Massachusetts Superfund Sites: Too Close and Too Toxic for Comfort
By Alexa Soares, Psychology, 2018
About 30 miles outside of Boston is the quiet town of Billerica, Massachusetts. On the surface, it seems like the perfect place to raise a family — it is home to many parks, playgrounds, and even a lake with a public beach. However, less than a mile from Billerica’s S. G. Haggar Elementary School is a dangerous plot of land that poses a serious threat to the health of the town’s residents. It is known as Iron Horse Park, an industrial complex home to wastewater lagoons, an asbestos landfill, and a host of chemicals that have contaminated the groundwater, surface water, and soil.
According to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Iron Horse Park was listed as a Superfund site in 1984, and still poses a health risk to anyone who comes in contact with the park’s water, soil, or sediments, which are contaminated with PCBs, asbestos, and a variety of heavy metals. A Superfund site is any abandoned hazardous waste site that the EPA has placed on the National Priorities List, designating it as a top priority for the organization to clean up. The EPA has been working since 1984 to decontaminate the site, but not enough progress has been made to make the area safe for those surrounding it.
The scary truth is that there are 31 sites just like Iron Horse Park scattered throughout Massachusetts. This puts Massachusetts in the top 20 states with the most Superfund sites, although Massachusetts is the seventh smallest state in the country. Part of the reason Massachusetts has so many Superfund sites is because of the state’s long industrial history. This state is home to the city of Lowell, the birthplace of the American Industrial Revolution. The state’s many industrial plants, although they bring in important revenue, have also released harmful contaminants, leading to Superfund sites all over the map.
The EPA estimates that it will cost over $1 billion to clean up all of the Massachusetts sites on the National Priorities List. The cost is the main factor holding back cleanup: parties responsible for the contamination are usually reluctant to pay, dragging the EPA into long legal battles that stall cleanup procedures. Although Iron Horse Park was designated as a Superfund site in 1984, the EPA did not reach a settlement for payment by the responsible parties until 2014. To make matters worse, the EPA lost its main source of funding in 1995, when a tax on the chemical and oil industries expired and was not reinstated by Congress. This tax generated around $1 billion for the EPA every year, but by the end of 2003, the balance was down to zero.
Federal regulations — like the Pollution Prevention Act of 1990, which made it national policy for pollution to be prevented at the source — have helped reduce the formation of new Superfund sites. However, the lack of funding may significantly reduce the EPA’s ability to enforce the new regulations. It is clear that prevention is more effective than post-contamination cleanup, but the EPA needs funding to accomplish this and make our communities safe to live in.