Superfund

More than 1,900 acres of the former Marine Corps Air Station El Toro in Irvine have been cleaned up and removed from the list of the nation's most hazardous sites after more than two decades, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced Monday. Officials say $165 million in soil removal and groundwater treatment by the U.S. Navy and local water agencies has cleaned up contamination at much of the old World War II-era air base, to the point that it no longer poses a risk to human health or the environment.

More than 1,900 acres of the former Marine Corps Air Station El Toro in Irvine have been cleaned up and removed from the list of the nation's most hazardous sites after more than two decades, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced Monday. Officials say $165 million in soil removal and groundwater treatment by the U.S. Navy and local water agencies has cleaned up contamination at much of the old World War II-era air base, to the point that it no longer poses a risk to human health or the environment.

Nearly $6 of every $10 spent on the Superfund toxic waste cleanup program goes for support activities and not directly to site cleanup, a congressional report said. The Environmental Protection Agency disputed the analysis used by the General Accounting Office. It said many of the activities the GAO called "support" actually contribute significantly to cleaning the toxic waste sites.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency will study a remote island used as an airstrip in the northwestern Hawaiian Islands that is often littered with plastic debris, the first step in a process that could eventually place it on the list of the country's most hazardous sites. In a letter to an environmental group, the agency said it will study Tern Island, part of a coral reef atoll about 550 miles northwest of Honolulu that is a breeding ground for millions of seabirds. The decision came in response to a petition filed last year by the Center for Biological Diversity.

On Monday, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Christie Whitman stood on a smog-shrouded peak in Tennessee's Great Smoky Mountains National Park and pledged to create "a healthier future for our children and a cleaner environment for our future in all the different parts of our great country."

Seventy-five California cities, including four from the San Gabriel Valley, are enlisting the public's help to win federal limits on municipal contributions to clean up Superfund sites. The Environmental Protection Agency is considering limiting the amount of money corporations can seek from cities in lawsuits to 4% of the total bill for cleaning up Superfund sites. Corporations have claimed that municipal garbage is also to blame for the pollution.

An increasing amount of Superfund money set aside for cleaning up the country's worst hazardous waste sites is being spent on administrative costs and support functions, according to a government report. The new data about the Environmental Protection Agency's program triggered fresh calls from congressional Republicans for an overhaul of the Superfund program, which was budgeted this year at $1.5 billion.

The Environmental Protection Agency is moving to have the Washington Navy Yard placed on the national list of Superfund hazardous-waste sites and has ordered the Navy to begin cleaning up dangerous pollutants in soil and storm sewers at the historic facility. The EPA's heightened activities at the 66-acre installation are part of efforts to restore the Anacostia River, which has been heavily polluted by D.C. sewage discharges and toxic runoff from the Navy Yard and other sources.

In its review of the Superfund program last year, the Environmental Protection Agency noted that the cleanup effort is at a critical juncture--running out of money and up for congressional renewal in 1991. The EPA wants to avoid a protracted debate in Congress, fearing that significant changes could further delay the cleanup campaign. Some environmental groups and others critical of the program say the time for reforms is now.

The Reagan Administration is violating the toxic cleanup and human health requirements of the 1986 law that was intended to revive the Superfund program, environmental groups charged. "The Administration has simply decided not to enforce parts of the new law which it actively opposed during the reauthorization debate," three organizations said in a report on the restructured program's first year. The report, by the U.S.

WASHINGTON - The Environmental Protection Agency's Washington headquarters now carries the name of former President Clinton, who acknowledged Wednesday that the honor could have gone instead to his vice president, Al Gore, who is perhaps best known for his work on climate change. But he and others at the naming ceremony said it was a fitting tribute, not so much to the man, but to his administration's environmental legacy. “I think it more than sort of fits, not for me, but for what we did,” Clinton said.

The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power plans to build the world's largest groundwater treatment center over one of the largest Superfund pollution sites in the United States: the San Fernando Basin. Two plants costing a combined $600 million to $800 million will restore groundwater pumping of drinking water from scores of San Fernando Valley wells that the DWP began closing in the 1980s, the utility said. The plants also will ensure that other wells remain open despite pollution plumes steadily migrating in their direction.

A dozen campers look suspiciously at the winding Brooklyn canal they are about to canoe. "OK, what's the most important thing about this waterway?" Owen Foote, their expedition leader, asks. "It stinks!" the preteens squeal in chorus. Indeed it does. But never mind that. The Gowanus Canal is the latest, hottest, coolest spot in a city that won't sleep until it's completely gentrified. Photos: Canoeing down a Superfund site Never mind that the federal government designated the Gowanus a Superfund site last year and "one of the most contaminated bodies of water in the nation.

Defense contractor Northrop Grumman Corp. has agreed to spend $21 million to clean up polluted groundwater in the San Gabriel Valley. Under a consent decree settlement announced last week by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the company will pump contaminated water from beneath Industry, La Puente and Walnut; build pipelines; and construct and operate a treatment plant. The area is one of four federal Superfund sites in the San Gabriel Valley, where more than 30 square miles of the water table are polluted with solvents and degreasing agents used for decades by business and industry.

The federal Environmental Protection Agency on Thursday proposed spending at least $36 million to clean up the world's largest deposit of banned pesticide DDT, which lies 200 feet underwater off the Palos Verdes Peninsula. Montrose Chemical Corp., which was based near Torrance, released 110 tons of DDT and 10 tons of toxic PCBs into the sewers from 1947 through 1971. The chemicals then flowed into the Pacific.

California's top environmental cop Monday rejected an offer to list the contaminated Rocketdyne Santa Susana Field Lab near Simi Valley as a federal Superfund cleanup site, saying the state can do the job quicker and more thoroughly.

Budget wrangling in Washington has jeopardized the cleanup of 12 toxic Superfund sites in and around Los Angeles, including a huge San Bernardino project where work has been halted on an underground river of contamination that has polluted one-third of the city's water supply. The San Bernardino site is one of four around the state, along with projects near downtown Los Angeles, in South Gate and in Oakland, where cleanup operations have been suspended, according to the U.S.

The Western Pacific Railroad site in northern Oroville was removed from the federal Superfund list of badly polluted sites. Ten years after targeting the site for cleanup, said Keith Takata, Superfund program official, "we can say that the ground water and soil no longer pose a threat to workers or the surrounding community."

Waiting in their cars or on broken sidewalks, the blue-jeaned crowd has turned out for a parade. But they could pass for mourners at a funeral. They line up along the main drag in front of empty cafes and shops and rusted mining equipment fenced off with barbed wire. Passing time, some press hands and foreheads against windows of stores that went out of business so many years ago that it's hard to remember what they sold. Two graybeards stand near a telephone pole, watching for any sign of action in front of Susie's Thrift and Gift.

For the off-road warriors of Northern and Central California, few wild landscapes are as enticing as the Clear Creek Management Area, with its deep canyons, scampering feral pigs, rainbow-hued flowers and giant rock formations. But on Thursday, a 48-square-mile swath of the Diablo Mountains in San Benito and Fresno counties was labeled a virtual death zone where five visits a year over three decades could lead to lung cancer and other crippling diseases.