May 22, 2011
by Beverly Ford, WBUR

In all his years as an attorney, Jan Schlichtmann has had few lawsuits so profoundly affect him as a 1982 case involving eight Woburn families and a public water supply contaminated by toxic chemicals. Profiled in numerous newspaper, television and radio accounts along with the movie “A Civil Action” starring John Travolta, the lawsuit became a watershed event in environmental politics for Massachusetts and the nation.

Yet today, nearly 30 years after that landmark court case, the wells that supplied both toxic drinking water and a legacy of cancer to Woburn remain contaminated despite a $21 million cleanup effort. And no one, not even the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency which monitors the site as part of the federal Superfund program, knows whether humans are still being exposed to its witch’s brew of chemicals, federal records show.

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From Cape Cod to the Berkshires and beyond, few communities are left untouched by the contamination. With between 3,000 and 5,000 polluted sites currently listed with the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection and 40,000 others already cleaned up by that agency since 1985, the state remains a patchwork of toxicity.

“They’re everywhere,” Eugene Benson, legal counsel and program director for Alternatives for Community and Environment, said of the many contaminated sites that dot the Massachusetts landscape. “They range from sites that aren’t serious to sites that are very serious. Some of the worst and most extensive sites are on the Superfund list,” he notes, “but there still are some very bad sites, as far as contamination and the toxins, that are not on the Superfund list too.”

Benson, whose organization works to achieve environmental justice for low income communities and communities of color, said DEP’s website offers a way for residents to check out toxic waste sites in their own community.

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At some sites like New Bedford Harbor where PCB-contaminated seafood is a concern, the exposure risk is listed as “not under control,” meaning that human contact with pollutants is possible. At other sites, such as the Industri-Plex site in Woburn where cleanup is estimated to run up to $13.6 million, contaminated groundwater continues to migrate to other areas, according to those same reports. At six other state hot spots, there is insufficient data to determine the status of groundwater migration or human exposure to toxins, the EPA cleanup impact profiles found.

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Even parcels that have been on the list the longest, like the Baird and McGuire chemical plant in Holbrook, ranked as the 14th worst site in the nation when it was added to the Superfund roster in 1982, continue to be tainted. Despite a cleanup effort estimated by the EPA to top more than $220 million, a groundwater study conducted last year under that federal agency’s authorization found metals such as arsenic still remain in high concentrations on that site 30 years later.

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The cost of cleaning up all those toxic minefields remains unclear. EPA says the “potential responsible parties” who often pay for the cleanup are not required to release cost figures. Neither the EPA nor Department of Defense officials were able to produce cleanup figures for any of the six military facilities in Massachusetts.

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Part of the reason behind the snail’s pace of cleanup is due to the lack of technology to quickly remove toxins from soil and groundwater. Cleaning up ground and water contamination is an arduous and cumbersome task that may take decades to complete, officials maintain. Site owners also force lengthy delays, challenging EPA decisions and balking at the cost of cleanup, creating a lull that can sometimes last for years. Yet, despite all the wrangling, EPA says it routinely collects 70 percent of all cleanup costs from the businesses that caused the contamination.

In 2002, however, the agency faced perhaps its biggest challenge of all when Congress slashed the Superfund’s primary income source – a tax targeting industrial polluters that once generated about $1 billion annually. By the end of Fiscal 2003, the fund’s balance was zero, down from a peak of $3.8 billion in 1996. Today, appropriations are made by Congress, which last month proposed cutting $23 million from the Superfund budget in a cutback that would slash it from $1.31 billion to $1.28 billion for the rest of the fiscal year.

Enforcement actions by the EPA supplement that budget, with responsible businesses paying for cleanup costs often under court ordered agreements, EPA officials say.

Still, the budget cuts have taken a toll. A precipitous scale-down of cleanup activity has cut mitigation by more than 50 percent, notes Ed Hopkins, the director of environmental quality for the Washington, DC-based Sierra Club.

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“If EPA doesn’t have the resources to investigate problems and enforce the law, it takes away the incentive for industries to clean up their own problems,” notes Hopkins. “We need to have a dedicated source of funding to get this job done in a timely way.”

Even Schlichtman agrees with that.

“We don’t have another 50 years to clean up the messes we are creating now,” he says. “We have to take action to prevent this large scale pollution or we’re not going to be around at the end of the century.”

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