The Environmental Protection Agency is waiting for a nuclear fire to erupt at a St. Louis landfill, House lawmakers warned at a Wednesday energy committee hearing.
The EPA has “failed the people in the most heartless manner possible,” Rep. Ann Wagner, R-Mo., said in testifying before a panel focused on the agency’s cleanup activities at the site and other communities suffering from the nation’s nuclear weapons legacy.
Schools near the site conduct drills in preparation for the inevitability of the radioactive waste at the West Lake site in St. Louis catching fire, Wagner said. “This is happening. And it’s happening to the innocent children everyday in St. Louis,” she said. And it’s “caused by years of dereliction and inaction by the EPA,” she said.
The West Lake radioactive waste landfill, which has been designated a federal Superfund cleanup site, sits adjacent to the non-nuclear Bridgeton landfill that houses an underground fire that is spreading. The fire has been smoldering since 2010 and is moving toward the West Lake facility, according to reports.
The Energy and Commerce Committee’s environmental panel held the hearing Wednesday to examine if the EPA has been meeting its obligations under the 30-year-old cleanup laws known as the superfund or CERCLA, the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act of 1980.
The hearing took aim at the West Lake waste landfill, which is in the St. Louis metro area, with members of the Missouri delegation recommending legislation to rectify the problem.
“I want to paint a bleak picture,” Wagner said. “Moms and dads are watching their children suffer from health afflictions … [and] school districts are sending students home with notices of emergency procedures.” Wagner testified before the committee with her Democratic colleague, Rep. William Lacy Clay, who raised the same concerns about the EPA.
Wagner has sponsored legislation to replace the EPA with the Army Corps of Engineers as a more reliable partner in dealing with waste problems under the law.
Rep. John Shimkus, R-Ill., chairman of the environment panel, said the hearing was meant to look at whether the EPA was meeting its cleanup obligations and if changes were needed.
The EPA placed the West Lake facility on its national priority list in 1990, but it wasn’t until 2008 that a plan was developed, Wagner said. No remediation program to remove the waste has been put into place, as the underground fire adjacent to the landfill is nearing where the radioactive contaminants are being stored.
They said that the EPA’s plan was to leave the waste alone and cap the site, which Wagner called unacceptable to her community, along with a special EPA review board overseeing these types of cleanup projects.
Wagner said it wasn’t until “intense public backlash and sharp criticism from the EPA’s National Remedy Review Board” that the agency decided to undertake additional testing and study.
“In June of this year, another document prepared by the National Remedy Review Board in 2013 was released by the EPA stating that removing radioactive waste at the landfill was feasible and could reduce long-term risks, contradicting the EPA’s earlier decision to leave the waste in place and capping it,” she said.
“The fact that this document has not been available before last month shows the lack of transparency and accountability that the EPA has demonstrated throughout this entire process,” Wagner said. “Meanwhile, families suffer as the clock ticks, ticks, ticks away.”
An activist coalition formed by concerned parents, called Just Moms STL, has been pressing the EPA to take action since 2012, when strange smells began to eminate from the site. Just Moms STL warns that the site was not designed to handle radioactive waste, which can easily migrate from the site.
EPA assistant administrator Mathy Stanislaus testified that the agency’s remedial programs address “complex, high-priority, longer-term cleanups.” He said the “cleanups have positive impacts on the lives of millions of Americans in thousands of communities across the country.”
