From the U.S. Government Accountability Office, www.gao.gov Transcript for: Watchdog Report: Superfund Costs and Cleanup Audio interview by GAO staff with John Stephenson, Director, Natural Resources and Environment Associated Report Number: GAO-10-380 Released on: June 22, 2010 [ Background Music ] [ Narrator: ] Welcome to GAO's Watchdog Report, your source for news and information from the Government Accountability Office. It's June 22, 2010. The Environmental Protection Agency established the Superfund Program to address waste sites that are hazardous to human health or the environment. The agency puts the most hazardous sites on the National Priority List or NPL. A group led by John Stephenson, a Director in GAO's Natural Resources and Environment Team, recently reviewed the cleanup and funding status of the NPL sites. GAO analyst Jeremy Cluchey sat down with John to learn more. [ Jeremy Cluchey: ] What is the Superfund Program? [ John Stephenson: ] The Superfund Program is a program that was established in 1980 by Congress to clean up some of the most hazardous and dangerous sites in the country. And these sites were former mines or chemical sites and contamination put on the ground, leaking into ground water, contaminating drinking water aquifers, and presenting a danger to human health and the environment, quite frankly. There’s some 47,000 sites that were evaluated, and of those, about 1,200—the most egregious sites, the most dangerous sites—were listed in the National Priority List, about a 1,000 of them are privately owned sites and about another 200 are federally-owned at Department of Defense military bases and the like. And the cleanup process for each of these, after they get on the listing, and the listing’s based on the hazardous ranking scale, consist of a long-term assessment of the contamination, and then they design a cleanup process. It could be moving soil. It could be setting up ground water filtration system. It could be a number of things to get these sites cleaned up so they no longer pose a risk to human health and the environment. [ Jeremy Cluchey: ] How is this clean up process generally financed? [ John Stephenson: ] In the past, when it was established, there was a Superfund tax that was established, which was a tax on certain industries, petroleum-based chemical industries, and it had actually grown to about $5 billion in 1997. However, that tax expired in 1995 and has not been reinstated since, and it has shrunk to about 582 million today. And so, now, it is funded through general appropriations to the tune of about 1.2 billion per year. [ Jeremy Cluchey: ] In this report, what did GAO find as the current cleanup and funding status of the most hazardous nonfederal NPL sites. [ John Stephenson: ] There's actually 1,111 of those private sites, and we focused our attention on the 75 sites with unacceptable human exposure and another 164 sites with unknown exposure. And we found basically that we have spent 1.2 billion on the 75 most dangerous sites, which is about 16 million per site, and they're still not cleaned up yet. So there's a lot of work to do. And based on the current annual appropriation, the needs for the Superfund program exceed the resources. [ Jeremy Cluchey: ] This report also looks to the future of the NPL. What did GAO find with regard to the likely status of sites listed on the NPL over the next 5 years? [ John Stephenson: ] It does, and surprisingly, there are not good projections coming out of EPA or the federal government as to how many sites might likely be listed. So what we did is we surveyed 10 regions and 10 states, and then used that as a basis for projecting how many new sites might be listed over the next several years. And based on their responses, about 20 to 25 new sites will be listed each year, and that will, of course, further exacerbate the limited funding that already exist. [ Jeremy Cluchey: ] What steps is GAO recommending be taken in order to address these issues moving forward? [ John Stephenson: ] The value of this report is that for the first time in a long time, presents a really good picture on the status of the program and the funding that exist for sites on the list today, and those that potentially will be listed. We do have one small recommendation that involves vapor intrusion, which is a form of contamination for indoor air. If there is a petroleum-based substance that leaks under a home, for example, reaches into the house, it's an indoor air problem. And right now, the listing process for the Superfund program doesn't include those kinds of sites. We expect that the Congress, probably next year, will begin to debate reinstatement of the Superfund tax that expired in 1995, and we think this report will make important contributions to that congressional debate. [ Background Music ] [ Narrator: ] To learn more, visit GAO's Web site at gao.gov, and be sure to tune in to the next edition of GAO's Watchdog Report for more from the congressional watchdog, the Government Accountability Office.