrective Action projects and the beneficial results that are accruing in some cases.  Here are several examples.

Corrective Action began in 1998 after the company and the EPA signed a consent order.  Since then, dredging operations along 5 miles of the Calumet River have removed 228,000 pounds (lb) of contaminants, including more than 1,550 lb of polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), and could raise the value of adjacent residences by an average of 27 percent.  Also, air sparging, stripping, and vapor extraction systems have removed an estimated 33,000 lb of benzene from groundwater migrating north toward Lake Michigan. 

Many of the 300 solid waste management units in the site still need remediation or containment.  Even after systems are built, monitoring will be necessary to ensure they work, and long-term stewardship of certain areas will be necessary to ensure future land uses are appropriate.

Parties agreed to include a specific parcel among the high-priority areas targeted first to facilitate construction of a new carbon alloy production facility important to both U.S. Steel and the local community.  As a result, contaminated soil in the area was excavated and safely disposed of, and construction of the new, cleaner-running facility proceeded on schedule, creating 500 construction jobs and supporting a $220 million investment in the plant’s continued operation.

Tronox, Henderson, Nevada.  In operation since 1942, the 450-acre Tronox facility produced rocket fuel and explosives.  Through 1988, Tronox and a second facility in the Henderson area produced all the perchlorate used in the United States.  Site investigations in 1997 discovered perchlorate-contaminated groundwater travelling 3 miles off-site, reaching Lake Mead and the Colorado River and affecting drinking water for 15 million people in Nevada, Arizona, and California.  Also, chromium and other metals, dioxins, hexachlorobenzene, PCBs, asbestos, and organochlorine pesticides have been detected in soils at the site.

After the perchlorate contamination was discovered in 1997, Tronox cooperated with the EPA and the state of Nevada to install removal and treatment systems.  As of November 2012, nearly 3,600 tons of perchlorate have been removed from the environment.  Concentrations entering one nearby water body have been reduced by 90 percent since 1997.  Also, about 930,000 tons of contaminated soil has been excavated, including 800,000 tons of dioxin-contaminated soil.

According to the EPA, absent involvement of the Corrective Action program, this site would likely have entered the Superfund program.  Tronox filed for bankruptcy in 2009.  But through Corrective Action, Nevada was able to initiate environmental response in the mid-1990s. 

Without the site characterization and cleanup work already completed under RCRA Corrective Action authorities, the state of Nevada and the EPA may not have been able to secure the $81 million and other assets it received as part of the bankruptcy settlement. Those assets are now managed under the Nevada Environmental Response Trust established in 2011 to oversee the continued operation and maintenance of the perchlorate treatment system and remaining cleanup work at the site.

Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), Los Alamos, New Mexico.  Established in 1943 as part of the Manhattan Project, the LANL occupies 28,000 acres over which liquids containing plutonium, uranium, and other radioactive isotopes and many industrial chemicals were routinely buried in unlined pits or dumped into deep shafts.  Restoration began in earnest in 1989, and 2,100 independent areas were identified where potential releases required, at a minimum, further investigation. 

To date, more than 40 percent of the original 2,100 potential release sites have been cleaned up, investigated, and determined not to need additional work, or consolidated with similar sites.

The project is a good example of a state-directed cleanup of a federal facility.  At the LANL, oversight is led by a New Mexico Environment Department team, the DOE performs the cleanup work, and the EPA provides staff and contractor support to both.  The DOE estimates that the total life-cycle cost for soil and water remediation at the LANL will exceed $1.7 billion.

Some Corrective Action projects have also demonstrated the efficacy of innovative treatment.  For example, a $140 to 150 million Corrective Action final cleanup at the Pfizer facility in North Haven, Connecticut, includes hydraulic containment walls and in-situ thermal remediation for dense nonaqueous phase liquids, one of the most difficult classes of contaminants to remediate.  Newer technologies being successfully used in other Corrective Actions include nano-scale zero valent iron to remediate an area contaminated with chlorinated solvents and pumping a mixture of cheese whey, molasses, and fresh water to enhance the natural breakdown of chlorinated solvents in contaminated soil and groundwater.

EPA’s Corrective Action report

William C. Schillaci
BSchillaci@blr.com