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 Gui-mond 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 Super-fund, 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.

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 (AASE-II), 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-

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

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 chlorofluorocar-bons. "How will the atmosphere re­spond as the ch lor ine load ing 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

Planes to probe ozone levels in Arctic regions