EPA Adds 11 Hazardous Waste Sites to Superfund’s National Priorities List / EPA also proposes to add 10 additional sites

Release date: 09/23/2009

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

WASHINGTON - The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is adding 11 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 10 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 1,607 sites listed on the NPL. Of these sites, 336 sites have been deleted resulting in 1,271 final sites currently on the NPL, including the 11 new final sites added in this rulemaking. With the proposal of the 10 new sites, there are 66 proposed sites awaiting final agency action: 61 in the general Superfund section and five in the federal facilities section. There are a total of 1,337 final and proposed sites.

Contaminants found at the final and proposed sites include antimony, arsenic, barium, benzo-a-anthracene, boron, cadmium, chloromethane, chromium, copper, dichloroethene (DCE), hexachlorobenze, lead, mercury, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), selenium, silver, 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 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.