We still have plenty of issues in America that are not being addressed from past and present practices. Companies are set up in such a way that if there is a big release or small releases over a long period of time, the company will file for bankruptcy and walk away. This has happened with a lot of the dying and finishing textile plants in the South.
At one site, I've seen groundwater the color of Mello Yello because of chromium contamination. The good news is nobody in the area is using groundwater for drinking water. The bad news is the groundwater is leaching into the surface water and wetlands adjacent to the site.
One company abandoned their open pit mining operation. They had about a 50% completion on the remediation when they decided it was too expensive to finish the job. Now you have about a 5-acre pit around 180 feet deep that is half filled with water that is essentially sulfuric acid. The water’s pH is about 2 and it is slowly seeping into the surface waters surrounding the site. We wont even mention the issues with their cyanide heap leach recovery systems.
But there is some good news. Exxon-Mobil and Philips-Conoco are spending millions cleaning up arsenic and lead contamination at old superphosphate fertilizer plant sites. These plants started operations around 1870 with the last ones closing their doors before WWII. The Mobil portion of Exxon-Mobil started life as the Virginia Carolina Chemical Company and has morphed over the past 130 years into Exxon-Mobil. Philips-Conoco started out as the American Agricultural Chemical Company before assuming its present day corporate entity.
Still, there are a lot of problems that are not being addressed. Money is the biggest single issue we are facing. We lack the funds to clean sites up. We don’t have the money to hire or keep the best and the brightest. And over the past several years, our budget has been cut and cut again. Politics always takes precedence over science.
With the continued expansion of subdivisions into what used to be rural farmland, we are discovering new problems. At times, the soils in these new housing projects have pesticide levels above residential soil screening levels. The farmers are not liable for this because they have applied the pesticides according to the manufactures instructions. The homeowners aren’t even aware a problem exists. The developer doesn’t care. He already has his money.
So that leaves the government holding the bag. Right now, there are no regulations or laws to address the issue. We don’t even have a mechanism in place to adequately address or prevent these problems from happening. The best we can do at the moment is let the EPA perform an emergency removal, which is expensive, time consuming, and very disruptive. But since Katrina, you’ll have a hard time getting the EPA to spend their limited budgets anywhere but in the hurricane area.
Hmmm… this isn’t a reply as much as it is a rant. /forums/images/graemlins/grin.gif Y'all have to forgive me. /forums/images/graemlins/blush.gif This is something that bothers me a lot. We have enough work here in America to keep us busy for a long time, but we lack the resources to adequately address the situation. It is frustrating to say the least.
