EDISON, N.J. — For 11 years, Robert Spiegel spent his nights creating elaborate wedding cakes and his days trying to force the government to clean up the arsenic, lead, dioxin and other lethal chemicals that saturate a six-acre lot nestled between suburban homes and a factory-sized bakery.
His commitment seemed about to pay off when, after years of studies and planning, federal Environmental Protection Agency officials announced a $28.5-million cleanup of the site where Chemical Insecticide Corp. had once manufactured a range of deadly chemicals, including the components of Agent Orange. Work was to begin this fall.
But a few months ago, local EPA officials told Spiegel not to expect the cleanup to begin soon. Then, last month, a report by the EPA inspector general named the Chemical Insecticide site as one of 33 priority Superfund sites in 19 states that had not received funding requested by EPA branch offices.
"It's like getting the wind knocked out of you," said an outraged Spiegel, as he stood amid about 60 barrels of hazardous materials left at the site.
With a number of sites around the country denied financing and the Superfund close to running out of money, there is growing concern at the grass-roots level that years of hard work to clean toxic waste sites may end in futility.
Congress and President Carter created the Superfund program in 1980 in response to the public outcry over the toxic disaster at Love Canal in New York. The trust fund, which was financed through taxes on polluting industries and court awards for hazardous substance releases, provided money for cleanups on sites where the polluters could not be charged. By the program's 20th anniversary, 757 sites had been cleaned nationwide.
But the fund is expected to be all but depleted by the end of next year, leaving it to scarce general tax revenue to pay for any further cleanups.
Spiegel and other supporters of the program attribute the idleness at Chemical Insecticide and other toxic sites to the Bush administration's failure to renew the tax, which expired in 1995. President Clinton proposed renewing it, but the GOP-controlled Congress balked.
"The perception that things are slowing down is arising from the fact that so much hysteria has been created ... in the community," said EPA spokesman Joe Martyak.
Marianne L. Horinko, the assistant EPA administrator in charge of the Superfund program, called Spiegel's concerns "unfounded." "I'm not slowing anything down," she said.
