EPA, Apparently Engaged in Shell Game, May Sidestep Policy on Toxic Dump Sites

WASHINGTON —  The Environmental Protection Agency, engaging in a kind of shell game that points up a growing national dilemma, is quietly considering a plan to ship thousands of tons of toxic waste excavated from a “superfund” cleanup site to another landfill that may itself be leaking.

The politically sensitive proposal appears to sidestep the EPA’s own written policy against shipping wastes from superfund sites--already the object of a multibillion-dollar federal cleanup program--to potentially “unsound” landfills where they again could leach into the soil.

More important, however, the plan underlines what officials acknowledge is a critical shortage of safe burial sites for the highly toxic wastes taken from superfund dumps and other closed landfills across the nation. The crunch is certain to worsen, they say, as long-delayed superfund cleanups begin at hundreds of other sites.

“We are in fact confronting a capacity problem. It’s on the horizon,” said one EPA toxic-waste official, who asked not to be named. “But it’s more than that. It’s a question of whether landfills are the way to dispose of these wastes at all.”

According to EPA records, at least 10 of the commercial landfills that have been paid to accept wastes from superfund sites have reported evidence of leaks. The list includes the nation’s largest toxic waste landfill, in Emelle, Ala.

Several EPA officials said that most of the others are likely to be found leaking when what one called “woefully inadequate” monitoring practices are improved.

The current EPA proposal, raised in internal meetings last month, is forced by a growing mountain of toxic dirt and sludge excavated this fall from a superfund site in Dartmouth, Mass., 40 miles south of Boston.

The 4,000 cubic yards unearthed so far are laden with toxic solvents and PCBs, a cancer-causing chemical. Unless the waste is removed by spring, rains and melting snow could carry the chemicals back into the site, which borders a river.

The EPA hired Cecos International Inc., one of the nation’s biggest hazardous-waste landfill operators, to truck the material to its Williamsburg, Ohio, dump. But the Ohio dump became filled to capacity in mid-December, and a new section, or “cell,” has not been approved to receive the highly toxic PCBs. Even that approval may be delayed by an internal EPA dispute over whether the dump, which has a recent history of environmental problems, is itself leaking.

Tests at the only alternative burial site, a huge Cecos dump in Niagara Falls, N.Y., disclosed in late 1983 that water samples from a nearby well showed evidence of chemical contamination. The EPA since has placed the site in assessment, meaning that the dump is suspected of leaking.

An internal EPA analysis, written last October, scored Cecos for “sloppy” practices at Niagara Falls, including poor monitoring for leaks. And the agency soon will order Cecos to perform a battery of tests to determine the extent of any contamination, EPA officials said.

The EPA’s own guidelines, issued in January, 1983, generally ban the shipment of superfund wastes to a landfill in assessment until tests show that the landfill poses no public health hazard. But agency officials have proposed to sidestep the policy by exempting a single cell of the landfill, which has been open for only a few months, from the coming EPA order for tests.

The cell being considered--a pit lined with plastic and a 10-foot clay barrier--is virtually identical to older sections of the Cecos site that are now suspected of leaking.

The proposal is regarded within the agency as especially sensitive because the Niagara Falls dump, one of the nation’s largest, has come under relentless attack from citizens’ groups and from Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-N.Y.). Moynihan has pressed the EPA to conduct tests to assess whether chemicals are leaking into the basements of nearby homes.

Elaine Stanley, assistant director of the superfund program, denied Tuesday that the exemption of the cell represented a change in EPA policy. She said the wastes would not be sent anywhere until the EPA “resolves problems with the New York facility . . . or another facility comes to our attention.”

Massachusetts officials said this week that the disposal problems at the Massachusetts superfund site probably will become routine, especially in the Northeast. There are no commercial hazardous waste dumps north of New York, and many of the nearest disposal sites--like the two Cecos dumps-- are beset with environmental troubles.

“There just aren’t many places to put this stuff,” said James C. Colman, a Massachusetts hazardous waste official. “What’s going to happen is that we’re just not going to take the stuff away from the sites anymore. We’ll cap it, try to neutralize it as much as possible and hope it doesn’t leak.”

The 760-plus superfund sites targeted so far will generate millions of tons of contaminated sludge and soil, much of which must be trucked to supposedly leakproof landfills. But many experts are not convinced that any landfill can be made leakproof.

“Over the last year, we’ve learned to ask more and more about landfills,” Stanley said. “And the more you ask, the more you uncover problems.”