EPA Touts ‘Accelerated’ Cleanup of Hazardous, Contaminated Sites
The Environmental Protection Agency has hit the acceleration button to clean up Superfund sites across the country on President Donald Trump’s watch, according to a new task force report detailing progress over the past two years.
The Superfund Task Force, commissioned in May 2017, developed a list of sites requiring the EPA’s “immediate and intense attention.” Formally known as the “Administrator’s Emphasis List,” EPA officials released it in December 2017, less than a year after Trump took office.
The new task force report spotlights the sprawling Tar Creek Superfund site as one of several where the government has made “substantial progress.”
Tar Creek includes thousands of acres of lead and zinc mining areas in northeast Oklahoma, southeast Kansas, and southwest Missouri. Because of the site’s “complexity and size,” the report says, a cleanup that goes back to 1984 will take several more years to complete.
The work includes “plugging” abandoned wells and excavating contaminated soil in Ottawa County, Oklahoma. State and federal officials first became aware of potential environmental hazards in 1979, when water began rising to the surface from underground mines.
The EPA has joined with the state of Oklahoma and the Quapaw tribe of Native Americans in a …read more