COLUMN ONE : Polluters Directing Cleanups : The EPA is accused of abdicating its responsibility and sacrificing public health. Evidence shows private labs have falsified tests.

WASHINGTON —  Ten years after Congress declared war on toxic waste, the Environmental Protection Agency is allowing the same companies that created the most dangerous problems to determine the scope of contamination and propose how to clean it up.

And, since the companies also must pay for cleaning up the hundreds of hazardous chemical dumps that scar the national landscape and threaten the health of millions of Americans, they are generally advocating remedies far less stringent than those proposed when the EPA itself evaluates the problems.

The EPA’s own officials in the field say companies are trying to save money by proposing only minimal cleanups, according to an internal agency report. At a Texas site, for example, companies--with EPA approval--will leave behind cancer-causing contaminants at levels 700 times higher than the agency’s plan for the nearly identical adjoining site.

Moreover, an investigation by the EPA’s inspector general has uncovered evidence that private labs relied upon nationwide to measure levels of contamination and other basic data have falsified test results for years. Ten such labs are under scrutiny, including one in San Diego and two in the San Francisco area, and criminal charges are possible, said John E. Barden, chief of investigations for the inspector general.

One major lab, United States Testing in Hoboken, N.J., was suspended from receiving new federal contracts in April after EPA officials accused the company of falsifying test results and dumping the hazardous material into city sewers and municipal dumpsters, according to internal EPA records.

But the Bush Administration last year adopted a strategy to increase sharply the number of sites turned over to polluters. As a result of this strategy, environmentalists and medical experts worry that public health and the environment are being sacrificed to speed cleanups and restrain skyrocketing costs, which some estimate could reach $500 billion and stretch over 50 years or longer.

“It absolutely makes no sense to have the guys who are going to have to pay for the cleanup at the end make the determination on what will be cleaned up and how it will be cleaned up,” said Linda E. Greer, a toxicologist with the Natural Resources Defense Council.

People who live near some of the worst chemical dump sites believe that the EPA has abdicated its responsibilities. They fear that they will never be safe.

“I wanted to believe it when the EPA told us it was safe to live here,” lamented Cheryl Finley, the mother of a child born with birth defects three years after the EPA assured her Houston neighbors that they were not at risk living next to a toxic waste site. Fearing that there is a link between her daughter’s condition and the toxic site, she said: “Now I will never be able to trust the EPA. And I definitely learned you cannot trust the chemical companies or anything they say.”

Examples abound of companies underestimating dangers, suggesting the cheapest, least permanent remedies and obtaining approval from the EPA.

In Michigan, the state attorney general is asking a court to overturn a cleanup plan negotiated by the EPA and several companies, including Ford, General Motors and Chrysler. The plan relies on technology rejected as inadequate by the state. But it is cheaper: One report estimates that a cleanup method meeting Michigan standards would cost $13 million, and the price tag on the EPA-companies’ plan is $1 million.

“They brag about cleanup settlements with companies, but that doesn’t mean the EPA is doing a good job,” said Sen. Frank R. Lautenberg (D-N.J.), chairman of the Senate panel that oversees the EPA’s cleanup. “In fact, it could mean that they are taking the easier way out.”

The problem’s roots stretch back to 1980, when Congress put the EPA in charge of a new program called Superfund to clean up the nation’s most threatening hazardous waste sites. In 1983, the EPA began turning over vital parts of the cleanup task on a small number of sites to the polluting companies.

From those limited beginnings, the pattern of farming out major tasks to the original polluters has mushroomed. Chemical companies and other polluters now lead half the Superfund site studies under way, and EPA Administrator William K. Reilly wants to increase the figure to at least 60%.

These two-step studies are pivotal in determining if a site will ever be safe again. The first phase, a risk assessment, identifies the hazardous material and gauges its threat to health and the environment. The second phase, an investigation of possible remedies, proposes the technology to clean up the mess.

Both steps depend on hundreds of judgments about chemicals and potential human risks, so the opportunity for bias and self-serving decisions is enormous.

The EPA defends its reliance on the companies for these complex tasks as the cheapest and quickest way to clean up the 1,218 toxic waste locations now on the Superfund list. The EPA maintains that environmental and public-health standards are ensured through its oversight of the work by the companies and by the agency’s selection of the final cleanup method.

“It isn’t like the companies do their thing and we aren’t there overseeing them,” said Don R. Clay, EPA’s assistant administrator and top Superfund official. “There’s been no major problem.”

However, there are questions about whether the present system makes it possible for EPA to monitor the company-prepared risk assessments or evaluate adequately the resulting cleanup proposals.

The Superfund law caps the amount EPA can spend on its own employees, setting ceilings too low to permit the EPA to use its own resources to oversee and evaluate risk assessments and cleanup proposals by the companies.

Instead, the EPA must rely on private contractors for the oversight. And virtually every one of these contractors also does business with the companies whose work they are evaluating.

“It’s the same as giving students the right to grade their own exams,” warned Sen. David Pryor (D-Ark.), a longtime critic of the use of contractors for government work that requires judgments about the public interest.

What’s more, the rising evidence of fraud among private laboratories has stirred concerns within EPA about whether cleanups planned for dozens of sites were based on faulty data.

EPA relies on such labs to perform thousands of tests to determine contamination levels at actual and potential Superfund sites.

One element in deciding whether a site gets on the Superfund list is the level of contamination. So the faked tests also have raised concern that some dangerous sites missed the list and could continue untreated for years--or forever.

This unfolding scandal is forcing reviews of sites nationwide. Worse yet, it threatens another black eye for the Superfund program.

“The whole thing gives you a credibility problem, but we don’t know yet how widespread it is,” Clay said.

Superfund’s credibility has been weak almost from the start.

The program was created after the EPA’s notable progress in tackling air and water pollution in the 1970s. With $1.6 billion from Congress, Superfund was expected to bring quick results in eliminating decades of indiscriminate and illegal disposal of millions of tons of toxic, corrosive, carcinogenic and reactive wastes poisoning surface and underground water supplies and contaminating land.

The expectation was pure folly.

Early progress was hampered by political scandals. Faced with allegations of lax cleanups and sweetheart deals with polluters, senior EPA officials, including Administrator Anne McGill Burford, were forced to resign. Superfund chief Rita M. Lavelle was convicted of perjury in connection with the Stringfellow acid pits site in Riverside County, California.

By the time Superfund was to expire in 1985, EPA Administrator Lee M. Thomas was able to report to Congress that only six of the 552 Superfund sites had been cleaned up and removed from the list.

In 1986, Congress reauthorized Superfund for another five years and appropriated $8.5 billion more. But the legislators demanded improvements and set tight goals for the program.

Politics was far from the sole cause of Superfund’s problems.

The number of waste sites dwarfed projections. Cleaning them turned out to be more complex than anyone imagined. No proven technologies existed to eliminate contamination, and every site offered a unique mix of chemicals and types of pollution.

For instance, locating waste dumped for 30 or 40 years at a site has been compared to archeologists unearthing layers of human activity in a city whose history is a mystery. Unlike ancient artifacts, however, hazardous wastes do not stay in place; they follow unpredictable paths in soil, ground water and surface water.

Small wonder that cleanups average almost eight years a site and cleaning many locations, particularly where ground water is contaminated, will take 20 years or longer.

As a result, after 10 years, Superfund’s record is still abysmal: 28 sites have been cleaned and deleted from the list, and 22 others have been cleaned but are still being monitored.

California has 91 Superfund sites, ranking third behind New Jersey and Pennsylvania. No California site has been cleaned and removed from the list, although a Sacramento junkyard has been cleaned and may be removed soon.

At four Superfund sites in the San Gabriel Valley east of Los Angeles, the EPA has spent about $13 million, mostly on consultants, studying ground-water contamination. But an EPA spokesman acknowledges that even selecting remedies remains “down the road,” and the actual cleanup will take decades.

“This is a major contamination problem, very complex, and we are trying to approach it as best we can,” said the official, Terry Wilson.

Angered by the slow progress, valley residents have raised a $100,000 reward fund to identify companies responsible for the dumping. They hope that the EPA will go after the companies and speed the cleanup. But they still feel ignored by the agency.

“Maybe because we are a working-class area where people don’t have time to focus on problems they can’t see, our problems are not as important as those in more affluent areas,” said Rep. Esteban E. Torres (D-La Puente), whose congressional district includes the sites.

Frustration with the gap between expectation and performance has scarred Superfund. A review ordered by Reilly after he took over the EPA in 1989 found that Superfund “operates without its once most valuable asset, the benefit of the doubt.”

No example better illustrates that finding than the Brio Refining site, 20 miles southeast of downtown Houston.

For 25 years, the 58-acre Brio site was used alternately by about 100 companies as a chemical-processing plant, a refinery and a dump. Waste was stored in unlined pits up to 20 feet deep. When a pit filled up, the sides were pushed in to cover it and a new one was dug.

The result is a witch’s brew of wastes. An analysis of 150 Superfund sites in 1988 by the Hazardous Waste Treatment Council, a treatment-industry group, found contamination levels at Brio among the nation’s highest for six chemicals, including three that cause cancer in lab animals. Records show that a potent human carcinogen, vinyl chloride, is also present at high levels.

By the time the site was closed in 1982, the pits contained 245,000

cubic yards of contaminated material, enough to cover a football field to a height of 117 feet.

The same year Brio shut down, Gary and Carolyn Merrill moved into the Southbend subdivision. It was a new neighborhood, with rows of modest, neat, two-story homes. Across the back yards of many of the homes, separated by a wooden fence, was Brio, with its small outbuildings and dilapidated storage tanks.

“About 30 homes were sold within days of each other, and the couples, almost all of us young and without children, moved in within a day or so,” Merrill remembered. “You could watch the moving vans pull up every couple of hours at a new house.”

No one who moved in had an inkling of what lurked beneath the scrub grass and patches of bare dirt beyond the wooden fence at the edge of Southbend. Couples started having babies. An elementary school was built three blocks from the site. A hospital and a junior college went up half a mile away.

On Halloween in 1984, state officials and the EPA called a community meeting at the school and disclosed that Brio was going on the Superfund list as one of the nation’s most toxic sites.

People were uneasy. Walking to a neighborhood Christmas dinner party a few weeks later, a joke about glowing in the dark silenced a dozen residents. But the anxiety was tempered by trust in the government.

From the start, the EPA and the companies responsible for the pollution assured residents over and over that they were safe. The federal agency created to examine health risks at Superfund sites, the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, said there was no pathway leading from the contaminated site to the subdivision.

By 1987, unusual health problems were occurring among the nearly 600 families in Southbend. Among the victims was the EPA’s credibility.

Carolyn Merrill had developed skin cancer at the age of 23, extremely young for a disease usually caused by too much sun but also linked to chemical exposure. Her second child, Brittany, was hospitalized with an unexplained fever five days after she was born in May, 1987, and was later diagnosed as having a weak immune system.

Another baby was born with a hole in its heart. A young mother developed a tumor that put her in a wheelchair. An insurance salesman developed a form of cancer usually seen only in chemical workers.

Fears escalated as rumors circulated. “For sale” signs started popping up. The community newspaper began raising questions about the adequacy of the site testing.

Last year, worried residents did their own health survey, with volunteers going door to door. They discovered a high rate of miscarriages, particularly among women pregnant in late 1986 and early 1987. That was when test burnings of contaminated material had been conducted at the pit nearest the subdivision.

“People were moving out on a daily basis,” said Cheryl Finley, who initiated the survey after her daughter was born without reproductive organs and she lost faith in the government’s safety assurances.

Establishing a link between hazardous wastes and health problems is extremely difficult. What appears to be incontrovertible proof to frightened residents is likely to be inconclusive evidence to scientists. And the results often fuel neighborhood apprehension.

When the administrators at the neighborhood grade school refused to allow anxious parents to transfer their children to another school, mothers set up picket lines. Others adopted a different tactic.

Convinced that school officials were withholding information, some women began stealing the trash every night from outside the administrative offices. To avoid detection, they replaced the white plastic bags with the bags they had taken and examined the previous night.

“You think I wouldn’t rather be home reading to my kids than digging through this garbage?” demanded Pat Steinsholt, a policeman’s wife with two children at the school, as she heaved bags of trash into her truck late one night in April.

Before the mothers were caught in May, the biggest find was an internal memo saying that 14 of the school’s 31 teachers had requested transfers. The haul also yielded documents about the administrators’ concerns over declining enrollment as families with enough money moved their kids to private schools.

Anxieties are natural among people who find themselves living next door to a Superfund site. Residents near Brio say their fears are magnified because the risk assessment and cleanup proposals were done by the companies responsible for the pollution, led by Monsanto Co., the St. Louis chemical and agricultural giant.

A civil lawsuit accused Monsanto of negligence in operating the site, but the four-month trial also focused on the way risks had been assessed at the location.

A soils expert said in court that Monsanto exercised too much control over the site studies, leading EPA to approve a remedy that he said will not leave Brio safe for nearby residents. A hydrogeologist testified that the study of contaminants was incomplete and inaccurate.

Veteran EPA official Hugh B. Kaufman testified that data had been destroyed and test results altered, including changing the amount of soil covering the pit closest to the subdivision from six inches to 78 inches.

“It’s my opinion that this chemical company used those opportunities to basically cook the books to their potential financial interest,” said Kaufman, who was testifying unofficially.

The Houston jury disagreed. In February, the jurors found no negligence by Monsanto. Instead, the jurors blamed the developers for not uncovering the dangers before building Southbend.

After the verdict, a juror told the Houston Chronicle: “I believe it is safe to live out there.”

Stephen P. Krchma, a Monsanto attorney, defended every aspect of the study as honest and praised the cleanup plan as responsible.

“We have been suffering under unsubstantiated allegations,” he said. “We don’t know how to do a project any better than this and we haven’t seen one done any better.”

The EPA has backed Monsanto and defended its oversight at Brio. “We have confidence that what we have done is based upon sound science and will withstand the criticisms that have been brought to bear,” said Phil Charles, an EPA spokesman in Dallas.

The oversight for EPA at Brio was performed by Roy F. Weston Inc., an environmental consulting and testing firm that also has worked for Monsanto elsewhere in the past.

Charles said the agency was unaware that Weston had worked for Monsanto previously. But he said it was not an issue because the previous work was not at Brio. Weston and Monsanto take the same position.

“What we are especially conscious of is that we are not representing opposing sides on the same site,” said Thomas J. Tuffey, executive vice president of Weston. “We may well be working for Monsanto at another location. We don’t consider that that gives us a conflict of interest. If the conflict of interest interpretations get that extreme, we will not have anyone to tackle this problem.”

There is another twist to the Brio story. Weston is one of three companies disciplined so far in the investigation of falsified test results from Superfund sites.

Last February, the Justice Department accused Weston in a civil action of backdating tests of contaminated samples from Superfund sites for at least a year at one of its labs. The company denied any wrongdoing but settled the case by voluntarily withdrawing from bidding on new EPA work for four months and paying the government $750,000.

The challenged tests did not involve Brio, but the questions linger there.

In late May, Rep. Jack Brooks (D-Tex.) asked the EPA to conduct new tests at Brio. The request came after the U.S. Geological Survey identified three types of potential ground water contamination that it said had not been addressed adequately by the previous studies.

“The cleanup effort at Brio must be done right and must be done right the first time,” Brooks said. “Unfortunately, we are not there yet.”

A few weeks ago, Carolyn Merrill was diagnosed as having a rare bladder disease that could be linked to chemical exposure. Excruciating pain awakens her repeatedly every night. For a while, she would lie awake considering suicide. Now she wonders why all this happened.

“How could every government agency fail and let this subdivision be built?” she asked, tears rolling down her cheeks as she clutched the hand of her daughter, Brittany. “How could they tell us it was safe to keep living here? It is dumbfounding and it is scary.”

Superfund Costs Far more Superfund monies are spent on outside contractors than on work the government does itself. Outside spending is represented by external figures; government workers are internal figures. FY 1988 Internal: $187,002,300 External: $1,310,368,000 Total: $1,497,370,300 FY 1989 Internal: $178,521,000 External: $1,365,143,300 Total: $1,543,664,300 FY 1990 Internal: $234, 156,800 External: $1,331,967,300 Total: $1,566,124, 100 FY 1991 Internal: $272,405,600 External: $1,480,700,800 Total: $1,566,124,100 Source: EPA Superfund Sites The number of Superfund sites nationwide: 1983: 418 1984: 546 1985: 786 1986: 850 1987: 888 1988: 951 1989: 1,177 1990: (as of 6/1/90) 1,218 Source: EPA