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Explaining the toxic trail: live Q&A with Matt Drange and Susanne Rust Explaining the toxic trail: Q&A with Matt Drange and Susanne Rust
(about 4 hours later)
For months, CIR reporters Matt Drange and Susanne Rust have asked questions to find out what happens to the waste that’s pulled from beneath Silicon Valley’s Superfund sites. Now it’s your turn. For months, CIR reporters Matt Drange and Susanne Rust have asked questions to find out what happens to the waste that’s pulled from beneath Silicon Valley’s Superfund sites. Today, readers had a chance to do the same.
Our Toxic Trail investigation, conducted in partnership with the Center for Investigative Reporting, is a complex story with significant implications for the Environmental Protection Agency’s Superfund cleanup program and its hidden environmental toll. Here are the highlights from our live Q&A with Drange and Rust, who explained the key takeaways from the ‘toxic trail’ investigation. To read the full Q&A, click on the widget below.
Today at 3pm ET (7pm UK time), Drange and Rust will walk us through the most important takeaways from the story and explain what it means for you. What led you to the story?
If you live near a Superfund site (find out via our interactive map) and want to know what to look out for, or about the costs to us all, toss your questions in the widget below and come back at 3pm ET for the live discussion. Susanne Rust: It started with a couple of phone calls. We asked the EPA what happened to the chemicals they removed from the Silicon Valley Superfund site. They told us that was something we should ask the state. So we called up the the state of California and asked. They told us to ask the EPA. Bingo. We knew we had a story.
Matt Drange: And just to add: Before that we wrote a story about Google employees being exposed to potentially dangerous levels of toxic chemicals. That begged the question and started the hunt for more answers.
And how long have you been reporting it?
Drange: We published our first story a year ago today. Since then we’ve been reporting on and off to follow the Toxic Trail, which turned out to be longer and more winding than we expected.
What’s the most surprising thing you both learned during the course of your reporting?
Rust: Two things: 1) How totally inefficient the clean up process is at some of these Superfund sites; and 2) that despite continuous cleaning and treatment, many of these sites aren’t actually going to get clean for hundreds of years.
Drange: For me it was that no one had ever asked this question before, of ‘What happens next?’ I think everyone assumed for so long that Superfund meant cleanup, but actually it’s just the beginning.
If I live near a Superfund site am I in danger? What do I need to know?
Drange: That depends. At many of the sites, there is little to no risk of human exposure. We break down where each site is and the dangers at them. Some, for example, are in the early stages of cleanup and we aren’t sure what the risk is. At each site the EPA lists community contacts. I would start there by giving them a call. For example, at the MEW site in Mountain View you can go here, and scroll down to the bottom of the page to find phone numbers and email addresses for the officials overseeing the cleanup
Rust: If you want to know which chemicals are involved at any particular Superfund site, check out the graphic Matt linked to above (bit.ly/superfundnearyou) and click on the question mark.
Has the Superfund issue been reported before?
Drange: No, it hasn’t! That’s exactly what surprised me when we started looking into this. I think the assumption since the program’s inception was that the cleanup ended once the waste was removed from the site. That’s certainly how EPA approaches the issue. The problem is, that’s just the beginning. It’s my hope that there are many more stories like this, asking important questions at sites in communities like yours.
Rust: In the 1980s, when the program was launched, this very question was asked. A lot of people were worried that waste would just be moved around, potentially creating new Superfund sites elsewhere. We found that while the EPA gave it lip service back then (created a rule that said only facilities that complied with certain environmental laws could receive the waste) the waste is still getting passed along -- and going to waste sites that have clear violations.
Do Superfunds and toxic waste clean up contribute to climate change?
Rust: They definitely contribute to a significant amount of greenhouse gas emissions. For every five pounds of chemical removed at the Silicon Valley site we focused on, 20,000 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions were produced. That’s from running the pumps constantly at the site, shipping the chemicals across country and then treating them in continuously burning furnaces.
Drange: Pumping the contaminated water creates enough CO2 to fill a 330-foot cube, taller than the Statue of Liberty!
If the Superfund program costs so much, can create further problems, and isn’t even really cleaning up the problem, why is the EPA still doing it?
Drange: It’s a lot reasons. It’s true that companies make a lot of money by processing, treating (burning) and disposing of Superfund waste. But at the plants we looked at, only about 10 percent of their total waste came from Superfund sites. The other stuff comes from day to day life, things like thermometers, dental fillings, etc. that we often dispose of in a very inefficient and costly way. Many people told us, essentially: Better that than in our backyard.
Rust: I’ll take question 1: Why is the EPA still doing this? In most cases, agreements about how to clean up the sites were written when the sites were identified -- most back in the 1980s and 1990s. These agreements are called Records of Decision. In them, EPA lists all of the ways the site could be treated as well as the costs of each type of treatment. They then pick a preferred method and sign a contract with the party in charge of cleaning it. In many cases these contracts are old, there’s a level of inertia, and it is very difficult to change them and start new treatment methods. The EPA is aware that some of these sites are no longer getting treated. They also know there are costs to treating them (as we pointed to in our story)
Drange: As the EPA told us: “They (companies) may not wish to rock the boat with something new because it may not work.” The cleanup at these sites, they told us, “is a long, bureaucratic process.” The problem here is that it’s up to the companies responsible for creating the mess to take the initiative to find innovative ways of cleaning it up. Often, that never happens.
What would be a better alternative than pump and treat?
Rust: There are other treatment methods - many that don’t contribute to the toxic trail that we uncovered. These include bioremediation (pumping biological agents, such as yeast, under ground where they eat away at the toxic chemicals) and oxidation (which is like bioremediation, except that chemicals are pumped under ground that break apart the hazardous stuff). the problem is that at many of these sites, it doesn’t matter what you do. In the end, it’s going to take centuries to get rid of the toxic chemicals. That’s because the chemicals aren’t just in the water, but in the surrounding ground soils. And when you take the toxic chemicals out of the water -- in process that kind of works like osmosis -- the chemicals from the soils seep into the water.
Drange: Cleaning up groundwater is hard. There’s entire consulting firms here in the Bay Area that have made it their mission to figure this out. The way many people put it to me, is: ‘If we’re talking about Silicon Valley--a place with more Superfund sites than any other area in the country--why don’t the Googles and Facebooks of the world take note and come up with a solution?’
Why don’t we know how many dioxins are produced at these sites and their impact on the environment?
Rust: The EPA is well aware that dioxins are dangerous. They’ve done a lot of work to reduce them in the environment. However, when we started looking deeply into it, we realized that they haven’t looked at these waste facilities since the late 1980s. Even though they acknowledge they are significant contributors. So, until someone is compelled to test these facilities (whether the facility owners or the EPA itself) - we just don’t know.
What were the biggest barriers you faced in getting the info you needed to report this story?
Drange: Great question. There were many. Here’s just two:There isn’t a good way to track waste from site to site. The government keeps tabs on only a small fraction of this, while the rest of the pieces of the puzzle are buried in the basements of state EPA offices around the country. This makes it almost impossible to do any sort of systemic analysis, either in an academic or industry led way.The other thing is that the companies that clean up this waste are often very hesitant to talk. When I was fact checking the story earlier this month, the VP of one of the largest waste treatment companies in the country--Environmental Quality Company--inadvertently responded to his PR guy and myself with the following:“We don’t plan on responding to this nut do we? Sent from my Verizon Wireless 4G LTE DROID”
Now that we know that some Superfund cleanup is potentially creating more harm than good, what can be done about it?
Drange: The first thing is to start to measure the impacts of the Toxic Trail in a comprehensive way. Like Susanne said earlier, the EPA knows there are serious costs to cleanup, but chooses not to monitor them.That has to change if we are going to push this discussion forward.
Rust: I think every Superfund site needs to be looked at on a case-by-case basis. Is the treatment working? Do the costs of the treatment outweigh the benefits? And we need to look beyond the immediate site clean up -- and ask questions like Matt and I did.