EPA Adds Nine Hazardous Waste Sites to Superfund’s National Priorities List / EPA also proposes to add an additional 13 new sites to the NPL

Release date: 04/08/2009

Contact Information: Latisha Petteway, (202) 564-4355 / 3191 / petteway.latisha@epa.gov

(Washington, D.C. – April 8, 2009) The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is adding nine new hazardous waste sites that pose risks to human health and the environment to the National Priorities List of Superfund sites. Also, EPA is proposing to add 13 other sites to the list. Superfund is the federal program that investigates and cleans up the most complex, uncontrolled or abandoned hazardous waste sites in the country.

To date, there have been 1,596 sites listed on the NPL. Of these sites, 332 sites have been deleted resulting in 1,264 final sites currently on the NPL. With the proposal of the 13 new sites, there are 67 proposed sites awaiting final agency action: 62 in the general Superfund section and five in the federal facilities section. There are a total of 1,331 final and proposed sites.

Contaminants found at the final and proposed sites include arsenic, asbestos, barium, cadmium, carbon tetrachloride, chloromethane, chromium, copper, dichloroethene (DCE), lead, mercury, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), selenium, silver, sulfuric acid, tetrachloroethene (PCE), trichloroethane (TCA), trichloroethene (TCE), vinyl chloride, and zinc.

With all Superfund sites, EPA tries to identify and locate the parties potentially responsible for the contamination. For the newly listed sites without viable potentially responsible parties, EPA will investigate the full extent of the contamination before starting significant cleanup at the site. Therefore, it may be several years before significant cleanup funding is required for these sites.

Sites may be placed on the list through various mechanisms:

• Numeric ranking established by EPA’s Hazard Ranking System
• Designation by states or territories of one top-priority site
• Meeting all three of the following requirements:

• The Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR) of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has issued a health advisory that recommends removing people from the site;
• EPA determines the site poses a significant threat to public health; and
• EPA anticipates it will be more cost-effective to use its remedial authority than to use its emergency removal authority to respond to the site.