• ';460
&EPA JOURNAL
Environment and the Law
If
Chemical
Wastes
Exploding!
-------
Environment and the Law
The cover photo showing
the recent explosion of
chemical wastes at a
dump site in Elizabeth, New
Jersey, dramatically illustrates
the need for environmental
protection laws effectively
enforced. This issue of EPA
Journal focuses on the role of
the Agency and the States in
such enforcement.
EPA Administrator Douglas
M. Costle explains the
Agency's enforcement policy
and priorities. His overall
performance at EPA is assessed
in an article reprinted from the
Wall Street Journal.
Acting Assistant Administra-
tor for Enforcement, Jeffrey
Miller, discusses in an inter-
view how EPA carries out the
laws for which it is responsible.
Assistant Administrator for
Planning and Management
William Drayton, Jr., presents
an approach to environmental
law enforcement which relies
on economic principles.
The Agency's actions to deal
with the hazardous waste prob-
lem are outlined by Deputy
Administrator Barbara Blum.
The efforts to control hazardous
wastes in New Jersey, where
the problem is acute, are
explained by that State's top
enforcement officials.
The successful conclusion
of one of the Nation's most
important environmental cases
—Reserve Mining Company's
pollution of Lake Superior—is
reported by Truman Temple,
Associate Editor of EPA
Journal. An agreement to
greatly improve sewage treat-
ment in one of the Nation's
largest cities, Philadelphia, is
reviewed in another article.
EPA's Regional Offices present
examples of how enforcement
activities have corrected pollu-
tion ills in their jurisdictions.
The status of the drive to
clean up pollution from the auto
is explained. EPA's monitoring
program to insure that coal is
burned in compliance with
environmental standards is
outlined.
A report is presented on
activities on Earth Day '80, last
April 22, when observances in
cities and towns across the
country celebrated ten years of
progress in environmental laws
and cleanup and rekindled
dedication to the environmental
cause.
On the global scene, Qu
Geping, a top Chinese environ-
mental official, explains envir-
onmental laws and programs
in the People's Republic of
China, and progress in key
aspects of world environmental
law is detailed by Peter
Thacher, Deputy Executive
Director of the U.N. Environ-
ment Program. G
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United States
Environmental Protection
Agency
Office of
Public Awareness (A-107!
Washington DC 20460
Volume 6
Number 6
June 1980
xvEPA JOURNAL
Douglas M. Costle, Administrator
Joan Martin Nicholson, Director, Off ice of Public Awareness
Charles D. Pierce, Editor
Truman Temple, Associate Editor
John Heritage, Chris Perham, Assistant Editors
Articles
EPA is charged by Congress to
protect the Nation's land, air and
water systems. Under a mandate
of national environmental laws
focused on air and water quali-
tyv solid waste management and
the control of toxic substances,
pesticides, noise and radiation,
the Agency strives to formulate
and implement actions which
lead to a compatible balance be-
tween human activities and the
ability of natural systems to sup-
port and nurture life.
Enforcement and
the EPA
EPA Administrator Costle
reviews the Agency's enforce-
ment policy.
Reserve Mining
Ends Lake Dumping 4
A report by Truman Temple on
the end of a major source of
Lake Superior pollution,
Hazardous Waste
Action 7
EPA Deputy Administrator
Barbara Blum explains the
Agency's drive to control
hazardous wastes.
Earth Day '80 9
A rededication to the Nation's
environmental goals.
Cleaning Up
in Mew Jersey
10
A report by this State's Attorney
General and Deputy Attorney
General on hazardous waste
enforcement.
Carrying Out
the Law
An interview with Jeffrey
Miller, EPA's Acting Assistant
Administrator for Enforcement.
Enforcement at
the Grassroots
15
Ten pollution control settle-
ments around the country are
explained by EPA's Regional
Offices.
Auto Pollution:
The Remaining Job 22
A review of progress in curbing
auto fumes.
The Mew Philadelphia
Story 24
The encouraging news about
Philadelphia's sewage cleanup
agreement with EPA.
Economic
Law Enforcement
26
An approach to environmental
law enforcement is explained
by William Drayton, Jr., EPA
Assistant Administrator for
Planning and Management.
World Environmental
Law
Progress in environmental law
in areas beyond national juris-
diction is discussed by Peter
Thacher, Deputy Executive
Director of the U.N. Environ-
ment Program.
Douglas Costle's
Balancing Act
The Wall Street Journal
assesses the performance of
EPA's Administrator.
Controlling
Pollution in
China
Environmental programs are
highlighted by Qu Geping, a
top Chinese environmental
official.
Monitoring Coal 39
EPA's methods to measure
coal's.environmental com-
pliance are discussed by
Richard Wilson, Deputy
Assistant Administrator for
General Enforcement.
Front Cover: Fireball rises into the
night sky after explosion of chemical
storage drums at Chemical Control
Corp. in Elizabeth, N.J., on April 21 ,
the eve of Earth Day. (Article on
P 10)
Opposite: This is the explosion site
at Chemical Control as it looked on
July, 1979, when this photo was
taken by an EPA official, David L.
Cowles of the Environmental Re-
search Center in Cincinnati Many
of the most dangerous drums had
been removed by authorities before
the explosion occurred. (Article
on P. 10)
Departments
Around the Nation 30
Almanac 35
Update 36
38
News Briefs 40
Photo credits: Michael Nogron;
MikeZerby, Minneapolis
Tribune; Steve Delaney;
David L. Cowles; Homestake Gold
Mine; Hawaiian Sugar Planters'
Assn.; Ted Cowell. Black Star,
Fisher Body Division, General
Motors; Nick Karanikas; FT. Eyre,
U.S Coast Guard, Rollins Environ-
mental Services, Inc ; John
Alexandrowicz; The Embassy of the
People's Republic of China, Don
Emmerich
Design Credits Robert Flanagan,
Donna Kazaniwsky and Ron Fan.ih
The EPA Journal is published
monthly, with combined issues
July-August and November-Decem-
ber, by the US Environmental
Protection Agency Use of funds for
printing this periodical has been
approved by the Director of the
Office of Management and Budget
Views expressed by authors cio not
necessarily reflect EPA policy Con-
tributions and inquiries should be
addressed to the Editor (A-107).
Waterside Mai!. 401 M St , S W
Washington, D C 20460 No per-
mission necessary to reproduce
contents except copyrighted photos
and other materials Subscription
S1 2 00 a year, SI 20 for single
copy, domestic. Sib 00 if mailed to
a foreign address No charge to
employees Send check or money
order to Superintendent of Docu
merits. U S Government Printing
Office, Washington. D C 20402
Text printed on lerycleil |japei
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Environmentally Speaking
Enforcement
and the
EPA
By Douglas M. Costle
EPA Administrator
EPAJOURNAL
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The EPA's enforcement program is a
beginning, not an end. We prod
industry to seek innovative solutions
to legal requirements. We encourage
pollution cleanup measures that save
money and energy. We try to remove any
financial incentives to pollute so everyone
has the same stake in complying with the
law. Our objective is a clean environment,
not a busy courtroom.
However, our underlying strength is our
ability to back up our words with action.
We rely on voluntary compliance to a large
extent, but when necessary, we bring
formal enforcement actions—including
criminal proceedings on occasion—to
make sure that environmental require-
ments are met.
States have an important role in this too.
While a few statutes call for direct Federal
regulation, most are based on State
regulation with some Federal overview,
or on Federal regulation only until States
develop approvable programs for direct
regulation. EPA's policy is to encourage
and assist States to develop such pro-
grams, and to help States enforce these
programs once they are in place.
Firmness, fairness, and good judgment
are requirements for success in carrying
out enforcement's roles.
Firmness is the most obvious corner-
stone of enforcement behavior. It is best
translated into action by telling affected
parties in advance what is expected of
them, how their performance will be moni-
tored, what action can be expected if
performance is poor. Then EPA must be
consistent in following through.
While enforcement's objective is to
assure compliance with regulatory require-
ments, fairness must play a key role.
It means that the regulator's actions should
be reasonably predictable, and should be
appropriate to the situation.
Third, good judgment is essential for
effective enforcement. It requires fashion-
ing responses that will work.
EPA is determined to achieve a high
rate of compliance with environmental
rules. By the end of 1979, only 1,696
(6.2 percent) of 27,557 major air pollution
facilities were not in compliance with
regulations or on a schedule to meet them.
Similarly, only 243 (7 percent) of 3,662
major non-municipa! wastewater dis-
chargers were not in compliance with their
permit requirements or on a schedule to
meet them. Our progress with the steel
industry has been particularly significant.
We've certainly come a long way.
EPA has also adopted a civil penalty
policy that requires that settlements for
violations of the Clean Air and Clean
To test for radioactivity, an EPA official
collects a sediment sample from a phosphate
industry sett/ing pond in Florida.
Water Acts deprive a violator of the
economic benefit gamed by failure to
comply with statutory deadlines. In addi-
tion, penalties are added for recalcitrance
and environmental harm, when these are
appropriate. Penalties are either paid to
the U.S. Treasury or are offset, in whole or
in part, by expenditures for environmental
improvements above and beyond the
requirements of law.
We have numerous examples of the
success of this policy. Some of the major
penalty settlements we have reached
include one with United States Steel for
violations of the Clean Air and Clean
Water Acts at its Monongahela Valley
facilities. U.S. Steel agreed to a number
of major environmental improvement
projects not otherwise required by law
for which it received almost $23,000,000
in "credits" against the penalty which the
company owed. Many other steel com-
panies have also reached settlements with
EPA requiring either the payment of penal-
ties or the utilization of EPA's "credits"
provision in the penalty policy.
But enforcement is not litigation alone.
I see another role—one of attacking our
complex, intertwined environmental prob-
lems through coordination with other
EPA program offices. The problems of
managing hazardous waste, consolidating
our permit programs and requirements,
and controlling discharges from publicly-
owned wastewater treatment works
immediately spring to mind.
1. The consolidation of permit programs
has been designated as one of the
Agency's highest priorities, reflecting
the Administration's goal of regulatory
reform. Consolidated permit regulations
involving four different environmental
programs—air, water, hazardous waste,
and dredged or fill material—were promul-
gated in May, 1980. This consolidation is
expected to produce environmental
benefits through more comprehensive
management and control of wastes and
elimination of program gaps, overlaps, and
inconsistencies.
2. A majority of publicly-owned waste-
water treatment works have not complied
with the Clean Water Act's July 1, 1977,
treatment requirements and are contrib-
uting a substantial pollutant load into our
Nation's waters. Many of these facilities
are eligible for extensions of the time for
compliance until July 1, 1983. EPA's
National Municipal Policy and Strategy
coordinates construction grant funding,
water quality discharge permitting, and
Clean Water Act enforcement to assure
that qualified publicly-owned wastewater
treatment facilities receive extensions
with compliance schedules keyed to
construction grant schedules. It also seeks
to assure that grant funding is allocated
first to projects which require money to
comply with the Act. The strategy also lays
out the enforcement response required
for each category of non-compliance,
making it clear that rigorous enforcement
is intended where necessary.
3. In recent months the specter posed by
situations such as Love Canal and the
Kepone contamination of the James River
has heightened public, industrial, and
governmental awareness of the dangers
posed by our past practices in handling and
disposing of hazardous materials. One
price of our industrial growth has been the
creation of numerous time bombs from
these wastes.
In May of 1979, EPA set as its highest
priority the clean-up of hazardous waste
dump sites threatening the public health.
Although 5,000 potential hazardous
waste problem sites around the Nation
have been inventoried, the extent of the
risks posed is only beginning to be under-
stood. The sites may be abandoned,
inactive, or active. In addition, hazardous
wastes are sometimes disposed of in
unauthorized and potentially harmful
ways, such as "midnight dumping." When
fully implemented, the regulatory programs
under the Resource Conservation and
Recovery Act will deal with the majority
of concerns such as active disposal sites,
but not with some others, such as
abandoned or inactive site problems.
To fill existing gaps, EPA and the States
must take forceful and expeditious action
to remedy those situations which present
a substantial risk to public health and the
environment. We have and will continue to
use existing authorities under the Resource
Conservation and Recovery Act, the
Clean Water Act, the Toxic Substances
Control Act, the Refuse Act of 1899 and
common law, as well as existing State
authorities, to obtain the necessary relief.
Because the problem is so acute, the
Administration has also asked the
Congress to pass "Superfund" legislation,
which will provide money for cleanup of
spills and abandoned sites, as well as a
mechanism for recovering cleanup
costs from those responsible for the
problem.
As I said in the Nov./Dec. 1979 Journal,
the environmental movement is entering
its "golden" age. It has achieved maturity
at the expense, some might say, of head-
line grabbing and rabble rousing. The
rabble rousers have effectively done their
work—the environmental laws are
evidence of this. Their anger has been
expressed in law—the essence of environ-
mental protection. The burden of environ-
mental improvement has passed from the
rebels to the technicians. Our enforcement
activities reflect this movement, and these
activities are yielding the results we all
have hoped for. D
JUNE 1980
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.
-
-
t
Reserve
, .-^.
By Truman TSmple
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After some two and a half decades of
dumping asbestos-laden ore tailings
into Lake Superior, the Reserve
Mining Company has halted this discharge
into the lake and will be depositing it
inland.
The company's action came March 1 6 in
response to a Federal court order re-
quested by EPA and others, and was a
month ahead of the court deadline. It
ended the dumping of some 67,000 tons
daily into the lake over a period of nearly
25 years.
The shutdown of the discharge came
after what had been described as the long-
est and most expensive environmental trial
ever prosecuted by the Federal Government
(EPA Journal, January 1978). In his land-
mark decision ordering the plant closed at
the end of the first trial in 1974, U.S.
District Court Judge Miles Lord noted that
the case by then had included 139 days of
trial, more than 100 witnesses, more than
1,621 exhibits, and over 18,000 pages of
transcript.
"It had been clearly established in this
case," Judge Lord declared, "that Re-
serve's discharge creates a serious health
hazard to the people exposed to it." The
tailings contain asbestos particles of a type
suspected of causing cancer and
other serious ailments when ingested or
inhaled.
What now lies ahead is an on-land dis-
posal system to manage both coarse and
fine particles of the tailings so that they
will not endanger area residents. The sys-
tem is designed to prevent the particles
from travelling off-site either by air or
water.
Although Reserve Mining has been em-
broiled since 1969 in administrative or
legal battles over the dumping, the story
actually dates backto 1947 when Minne-
sota State agencies granted the company
permission to take some 1 30,000 gallons
per minute of Lake Superior water and dis-
charge it with taconite tailings in suspen-
sion back into the lake. Although the per-
mits at that time specified that this must
not result in any adverse effects on public
water supplies, it was not until many years
later that health experts were able to come
up with evidence convincing the court that
such a discharge constituted a potential
public health hazard.
Reserve Mining, which is jointly owned
by Armco Steel and Republic Steel Corpo-
ration, began its first full year of commer-
cial operations at Silver Bay, Minn, in
1 956, with permits amended to allow
260,000 gallons per minute to be dis-
Taconite tailings poured into Lake Superior
for 24 years from Reserve Mining Company.
The firm recently stopped the dumping.
charged into the lake. (Reserve built a
pilot plant at Babbitt, Minn, after getting
the go-ahead from the State in 1947, and
did not begin construction on the main
facility until 1951.) It was in 1969 that the
Department of the Interior reported that
fine tailings were not being carried to the
bottom of the lake as originally believed,
and that Reserve should be given three
years to study and construct on-land waste
disposal facilities. A Lake Superior En-
forcement Conference convened that year
by the Interior Department also determined
that the discharge potentially endangered
the health and welfare of persons in States
other than Minnesota.
In 1972, at the request of EPA, the Jus-
tice Department sued Reserve seeking
abatement of discharges into the lake.
A year later EPA announced that Duluth's
drinking water contained large quantities
of asbestos-like fibers believed to originate
from Reserve's discharges some 65 miles
away. The city began measures to distrib-
ute uncontaminated water and filtered
water to area residents, ultimately building
a filtration plant with Federal and State aid.
Although Judge Lord ordered the Re-
serve plant closed at the end of the first
trial in 1974, an appeals court allowed it
to resume operations a few hours later and
in 1977the Minnesota Supreme Court
ordered the State to give Reserve Mining
permits for on-land disposal. Subse-
quently a Federal judge set April 1 5,
1980 as the deadline for ending the dis-
charge into the lake. The company also was
ordered to stop emitting the fibers into the
air and to pay more than $1 million in fines
and penalties for violating pollution con-
trol laws. When Reserve halted the dump-
ing last March 1 6 it shut down the plant for
about seven weeks so that workers could
complete the on-land disposal system.
For the many EPA scientists, lawyers,
and water pollution specialists involved in
the case, the halt in the lake dumping was
a special moment in their careers.
"It was a once-in-a-lifetime assign-
ment," says Dr. Robert ZeHer, who headed
a Federal interagency task force working
for several years on the problem. "It was
an opportunity to do something important
for the Agency and come away feeling
you'd contributed significantly to a major
problem solution." Zeller, who now is a
senior policy advisor in EPA Region 10for
the Office of Water and Waste Manage-
ment, served as chairman of the inter-
agency group from 1975 to 1979 dealing
with the Reserve Mining problem.
"I had a total of 22 people on my task
force, from eight agencies, all actively pur-
suing it," he declared. Actually this was a
second assignment for him from 1975 to
1977, when his title was Director of
Municipal Operations and Training Divi-
sion at EPA Headquarters in the Office of
Water Program Operations. A sanitary en-
gineer who had served in the U.S. Public
Health Service before joining EPA, Zeller
recalls that the Reserve dumping issue
"began as a nuisance problem and a sus-
picion of something more. Then in 1973
when EPA confirmed the existence of
asbestos fibers in the water supplies at
Duluth, the implications of the problem
extended dramatically."
The solution of on-land disposal of the
tailings, reached after seemingly endless
litigation, is costing Reserve Mining some
$370 million. It has involved upwards of
2,500 workers to build the 5.8 square mile
basin and dams and related facilities five
miles inland from the lake's shore at Siiver
Bay. Coarse tailings now are being used as
a basic dam-building material, and even-
tually will be carried in rail cars to the
inland site, known as Milepost 7, and
dumped into the basin. Fine tailings will be
pumped in a water slurry in 24-inch-diam-
eter pipelines to the basin. Excess water
will be pumped back to the plant from the
basin in a closed-loop system. Eventually
the basin will be entirely covered with
water, a safety precaution to prevent
asbestos fibers from blowing into popu-
lated areas.
The disposal site is planned to accom-
modate taconite wastes for the next 40
years and is capable of holding 823 million
tons of tailings. The basin eventually will
look like an elongated lake surrounded by
hardwood and conifer trees.
In related projects, Reserve has installed
more than two dozen electrostatic precipita-
tors at its beneficiation plant in Silver Bay
to remove asbestos fibers from the plant's
air emissions. It also is building a rock wall
inland from a delta of tailings that extends
into the lake. The theory behind this is that
eventually the wall will sink into the lake
due to wave erosion of the delta, forming a
subsurface breakwater that will close off
the tailings delta, preventing fibers from
migrating any further. That, however, is
expected to take a long time.
In the aftermath of the case, research is
continuing on the whole subject of health
effects of asbestos fibers. EPA's Environ-
mental Research Laboratory at Duluth is
doing analyses of human, fish, and test ani-
mal tissues exposed to asbestos. Since the
Agency is concerned with mining wastes in
water and air throughout the Nation, scien-
tists are seeking more accurate ways to
detect health risks. The Minnesota Depart-
ment of Health, under a grant from the
JUNE 1980
-------
EPA Industrial Environmental Research
Laboratory in Cincinnati, also is doing stud-
ies of the population around Duluth to see
if the incidence of cancer has shown an
increase. Thus far, no increase has been
observed. The studies will continue for a
long time, however, since cancer can take
from 20 to 40 years to show up after initial
exposure to a carcinogen.
Several EPA employees have won
awards for their work in the Reserve Min-
ing case. Dr. Philip M. Cook, a research
chemist at the Agency's Duluth laboratory,
received the Scientific and Technological
Achievement Award this year for his find-
ings on the way asbestos fibers travel
through the human body. The research was
of vital importance in the Reserve case,
since a major problem was to determine if
mineral fibers in drinking water accumu-
lated in the body as inhaled fibers do.
Dr. Cook provided the first documentation
that mineral fibers do pass through the
gastrointestinal tract wall.
Gary S. Logsdon and James M. Symons,
two engineers with EPA's Municipal En-
vironmental Research Laboratory in Cin-
cinnati, also received the Scientific and
Technological Achievement Award for
successfully developing an economical
treatment method to remove asbestos
fibers from drinking water. The two men
determined what combination of coagu-
lants would give the best fiber removal for
the lowest cost and then developed a tech-
nique by which treatment processes could
be controlled. Their breakthroughs have
allowed many water treatment plants to
modify their practices to improve fiber
removal. Their work was a direct out-
growth of the problem of removing asbes-
tos fibers from Duluth drinking water,
which was pumped from Lake Superior.
A multi-million-dollar special filtration
plant completed in 1976 is now removing
99 percent or more of the asbestos fibers
from Duluth's drinking water, according to
scientists at the University of Minnesota
who monitor the plant under contract.
"It's working very efficiently—much better
than expected," declares David Markland,
a chemist with the university.
As a postscript to the years of litigation
spent by EPA on the Reserve case, there
was an unlooked-for event. Pamela Quinn,
a lawyer in the EPA General Counsel's
office, worked on the case from January,
1974 to November, 1978, one of the long-
est periods any attorney with the Agency
devoted to the struggle. When she went to
Minnesota in 1974 during the trial, she
met John Hills, a lawyer who was on the
Justice Department team trying the case
and who later served as senior legal ad-
visor to the Council on Environmental
Quality. Romance bloomed, and they were
married the following June. The couple
now live in Annapolis where he is in private
practice and she is on the Maryland
Attorney General's staff. D
Temple is Associate Editor of EPA Journal.
if a single private citizen stands out
in the public's efforts to save Lake
Superior from asbestos pollution, it is
a Potomac, Md., secretary named
Verna Mize.
Her battle to stop Reserve Mining
Co. from dumping tailings into the
lake began 13 years ago. A native of
Houghton County in the Upper Penin-
sula of Michigan, where Lake Supe-
rior borders the land on three sides,
she enjoyed its crystal-clear waters
as a child and liked to visit there for
vacations after she married.
In 1967 she came back to Wash-
ington from a vacation and was tell-
ing friends the lake was so clean you
could dip your cup over the side of a
boat and drink it.
"You drank that water?" a friend
aske'd. "Haven't you heard about
Reserve Mining?"
Verna didn't sleep well that night,
and the next day she phoned a Duluth
newspaper to ask if the stories were
true.
"They confirmed that Reserve was
dumping into the lake, so I started to
do something about it," she recalls.
"People said you can't fight city hall,
but I felt this dreadful outrage
couldn't go on without a battle."
Always using her own funds, with-
out a penny of support from any
group, Verna Mize began a long cam-
paign. Her battle cry was "Lake Su-
perior—Preserve It, Don't Reserve
It." She flew to Michigan to collect
Lady With A Mission
signatures on a "save the lake" peti-
tion, even signing up other passen-
gers on the plane. She persuaded the
Copper County (Mich.) Chamber of
Commerce of her cause. In response
to her appeal, the Chamber adopted a
resolution opposing the pollution of
the lake by taconite tailings from
Reserve Mining. "If the lake was
polluted, there went their tourist busi-
ness," she explains.
After carrying a stack of more
than 5,000 signatures on petitions
back to Washington, she attracted the
attention of the Detroit Free Press
and they published an article about
her campaign.
"It was a tidal wave of response,"
she relates. "It washed all over the
State of Michigan. It was one of the
most beautiful experiences of my
life."
Verna Mize quickly learned how to
operate in the thickets of environmen-
tal campaigns. She developed friends
everywhere—in Congress, in Federal
and State agencies, even a few in
Reserve Mining's town, Silver Bay.
One day her network warned that
officials of Armco Steel and Republic
Steei, the owners of Reserve Mining,
were on the Hill lobbying. She gath-
ered two bags of Lake Superior stones
from her collection, trudged down to
the Capitol, and left one with each
member of Congress involved with
the lake, with a note reminding them
of her need for their help.
"A few days later, six Senators
jointly wrote a letter to EPA saying,
in effect, 'Sue them,' " she says.
Verna Mize prodded, pleaded, and
nagged. She wrote Congressmen,
EPA officials, and newspapers. She
appeared on radio and TV interviews.
She was invited by Senator Philip A.
Hart to testify before his Subcommit-
tee on the Environment. Responding
to citizen protest, the Federal govern-
ment sued Reserve and won. And
after 13 years she saw Reserve Min-
ing last March finally stop dumping
its ore wastes into the lake.
Among her souvenirs of the cam-
paign: An autographed photo from
Senator Hart inscribed "Dear Verna,
You are proof positive that one person
can make a difference." Another from
Governor William G. Miiliken of
Michigan bears the message: "To
Verna Mize—The First Lady of Lake
Superior."
Verna Mize retired February 29
from her Civil Service job. Her plans
for the future: To write a book, at the
urging of friends, about the Save
Lake Superior campaign.
"My one regret," she reflects, "is
that my husband did not live to see
this victory. He bore the brunt of the
disruption to our family life and yet
encouraged and comforted me when
the going was rough. 'That lake is
worth it,' he would say." D
EPAJOURNAL
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Workman preparing drums of hazardous waste for reprocessing at the Silresim site in Lowell, Mass.
Hazardous
Waste Action
By Barbara Blum
EPA Deputy Administrator
For decades, toxic wastes from extrac-
tion and manufacturing processes have
been disposed of carelessly—often
simply dumped and forgotten in the open
fields, nearby ponds or streams, aban-
doned mineshafts and quarries, and
even residential backyards. Sometimes
waste disposal problems result from a
lack of foresight and a failure to consider
long-range effects. In other instances, they
grow out of a criminal disregard for public
safety and the environment.
The results of improper disposal of toxic
and hazardous wastes are now evident in
every part of the Nation. Public drinking
water supplies and irreplaceable aquifers
have been destroyed, surface waters have
been rendered unusable, fires and explo-
sions have threatened whole communities,
and the health of untold numbers of people
has been threatened by exposure to toxic
pollutants in the air and water.
To help protect against toxic by-
products, EPA has launched a major regu-
latory and enforcement drive, including
suits using EPA's 'imminent hazard" or
"emergency" provisions to force the
cleanup of the most dangerous hazardous
waste problems. I anticipate that 50 such
cases willbefiledbeforetheendof 1980.
The most widely recognized symbol of
the hazardous waste crisis is Love Cana!
in Niagara Falls, where an entire neighbor-
hood has been abandoned. There are, how-
ever, hundreds of other graphic examples
scattered across the country.
The issue of how to deal with our
legacy of dangerous waste disposal sites
and to prevent the development of new
"Love Canals" may be the most difficult
environmental challenge of the 1980's.
EPA has launched four interrelated efforts
to bring this problem under control:
1. Litigation under "Imminent Hazard''
provisions of existing EPA laws.
EPA and the Department of Justice have
begun a major effort to force judicially-
ordered clean-up of sites posing the
gravest health or environmental threats.
Primarily emphasizing injunctive relief,
this program seeks to halt dangerous
disposal practices and to force privately-
funded clean-up. This approach gets
results, of course, only where a responsible
party can be identified and has adequate
financial resources to carry some or all of
the clean-up costs.
2. A hazardous waste regulatory pro-
gram under the Resource Conservation
and Recovery Act.
Under this law, EPA is establishing a com-
prehensive "cradle-to-grave" program to
manage the handling of hazardous waste
from the point of initial production to
eventual safe disposal or destruction.
This program, which includes a "mani-
fest" system to track hazardous wastes to
JUNE 1980
-------
their destination and a "permit" program
to insure the wastes go to safe disposal
sites, is scheduled for fuli operation in
November, 1980. While this regulatory
program is intended to prevent the creation
of new hazardous wastes disposal
problems, it cannot eliminate problems
resulting from past or currently inadequate
disposal practices.
3. Emergency control of toxic chemicals
threatening navigable waters.
This program, based on Section 311 of the
Clean Water Act, provides an emergency
response capability for containment and
cleanup of 299 listed chemicals in situa-
tions which threaten navigable waters.
The approach is similar to that success-
fully used by EPA and the Coast Guard to
respond to oil spills. However, while Sec-
tion 311 cleanup authority is very useful, it
has clearly defined limits. Before authority
can be applied, navigable waters must be
threatened and the chemicals involved
must be among the 299 specifically listed
by regulation. Additionally, emergency
containment and cleanup may be statu-
torily limited to actions which stop short of
a full response to complex incidents of
chemical pollution.
4. A "Superfund" legislative proposal
to fill major gaps in dealing with haz-
ardous waste sites.
The Superfund would empower the Fed-
eral Government to take Immediate emer-
gency response and containment action at
hazardous waste disposal sites—and then
proceed against identifiable responsible
parties for recovery of funds expended.
Additionally, the fund—financed by a
combination of industry fees and Federal
appropriations—would allow the Federal
Government to move to clean up and con-
tain dangerous sites where Section 311
did not apply (such as a threatened aqui-
fer) and where no responsible or financially
viable party could be found and forced to
bear the cost.
The Newesj Approach
The basic emergency cleanup program
under Section 311 of the Clean Water Act
has been operational for some time, and
the hazardous waste regulatory program
and Superfund legislative proposal have
received wide publicity. The least known
and newest element of the EPA hazardous
waste response strategy is the increased
use of "imminent hazard" litigation.
EPA is bringing a wide array of statutes
and common law remedies to bear on haz-
ardous waste problems posing an immi-
nent danger. As of May 1980, 21 Federal
cases have been filed, and more than 100
additional sites were under investigation
for possible enforcement action.
Sections of the Resource Conservation
and Recovery Act, Safe Drinking Water
Act, Toxic Substances Control Act, Clean
Water Act, and Clean Air Act all authorize
EPA to ask the court for injunctive relief in
situations which pose threats to public
health or the environment. Section 309 of
the Clean Water Act levies a penalty of up
to $ 10,000 a day for unpermitted dis-
charges to navigable waters {a leaking
dump can be considered a discharge). The
1899 "Refuse Act" provides additional
penalties for unauthorized discharges or
dumping. Available common law remedies
include the common law of nuisance and
trespass, restitution, and "strict liability"
for damages caused by those who engaged
in ultra-hazardous activities. We are
aggressively using each of these legal tools
to address the hazardous waste disposal
problem.
The Agency—working with the Depart-
ment of Justice—has launched a top-
priority effort to pursue imminent hazard
cases. A Hazardous Waste Enforcement
Task Force has been established in EPA's
Office of Enforcement, and the Justice
Department has created a parallel Haz-
ardous Waste Section. The 30-person EPA
Headquarters Task Force is responsible
for working with the EPA Regional Offices
to develop the technical and legal aspects
of hazardous waste cases. Additionally,
the Task Force is charged with managing
several "national" cases that involve sig-
nificant legal precedents and that concern
multiple sites. Suits against Hooker Chem-
ical Company in New York and in Califor-
nia are one example. Justice Department
attorneys, of course, are responsible for
the actual litigation of hazardous waste
site cases.
To speed development of these cases,
EPA and Justice have adopted an innova-
tive set of procedures. Rather than follow-
ing the "sequential" case review process
common in other areas of EPA litigation,
our agency and Justice have developed a
case development process that is designed
to secure "up-front" agreement on the
technical and legal aspects of a potential
case. As soon as a site appears to have
enforcement potential. Task Force,
Regional, and Justice staff meet to hammer
out an agreement or the appropriate legal
theories and the required supporting
evidence. Our experience so far suggests
that this process moves cases through the
system faster than other approaches.
Obviously, in imminent hazard cases, time
is a critical element.
Another major element in developing
imminent hazard cases is establishment of
a system to identify potentially hazardous
waste disposal sites and to track the
status of those sites through the site
inspection, remedial, and enforcement
stages. The Hazardous Waste Enforcement
Task Force—working with the EPA
Regions—has developed a computerized
site tracking system to meet this need.
By June 1980, the system is scheduled to
be operational with terminals available in
the Regional Offices to support site cleanup
and enforcement activities. Preliminary
data from the system reveal more than
5,530 potential hazardous waste sites
already on regional investigation logs.
The number of sites to be investigated
is growing at an average of 200 per month.
EPA's ability to investigate and to ana-
lyze the complex chemical samples that
are gathered soon will be significantly
enhanced. One effort—a contract jointly
managed by the Oil and Special Materials
Control Division and the Office of Enforce-
ment—will provide 180 more site investi-
gators. Other contracts will expand our
capacity to do laboratory analysis.
One of the things that the imminent
hazard enforcement effort has demon-
strated thus far is that enforcement actions
can be effective in the short-term to reduce
or eliminate hazards. While complex cases
may take years to litigate fully, others have
prompted the court to issue temporary
orders and preliminary injunctions that
solve all or part of the problem. In still
other cases, legal action has led the
defendants to initiate immediate cleanup
actions.
While imminent hazard suits may in-
volve difficult burdens of proof—and can
provide no relief at all where the respon-
sible parties are unknown or insolvent—
they represent a significant part of the
overall EPA response to the hazardous
waste disposal problem. As I project the
future, imminent hazard cases will con-
tinue to play a significant environmental
role even after the implementation of
EPA's hazardous waste regulations and
the passage of Superfund.
People are frightened by Love Canal
and by the emergence of threatening
hazardous waste sites in their local com-
munities. They are demanding action—
and they are getting it.
EPA has established hazardous waste
enforcement, cleanup, and control as its
first priority. This sense of urgency also
is reflected in State programs and in the
efforts of concerned citizens and environ-
mental groups.
As our society moves to weed out the
"bad actors," however, it must not create
a climate of panic which equates all
waste disposal practices or sites with
unacceptable health and environmental
risks. Our "chemical society" will continue
to generate potentially dangerous wastes,
and our goal must be to manage them
safely. Within that framework, there is
no doubt that enforcement has a key role
to play. D
EPAJOURNAL
-------
Earth Day
'80
From a sunrise service at the
Jefferson Memorial in Wash-
ington, D.C. to observances
in a thousand cities and towns
across the land, Americans
recently celebrated Earth Day
'80, the 10th anniversary of
the Nation's environmental
awakening.
Earth Day ten years ago
"opened an era of progress in
fighting pollution, preserving
our natural resources, and
safeguarding public health,"
said EPA Deputy Administrator
Barbara Blum in Atlanta on
April 22, the day marking the
observance.
In Washington, D.C. Earth
Day '80 began with a sunrise
service at the Jefferson Memo-
rial, where environmental lead-
ers of today read selections
from environmentalists of the
past including Margaret Mead,
Henry David Thoreau, and E. F.
Schumacher, author of "Small
Is Beautiful."
Byron Kennard, chairperson
of Earth Day '80, said he also
wanted to pay tribute to those
who staged the first Earth Day
a decade ago.
Later, in Lafayette Park in
front of the White House, more
than 3,000 bicycle-riding com-
muters converged to hear Den-
nis Christopher, star of the
Oscar-winning bicycle movie
"Breaking Away," say that he
had attended the first Earth
Day in 1970 and believes the
way to save energy is to "just
keep pedaling and turning off
the lights."
EPA Assistant Administrator
William Drayton, Jr., told the
group, "Bicycle commuting
makes very good economic and
energy as well as environ-
mental and health sense. So
does the commitment to
environmental cleanup this and
the last Earth Day signal and
Award to EPA for greatest
participation in Washington,
D, C,, Earth Day bike-in is re-
ceived by William Drayton, Jr.
Heft), EPA Assistant Adminis-
trator, from Dennis Christopher,
star of the bicycle movie,
"Breaking Away. "
have helped make possible. For
every job lost because of
environmental costs, the
cleanup has created 16 new
jobs. Nor is environmental
regulation inflationary: People
are now getting a much better
mix of goods, services, and
safety from their economy than
they did before. The idea that
the regulation that is thus
giving us more value for our
money is inflationary is at least
a little odd. As individual
bicycle commuters joined
together today and in the future
we're making sense—and a big
difference."
Drayton received a special
award for EPA—the Agency
with the most employees par-
ticipating in the Earth Day '80
bike-in.
Thousands of people later in
the day examined environmen-
tal exhibits on the Mai! in front
of the Smithsonian Institution;
attended films and seminars,
and listened to speakers pro-
claim the need to contribute to
the environmental fight. Most
were tourists.
Elsewhere in the Nation
there were festivals and other
observances. In New York, 10
blocks of Sixth Avenue were
cordoned off for a street fair.
In New London, Conn., a wind-
mill on top of the Connecticut
College library was christened.
In Illinois, volunteers collected
trash along 90 miles of highway
between Champaign and
Springfield.
Many of the activities mir-
rored events of the first Earth
Day, when thousands of Amer-
ican picked up trash along road-
sides, waded into polluted
rivers to cart out garbage, and
participated in environmental
teach-ins.
This year, hike, bike and
jog-to-work rallies and solar
home tours were added to
demonstrate pollution-free aids
to solving the energy crunch.
For the most part, Earth Day
'80 was intended to be quieter
than the activist days of a
decade ago, both to reflect the
changing times and to show
more broad-based community
involvement.
Instead of protest rallies,
more small seminars were be-
ing held on topics ranging from
acid rain to toxic chemicals.
"This is a different time and a
different level of activism,"
said Mike McCabe, Executive
Director of Earth Day '80, "We
specifically focused on more
community-based events
because we felt they would be
more useful."
While the first Earth Day was
mostly a one-day event, many
cities this year launched their
activities over the weekend to
make it a week-long affair.
Various environmental lead-
ers summarized the meaning of
Earth Day. Perhaps its biggest
impact has been in the con-
sciousness of the voting public,
several believed. Bill Butler,
general counsel of the Environ-
mental Defense Fund, drew an
analogy with an earlier move-
ment: "As the civil rights move-
ment of the 1960's heightened
the consciousness of the pop-
ulation at large so that in the
1970's civil rights considera-
tions automatically became
part of social decision-making,
so in the 1980's environmental
quality will be an automatic
factor in the society's public
decision-making. That, I think
was the major contribution of
the environmental movement
inthe 1970's."
Douglas Costle, EPA Admin-
istrator agreed. "Ten years ago
there were only a handful of
adults in this country who knew
what the word 'ecology' meant.
Today every schoolchild is
taught ecology. Environmental
protection is becoming a per-
manent part of our political
value system."
Galdwin Hill, former na-
tional environmental corre-
spondent of the New York
Times, had this comment in a
column in theTimes: "Because
'environment' is not some
absolute stage of grace but an
infinite series of choices on how
we alter our natural heritage,
the quest for environmental
quality is not a cause that can
ever be counted as 'won,' so
that everybody can sit back and
forget it. But it is a cause that
cannot be lost, given reason-
ably wise choices. One way or
another the effort will continue.
The record of 10 years shows
plainly that the crystallization
of public concern evinced in
Earth Day 1970 was a bell that
cannot be unrung." D
JUNE 1980
-------
Cleaning Up
in New Jersey
By John J. Degnan
and Steven A. Tasher
Kite.
fights /;/,//f in iti/nhcth, N.J., where drums of chemicals exploded at waste dump
Explosions find fire ripped through the
dump site of the Chemical Control Corp.
April 2 T, the eve of Earth Dny, in Elizabeth,
N.J., sending drums of flaming chemicals
flying through the night sky and spewing
black smoke over a 15-mi/e radius. Fire-
men in gas musks battled the blaze for
hours. The background of the Chemical
Control hazardous waste disposal case is
one of those reviewed in the following
article.—Ed. Note.
The New Jersey Department of Environ-
mental Protection has estimated that ap-
proximately 1 5,000 firms in the State, in-
cluding many of the Nation's largest manu-
facturers of chemical and petrochemical
products, generate potentially hazardous
waste materials. During 1977, these firms
produced in excess of 1.2 billion gallons of
liquid chemical waste and 350,000 tons of
semi-solid chemical sludges. Andthere is
no indication that this production has
abated.
The problem of improper disposal of
hazardous wastes is particularly acute in
New Jersey because of its dense popula-
tion, the highly industrialized nature of its
economy and its position along the north-
east transportation corridor.. Furthermore,
the State has a relatively rainy climate and
a topography rich with rivers, lakes and
wetlands, all of which make it practically
impossible to safely store wastes in the
ground. EPA estimates that in New Jersey
mo re than 100 old abandoned landfills may
exist that pose threats similar to those
posed by Love Canal. This danger has made
the State particularly sensitive to the efforts
to solve this problem.
The magnitude and severity of illegal
toxic waste disposal in New Jersey came
to light as the result of investigations
undertaken by our office and the United
States Attorney's Office. During the course
of these investigations, it became apparent
that the collection, transportation and dis-
posal of toxic wastes, as well as the opera-
tion of dump sites, are integral parts of an
illicit industry which reaps big profits. This
bootleg disposal industry is made up of
intricate networks of small, single-function
companies operating under the protection
of large parent corporations.
The difficulties in legitimate waste dis-
posal lead to the potential for abuse. Toxic
liquid waste may be mixed with non-toxic
solid waste and unlawfully buried at land-
fill sites. At some dumps, liquid chemical
wastes are emptied into pools and ditches
and subsequently leak into adjacent ground
or surface water. "Midnight" dumping of
hazardous wastes under cover of darkness
into municipal sewer systems or directly
into waterways is another common method
of disposal.
Perhaps the most imminently dangerous
situation we have uncovered in New Jersey
is the practice of accumulating toxic
wastes in "transfer" stations. Transfer
stations are warehouses or industrial lots
where drums of toxic liquids are stored
pending disposal. Their existence allows
collectors, who are often connected to
those who own both the transfer station and
the landfill, to circumvent the State's mani-
fest system which is supposed to record
the movement of liquid hazardous wastes
from "cradle to grave." The transfer sta-
tion, purported to be a treatment facility,
records the receipt of the waste indicating
that it has been recycled or incinerated
when, in fact, the waste is stored awaiting
quick burial in a landfill.
Since recognizing the problems created
by improper disposal of toxic wastes, New
Jersey has mounted an extremely aggres-
sive enforcement effort to protect its citi-
zens and their environment. The Economic
Crime Section of the Division of Criminal
Justice has secured indictments against
individuals and corporations as the result
of toxic waste investigations. These de-
fendants have been prosecuted for creating
and maintaining a common law public
nuisance, for violating the New Jersey
EPA JOURNAL
-------
Water Pollution Control Act of 1977, for
collecting solid waste water without the
required Certificate of Public Convenience
and Necessity, and for conspiring to com-
mit these illegal activities.
Within the Economic Crime Section
there has-been established a Toxic Waste
Investigations and Prosecution Unit. The
small staff of this unit has developed
sophisticated investigative techniques nec-
essary for the effective prosecution of toxic
waste violators. Aerial and photographic
surveillance have proved invaluable in
toxic waste investigations. The unit has
also established a central intelligence sys-
tem for Federal, State and local agencies
concerned with toxic wastes.
Civil prosecution has also proven to be
an important enforcement tool. Litigators
from the Division of Law have aggressively
advocated the State's interest in a series of
nationally recognized cases. Two examples
illustrate the problems and benefits asso-
ciated with these prosecutions.
Chemical Control is the owner and oper-
ator of a chemical waste disposal facility
located on a two-acre site in Elizabeth.
Nerw Jersey. The operation was conducted
in such a manner that drummed wastes
were collected at a rate that far exceeded
the company's desire or ability to dispose
of them. When our office first became aware
of the situation it was estimated that be-
tween 30,000 and 50,000 55-gallon drums
of waste had accumulated on the site.
Many of the drums were decaying and their
contents were leaking on to the ground
and into the nearby Elizabeth River. There
was also the constant danger that the
drums might explode or burn, releasing
noxious and potentially lethal fumes over
a populated area.
The State instituted legal action against
the corporations and individuals respon-
sible for the operation of the facility, alleg-
ing that it was operating in violation of
several State statutes. After a series of
proceedings, including the imposition of a
temporary restraining order closing the
facility, the court held in favor of the State,
concluding that the site constituted a seri-
ous threat to the public health and welfare.
In an unprecedented action which has at-
tracted the attention of Attorneys General
and environmental enforcement officers
throughout the country, the judge barred
management from operation of the facility,
appointed a receiver to oversee the opera-
tion and cleanup the site, and froze the
assets of the cooperation involved.
The chemicals are being removed from
the Chemical Control site through a series
of cooperative efforts. Generators who
have already paid once for disposal are
removing their own waste from the site.
The State Spill Compensation Fund, which
was established by the Legislature to deal
with discharges of hazardous substances
into the waters of the State, has paid for
stabilization and some immediate cleanup.
Federal, State and local officials have con-
tributed as have representatives of the
chemical industry. Nevertheless, funding
the cleanup (which may still cost millions
of dollars) will remain a problem since
indications are that defendants' assets are
not nearly enough to cover cleanup costs.
A similar case arose at the A to Z Chem-
ical Company in New Brunswick, New
Jersey. At that facility, four to seven thou-
sand drums of toxic and flammable wastes
were leaking and stored haphazardly
throughout the site. The State obtained an
Order to Show Cause with temporary
restraints requiring the owners and opera-
tors to safely remove the waste. When they
failed to do so, the court ejected manage-
ment, appointed a joint receiver (an engi-
neering firm and an attorney) and froze all
corporate assets.
These cases underscore several prob-
lems associated with regulation and pros-
ecution of typical members of the indus-
try. Owners and operators often shield
their activities behind a corporate veil and, •
in some cases, the bankruptcy laws. While
extensive litigation may eventually provide
sufficient funds to clean the site, the en-
forcing agency may be responsible for im-
mediate cleanup costs. And in most cases
initial costs for site inspection, monitoring,
and a comprehensive cleanup plan will be
borne by the State with little hope for ulti-
mate recoupment. In New Jersey these
funds may be provided by the State SpiiS
Compensation Fund.
At the heart of the problem is the un-
availability of safe and accessible disposal
sites. The huge expense of responsible
disposal, due in part to a lack of proper
facilities, makes illegal disposal extremely
lucrative. At the same time, the absence of
appropriate disposal sites is a frequently
asserted defense and judges may be reluc-
tant to impose penalties if they perceive
that the defendant has no choice.
These situations illustrate the strong
need for remedial legislation and a
stepped-up enforcement effort. Toward
that end. Governor Brendan Byrne has
announced a comprehensive four-part pro-
gram aimed at coping with the problems of
illicit disposal of hazardous wastes.
First, the plan created a strike force
composed of members from the various
divisions of the Department of Law and
Public Safety including the Attorney Gen-
eral's Office and the State Police, as well
as other Federal, State and local agencies.
The strike force, established by an EPA
grant of $500,000 matched by $110,000 in
State funds, has enabled the various agen-
cies to expand their cooperative efforts to
detect, investigate and prosecute violators,
to develop improved civil and administra-
tive remedies for the mishandling of toxic
wastes, and to work toward the develop-
ment of a clean, efficient and economic
system of disposal. It is the first such pro-
gram funded by EPA and is expected to
serve as a valuable model for the rest of
the country.
Second, based on the position that the
generators of toxic wastes should bear the
cost of the spill, the State has amended its
Spill Compensation and Control Act to
create a cleanup fund for abandoned dump
sites and mismanaged disposal areas. The
fund is financed through the imposition of
a fee on toxic waste generators based upon
their production. The system guarantees
the availability of cleanup funds despite the
financial condition of the violator. The Act
also imposes treble damages upon un-
cooperative violators.
Third, the State has amended its Solid
Waste Management Act to impose stiff
fines and jail sentences for those convicted
of illegal disposal. In New Jersey, a prison
term of up to five years and a fine of
$25,000 per day may be assessed in such
instances.
Finally, the Governor appointed a spe-
cial advisory committee representing gov-
ernment, industry and environmental inter-
ests, to study the development of regional
hazardous waste treatment and disposal
facilities to meet the State's industrial
commitment. That report, which has re-
cently been promulgated, is presently
under review in the Governor's office.
One unfortunate consequence of New
Jersey's comprehensive enforcement and
legislative efforts has been an increase in
the illegal dumping of hazardous wastes in
our sister states. States in the Northeast
region which lack comprehensive environ-
mental laws and trained investigators have
become magnets or natural targets for
those who illegally dispose of toxic wastes.
As a result, the States of the Northeast
region have grouped together to share in-
formation on legislation and enforcement
techniques and to exchange technical
assistance on methods of solving the
problem.
New Jersey has long since recognized
the dangers created by the improper dis-
posal of toxic wastes and has implemented
innovative legal remedies, both civil and
criminal. In addition, the State has acted
responsibly to examine and solve the core
question of developing scientifically appro-
priate systems on the proper disposal of
hazardous wastes. We recognize, however,
that the ultimate solution is regional in
scope and requires the cooperation of the
States and the Federal government. Q
Degnan is Attorney General of New Jersey
and Tasher is Deputy A ttorney General.
JUNE 1980
11
-------
Carrying
Out the
Law
Q
An Interview with
Jeffrey Miller
Acting Assistant
Administrator for
Enforcement
Could you tell us how
much was collected in penal-
ties last year as a result of
EPA enforcement action ?
/~\ Penalties assessed in con-
sent decrees or court orders
surpassed $30 million last year,
a substantial increase over pre-
vious years. In many consent
decrees, the penalties are offset
by expenditures for environ-
mentally beneficial projects:
environmental controls above
and beyond those presently re-
quired by law, specifically de-
signed research projects, etc.
Our policy in these court ac-
tions is to extract penalties that
remove the economic benefit
that polluting sources have de-
rived from delayed investments
of capital to install, operate,
and maintain pollution controls,
investments that would have
been made had the controls
been installed in a timely man-
ner. In addition, of course, mil-
lions of dollars have been as-
sessed in administrative penal-
ties under Acts incorporating
such provisions.
V ) Are the courts sym-
pathetic in environmental
enforcement cases?
/~\ We have a very high sun-
cess rate in court. Judges are
sensitive to environmental
problems. They breathe the air
and drink the water and read
the newspapers and I think they
are very responsive to our
problems.
Q
What about criminal
charges? Is this something
that you emphasize as an
important tool ?
A
Yes. The appeal of crimi-
nal prosecutions in a regulatory
program is that they encourage
individuals to carry out their
regulatory responsibilities far
more effectively than a civil ac-
tion against a corporation
would. In a civil action a corpo-
ration may have to pay a fine
and be put on a court-ordered
schedule to comply with what-
ever requirement is being vio-
lated. With a criminal action
individuals in that corporation
stand a chance of paying fines
themselves or going to jail. As
this happens to environmental
managers around the country
others very quickly feel the
heat. This reinforces their com-
mitment to carry out the respon-
sibilities within their own
corporation.
Over the last few years we
have significantly increased the
number of cases that we refer to
the Justice Department for
criminal action. Back in 1975
I think we only had four or five
such referrals and last year we
had 23. I expect this is one area
in which we'll seek continued
growth.
V J How about the rate of
prosecution where environ-
mental laws are being vio-
lated—is it increasing ?
r\ We have had about 1,200
referrals to the Justice Depart-
ment for civil and criminal ac-
tions during the life of the
Agency. Two thirds of those
have been in the last three
years. I mentioned earlier that
the rate of criminal referrals has
increased greatly over the last
4 or 5 years. Court actions,
however, are not the whole
story. Much of the enforcement
that we do is administrative and
the assessment of the adminis-
trative penalties and the issu-
ance of administrative orders
has greatly increased over the
last several years. The amount
of enforcement activity is on
the increase, and will continue
to increase. We are primarily
limited by the number of people
that we have working in the
area.
Q
How is industry accept-
ing EPA's enforcement role
compared to 10 years ago?
f~\ I see two main reactions
by industry to environmental
requirements. First, industry is
increasingly resistant to the es-
tablishment of new require-
ments: lobbying hard in Con-
gress against new legislation
and litigating in court almost all
new regulations and standards.
On the other hand, most corpo-
rations are good citizens and
make every effort to comply
with environmental require-
ments once they are estab-
lished. Most large corporations
have sizable and competent
environmental staffs and many
have internal compliance audit-
ing programs. As a result, over
90 percent of major industrial
sources have installed required
air and water pollution control
equipment.
Q
Public interest groups
are sometimes challenging
EPA's actions in court. Is this
resulting in better laws and
better enforcement?
A
Most of the suits by public
interest groups have involved
standard-setting rather than
enforcement. Typically, their
aim is to force the Agency to
accelerate its schedule for pro-
mulgating standards, or to ad-
dress problems it has neg-
lected. Many of those suits
have been successful. For in-
stance, the whole Prevention of
Significant Deterioration pro-
gram under the Clean Air Act
resulted from a suit initiated by
the Sierra Club. The Agency's
strategy to address toxic water
pollutants from industrial
sources resulted from a suit by
the Natural Resources Defense
Council. So some of these suits
have significantly shaped cur-
rent environmental programs.
Although few public interest
groups have filed enforcement
suits, some have been very suc-
cessful. For instance, Rivers
Unlimited, an environmental
group in Ohio, filed suit to force
EPA to revoke its approval of
Ohio's permit and enforcement
program for water quality. The
settlement of that suit resulted
in a great improvement in the
Ohio program including an in-
crease in the resources being
devoted to it. Other examples
are the suits filed by the Natural
Resources Defense Council and
the State of Alabama against
TVA for violations of Clean Air
Act requirements. EPA inter-
vened as plaintiff in the cases.
The settlement of the cases,
which has been entered in the
Federal district court in Ala-
bama but is still pending before
the Federal district court in
12
EPA JOURNAL
-------
Tennessee, establishes sched-
ules to meet air pollution re-
quirements for all of TVA's
power plants. TVA's plants are
such significant air pollution
sources that their cleanup will
result in a decrease of about 15
percent of sulfur oxides emitted
from all electric utilities in the
southeast.
I have been surprised that
there haven't been more citi-
zen suits in the enforcement
area.
v ) What have been the
most significant achieve-
ments in EPA's enforcement
effort?
A
You see the biggest
achievements in the more ma-
ture programs, especially in the
air and the water programs. We
have achieved a better than 90
percent rate of compliance by
major industrial sources with
basic Clean Air and Clean
Water Act requirements. This
generally high level compliance
is yielding a number of environ-
mental improvements—we
have only a handful of non-
attainment areas now for sulfur
oxides in air, and particulate
levels in air are down greatly.
Many river segments polluted
mainly by industrial sources are
much cleaner now. In Maine, for
instance, where the rivers were
polluted primarily by wastes
from pulp and paper mills, the
Atlantic salmon are being seen
for the first time in thirty or
forty years. That kind of thing is
happening around the country.
Particular enforcement ac-
tions can result in dramatic lo-
cal improvements. For instance,
the settlement of an EPA suit
against U.S. Steel in Pittsburgh
will result in about a 50 percent
reduction in particulates in the
air over the Pittsburgh area.
I think the environmental im-
provements we are observing
nationally a re produced by the
generally high level of com-
pliance that we have achieved.
v J Are there many major
gaps in EPA's environmental
enforcement authority?
f~\ There are significant gaps.
One is in the hazardous waste
area. The Resource Conserva-
tion and Recovery Act will help
prevent future Love Canals by
controlling hazardous wastes
from cradle to grave. But the
Act does not address existing
Love Canals. All we have now to
deal with existing hazardous
waste dumps is a patchwork of
emergency authorities and a
very small remedial fund under
Section 311 of the Clean Water
Act. These authorities are not
nearly sufficient to do the entire
job. That is the reason that we
need legislation to set up a
"superfund" to give us the
money to immediately clean up
hazardous waste sites where
necessary, and to give us more
effective judicial remedies
against the people who are re-
sponsible for the hazards in the
•first place. The Administration
is working with the Congress to
develop such legislation.
The second main area is our
inability under the Clean Air Act
to get at the problem of acid
rain.The CleanAirAct primar-
ily addresses health-related
problems from sources in a
particular area. Acid rain is
generally not a health problem,
and it results to a significant
degree from air pollutants trans-
ported far away from the area
in which they were generated.
The whole structure of the
Clean Air Act is such that it
just doesn't correct these kinds
of problems. I suspect that we
will see some new authorities
placed in the law to deal with
acid rain in 1981 when Con-
gress reviews the Clean Air Act
again.
Q
Will regulatory reform
make it easier to obtain com-
pliance with environmental
cleanup regulations? The
bubble concept, for example,
which permits a trade-off of
pollution sources inside a
plant if overall cleanup
standards are met?
A
In the short term, reforms
like the bubble concept may be
somewhat disruptive because
they force changes in the way
we address problems. They are
complicated and they have to
be assimilated.
In the longer range, as we be-
come able to deal with new reg-
ulatory approaches on a more
routine basis, their promise of
encouraging compliance and
making it easier will be fulfilled.
For instance, the whole idea of
the Bubble Concept is that by
experimentation and innovation
an industry can achieve envi-
ronmental objectives in a
cheaper and easier way. Obvi-
ously, if it can do so, the indus-
try will be less resistant to mov-
ing forward and complying.
Also to the extent that internal-
ly-developed innovation is used
by a company as a means of
compliance, the company has a
psychological stake in its suc-
cess. Further, when innovations
resulting from something like
the Bubble Concept produce
cheaper ways of compliance,
these innovations might be
applied elsewhere.
v ) Are cumbersome legal
proceedings making it hard to
obtain quick, effective
environmental actions?
A
For routine kinds of prob-
lems the very best mechanism
is an administrative penalty.
We have that in a number of
areas. Under Section 311 of the
Clean Water Act, for instance,
we may assess administrative
penalties for oil and hazardous
material spills and for failure to
have spill prevention, contain-
ment, and control plans. We
have administrative penalties
for violations of the Toxic Sub-
stances Control Act and the
Federal Insecticide, Fungicide
and Rodenticide Act. A similar
provision is Section 1 20 of the
Clean Air Act which establishes
penalties for violations by
major sources, although the
mechanism is somewhat cum-
bersome. In general, these are
fairly quick, precise, clean
remedies.
Court cases do take a long
time. They can last for years.
The Reserve Mining case lasted
for many years, but it did
succeed in ending the deposit-
ing of taconite tailings into Lake
Superior. That result could not
have been achieved in any other
way. More routine court cases
obviously don't last that long,
but nevertheless they do take
time. On the other hand, there
is really no substitute for the
injunctive relief that you can
get from a court and there's
certainly no substitute for the
effect that a criminal case has
on the industrial community.
So despite the fact that court
actions are resource intensive
and will take a long time, they
are essential.
Q
Do you see environmen-
tal mediation as a major tool
in settling environmental dif-
ferences that might otherwise
wind up in court?
A
Yes—but not so much in
the enforcement area. In en-
forcement you are talking about
a rather specific legal require-
ment and you either meet it or
you don't, so there's not too
much to mediate. Where I see
it being used is in broader, more
complicated legal areas, for in-
stance to resolve the local ob-
jections on the siting of a new
industrial plant. Mediation may
even be useful in the standard-
setting area but I don't see it as
being widely used in enforce-
ment.
Q
Do you encourage inno-
vations in settling enforce-
ment cases such as environ-
mental protection trust funds
set up with penalty monies?
A
Yes, We are constantly
looking for better ways to get
our job done and, using the
powers of the courts, there is a
lot of room for innovation.
I think the environmental
trust fund idea emerged in the
Allied Chemical case, where the
company partly offset a penalty
which had been assessed by the
court by establishing a trust
fund for environmental
improvement.
We have picked up that idea
and we've used it in several
large cases, including settle-
ments with the cities of Phila-
delphia and Los Angeles and
with several steel companies.
The device enables us to take
money from environmental pol-
lution fines that would other-
wise be lost in general revenue
JUNE 1980
13
-------
funds and use it to make
specific environmental
improvements.
We have also begun to use
receivers or special masters in
judicial actions where a violator
has historically been unable to
manage the particular project at
issue. For example, in our suit
against the City of Detroit, one
of the main problems was that
the cost sharing contracts that
Detroit had with the outlying
communities for processing
their wastes were outdated and
did not generate enough reve-
nue for Detroit to move forward
with secondary treatment. The
court appointed a special mas-
ter who updated all of those
agreements to produce suffi-
cient revenues. This was an
effective solution.
A third area of innovation is
the whole hazardous waste en-
forcement program in the l.ove
Canal case and other similar
situations. We are using emer-
gency and common law authori-
ties that two or three years ago
we would not have dreamed of
applying on a wide-spread
basis. We've done a lot of legal
thinking and innovation to es-
tablish a program of judicial
actions in areas where we have
not yet received specific statu-
tory authority.
What parts do EPA and
the Department of Justice
play in working together in
environmental enforcement
cases?
A
The Department of Justice
is EPA's lawyer in court and we
have a memorandum of under-
standing with Justice as to how
we work together. Under that
agreement EPA is a full partici-
pant in legal proceedings and
our lawyers can appear in court
alongside the Department of
Justice attorneys. We work pri-
marily with the Land and Nat-
ural Resources Division in the
Department of Justice, particu-
larly with the Pollution Control
Section which handles most of
our cases, and with the new
Hazardous Waste Section which
handles our hazardous wastes
initiatives. In addition we are
beginning to work with the
Criminal Division of the Depart-
ment on some of our criminal
referrals.
I / How does EPA work
togetherwith the States?
The environmental laws
that we administer have a de-
cided Federalist bent to them
and envision States carrying out
the bulk of environmental con-
trol and enforcement. Our
efforts are to encourage States
to assume a large enforcement
rule and to give them assistance
in doing so. Many States are
very aggressive in this area.
The State of Wisconsin, for
instance, took all of the major
water source violators into
State court and did so very suc-
cessfully. Some States aren't
quite as enthusiastic in the en-
forcement area and our role is
proportionately greater. But we
see an increasing willingness
on the part of the States to
maintain a prominent enforce-
ment profile and we are trying
to encourage that.
Every region has a single
contact for new source permits
and coordination of permit writ-
ing activities in the Regions.
We are working with other
agencies, such as the Depart-
ment of the Interior, to con-
solidate permits for coal min-
ing and other operations where
both agencies have jurisdiction.
We hope to provide consis-
tency and reduce overlaps and
duplication of work by industry
as well as by States and EPA—
a process that will produce ad-
ditional benefits for the environ-
ment.
Q
What is the status of
EPA's permits consolidation
initiative?
A
Our efforts to streamline
the permit process have pro-
duced some specific accom-
plishments. First, regulations to
consolidate the procedures gov-
erning five of EPA's permit pro-
grams should be in the Federal
Register by the time this Jour-
nal is published. The regula-
tions provide a common set of
procedures for these programs
within the limitations set by the
different laws. The new permit
application form has one part
requesting general information
needed by all programs and
subparts with questions specific
to each program.
The regulations also enable
States which have been granted
permit authority to consoli-
date their programs, if they
want to. Discussions have been
held regarding State experi-
ences with consolidated per-
mitting as well as State interest
in adopting a consolidated
procedure. There are provisions
for joint Federal/State actions
(public notices, hearings, etc.)
where both a State and EPA
have permit authority over a
particular facility.
Q
How does surveillance
and analysis fit into the EPA
enforcement program?
A
The Surveillance and
Analysts Divisions in our re-
gional offices are the enforce-
ment shock troops. They are the
inspectors that detect violations
and find a reason for them.
Without good professional Sur-
veillance and Analysis Divi-
sions there would be very little
enforcement.
Q
What is the overall role
of the Office of Enforcement?
A
Obviously, our role is to
enforce the law. But the proc-
ess is much more complicated
than that—the private sector,
the Congress, the States, and
EPA all work together to under-
stand environmental problems,
and to produce a fabric of en-
vironmental laws and regula-
tions to deal with them. State
environmental agencies and
EPA's regional offices work to-
gether to spot and correct vio-
lations of these environmental
requirements. The Office of
Enforcement simply makes sure
that the job gets done.
Q
What are the biggest
enforcement tasks before
EPA now?
A
Our biggest challenge is
absorbing the increasing en-
forcement workload resulting
from all of EPA's new programs
without a commensurate
increase in money and people.
Our tasks are much greater
than they were five years ago.
We have new laws to enforce,
including the Toxic Substances
Control Act and the Resource
Conservation and Recovery
Act. We've also created a
special enforcement task force
to clean up existing hazardous
waste sites. Even under the
older acts, the Clean Air and
Water Acts, our enforcement
responsibilities have greatly
increased. Each time EPA
establishes a new standard or
requirement there is an in-
crease in the enforcement
workload, and our resources
have not grown to match. This
presents us with a great chal-
lenge to devise new and more
efficient ways to do our work
and to establish strict and
sometimes painful priorities.
There are also a number of
more specific areas which will
present a great challenge over
the next few years. One is
obviously the effort to address
the worst hazardous waste
problems—the Love Canals of
the world—and, related to that,
setting up workable systems to
enforce the forthcoming
Resource Conservation and
Recovery Act regulations.
Another challenge is to im-
plement Section 120 of the
Clean Air Act. This involves as-
sessing administrative penal-
ties against hundreds of major
air polluters that are in violation
of Clean Air Act requirements,
penalties calculated to take
away the economic benefit the
polluting sources derived from
delaying compliance.
Bringing major publicly-
owned treatment works into
compliance with water pollution
requirements is also a major
challenge, especially since the
low compliance rate for this
segment of sources is connect-
ed to some extent with the fail-
ure of the Federal government
to provide the necessary con-
struction grant funds to get
those facilities built on time.
Also, our mop-up enforce-
ment operations against major
steel and electric companies,
primarily in the air pollution
area, present significant
challenges. D
This interview was conducted by
John Heritage, Assistant Editor
of EPA Journal.
14
EPAJOURNAL
-------
at the
Grassr
*he success of environmen-
tal enforcement depends
on action at the grass-
roots. It is in the communities
and rural areas that goods are
produced and consumed; ve-
hicles sold, maintained, and
fueled; wastes generated and
disposed of. The fate of clean-
up laws depends on whether
they are upheld or violated in
these localities, as the country
goes about its daily business.
Because EPA's regional of-
fices operate at the grassroots,
they do most of the Agency's
enforcement work—the surveil-
lance and analysis, courtroom
support, follow-up to insure
compliance. Working with the
States, they handle most of the
cases—an industry exceeding
a pollution limit, illegal dump-
ing of hazardous wastes, a gas
station pumping leaded fuel
into an unleaded car.
in the report that follows,
each of the 10 EPA regional
offices explains a case in which
it has been involved. The cases
range from leaky oil pipelines to
tainted drinking water. The out-
comes often aren't just fines and
cleanup directives. Innovations,
energy savings, and better co-
operation between discharger
and regulator frequently result.
These profiles of enforce-
ment cases were prepared by
the offices of public awareness,
information and enforcement
in the EPA Regions.
JUNE 1980
15
-------
Saving
Energy
Officials of EPA and the Brown
Company, a Berlin, New Hamp-
shire pulp and paper-making
concern, reached an agreement
which resulted in protection of
air quality, collection of a sub-
stantial civil penalty, and which
allowed the company to burn
more economical higher sulfur
fuel.
In 1978, EPA's New England
Regional Office sought legal
action against the Brown Com-
pany for violations of the Clean
Air Act. The company was
burning fuel oil containing more
than the 1.0 percent sulfur
limit established by the New
Hampshire State implementa-
tion plan for achieving air qual-
ity standards.
Brown's boilers burned ap-
proximately 50.4 million gal-
lons of sulfur-containing fuel
annually, making Brown the
single largest source of sulfur
dioxide pollution in Berlin. Air
quality monitors recorded vio-
lations of primary (health pro-
tecting) air quality standards
for both sulfur dioxide and
suspended particulate matter.
Thus EPA referred the case
to the Department of Justice. In
response, Brown proposed a
plan which would halt the air
quality standards violations
without requiring the use of
low sulfur fuel. After 1 6 months
of negotiations, EPA, the State
of New Hampshire, and the
Brown Company entered into a
consent agreement in which
Brown agreed to an exten-
sive air pollution abate-
ment program which was ex-
pected to solve air pollution
problems in the Metropolitan
Berlin area while permitting
Brown to use 2.2 percent sulfur
fuel. The cleanup plan, which
cost the company an estimated
twelve million dollars, included
construction of taller smoke-
stacks to better disperse air
pollutants, installation of addi-
tional air pollution control
equipment, and construction of
a new combination wood
waste/oil power boiler.
The Brown Company also
agreed to pay a $66,000 pen-
alty for violating Federal air
pollution regulations. Twenty
thousand dollars of the pen-
alty imposed on the Com-
pany was allocated to the New
Hampshire Air Resources
Agency to monitor Brown's
compliance with the terms of
the decree.
The new boiler will replace
two existing oil-fired power
boilers resulting in a saving of
about 11 million gallons of oil
a year. In addition, the combi-
nation boiler will solve a solid
waste problem by disposing of
large amounts of bark which
are generated by the pulp and
paper-making process. The new
boiler will also avert water pol-
lution problems resulting from
breakdown of the bark and
leaching of the products into
drinking water supplies in the
area.
The construction of the new
boiler is subject to Prevention
of Significant Deterioration
Regulations which are designed
to protect clean air areas. EPA
found that the construction and
operation of the new boiler
would not violate PSD regula-
tions or Federal ambient air
quality standards and issued
Brown Company a PSD permit.
The permit allowed the com-
pany to begin construction of
the new boiler and to move for-
ward with its environmental
cleanup program, to be com-
pleted by December, 1981. An
expanded ambient air pollution
monitoring system will be
maintained by the company for
twelve months after completion
of the project to demonstrate
that clean air standards are
being attained in Berlin.
William R.Adams, EPA Re-
gional Administrator, noted,
"This agreement is a very satis-
factory one, resulting in sub-
stantial environmental benefits
—not only in terms of air qual-
ity, but also water quality and
solid waste management—as
well as energy savings. I believe
that this case is an excellent
example of how government
and business can work together
to develop solutions which sat-
isfy our energy and economic
needs while protecting the en-
vironment and the public
health."
Waste
Controls
A precedent-setting consent
agreement was reached last
March regarding the incinera-
tion of hazardous waste mate-
rials. The agreement, arranged
by EPA's Region 2, is with
Rollins Environmental Services,
Inc. of Bridgeport, New Jersey.
Rollins Environmental Serv-
ices is a waste disposal facility
which began operation in 1970.
Wastes are treated and dis-
posed through physical, chemi-
cal, and biological methods, as
well as incineration. In 1977,
EPA issued a Notice of Viola-
tion charging that the Rollins
incinerator was not being oper-
ated in accordance with air
pollution laws. In November,
1978, EPA and the Company
entered into a Consent Order to
correct those violations. A final
consent agreement resulted
from charges that during 1979
the incinerator was not consis-
tently operated within the tem-
perature limits of that Order.
Charles Warren, Region 2
administrator, indicated that
the Rollins agreement is ex-
pected to become a national
model for controlling the oper-
ation of hazardous waste facili-
ties. The action, taken under
the Clean Air Act, anticipates
the regulations now being de-
veloped by EPA under the Re-
source Conservation and Re-
covery Act. The agreement
imposes not only penalties
for past violations, but it
also sets forth strict operating
limits for the incinerator to en-
sure that chemical wastes are
thoroughly destroyed with no
adverse impact on the environ-
ment. In addition, stiff financial
penalties are triggered auto-
matically should the limits be
violated, precluding delays if
EPA had to go through the
courts.
The consent agreement ful-
fills part of a public commit-
ment made last year by EPA and
the New Jersey Department of
Environmental Protection to
correct past operating viola-
tions at the Roll ins facility and
to conduct a thorough environ-
mental assessment of the in-
stallation. The assessment is
now underway, directed by the
New Jersey department, which
is also pursuing the correction
of other operating deficiencies.
Hazardous waste incinerator owned by Rol/ins Environmental Serv-
ices. Inc. in Bridgeport, N.J.
16
EPAJOURNAL
-------
Warren pointed out that the
consent agreement was worked
out with the full cooperation of
Rollins itself. "All levels of gov-
ernment and the industries that
generated and dispose of haz-
ardous waste must recognize
that the public simply will not
accept disposal facilities unless
they are constructed, operated
and maintained with a proper
regard for human health and the
environment," Warren said.
"This agreement represents
the kind of close control that
will have to be imposed if we
are to achieve this public
confidence."
Warren also cited the regula-
tions now being developed by
EPA under the Resource Con-
servation and Recovery Act,
and the many initiatives already
undertaken by New Jersey to
control hazardous wastes.
Rollins was fined a penalty of
$65,000 for the violations. It is
also-required to follow strict
operating conditions when in-
cinerating priority wastes.
Priority wastes are defined as
any concentrations over one
percent of the waste aggregate
of the following: benzene,
cyclohexane, dimethyl tereph-
thalate, ethylene amine, 1,4
dioxane, polycyclic aromatics,
aromatic amines, halogenated
hydrocarbons, cyano-wastes
(both organic and inorganic),
herbicides, and pesticides.
The wastes must be inciner-
ated only at temperatures of
1750°F and higher for specified
durations.
These operating conditions
are designed to ensure com-
plete, safe destruction of the
wastes. The agreement also
required the company to install
a complex system of sensors on
the waste stream feed, record-
ers and strip charts, automatic
shut-offs and alarms to ensure
operating conditions are met.
In addition, monthly reports and
analyses, including recording
charts, must be sent to EPA.
Should the company violate
any of the specified operating
conditions, penalties ranging
from $1,500 for a minor viola-
tion to $25,000 for a full day's
violation will be automatically
imposed without the need for
further legal actions, in an-
nouncing the action, Warren
emphasized that proper hazard-
ous waste disposal remains a
major problem to be worked out
at all levels of government.
"If we wish to avoid hazardous
waste disasters such as Love
Canal, Chemical Control Com-
pany, or the midnight dumpers,
we must have well-planned,
safely operated disposal sites
that will be acceptable to the
public."
Reducing
Oil Spills
Eureka Pipeline Company oper-
ates an extensive petroleum
pipeline system in West Virgin-
ia which for many years has
been the leading source of oil
spills in the state. For example,
as recently as last year, Eureka
was responsible for over 50 per-
cent of all reported oil spills in
the state.
EPA has been trying to find
a way to get Eureka to take
some positive action to reduce
spillage. Although a 1972
agreement between EPA and
Eureka had resulted in a sub-
stantial decrease in the amount
of oil spilled, the reduction
seemed to be a result of the
company removing over half of
its lines from service. The num-
ber of individual spills re-
mained the same, as did the
volume of oil spilled per mile of
pipe in operation.
In April 1978, the EPA
Region 3 staff in Philadelphia
became aware of what ap-
peared to be a clear criminal
violation of the Clean Water
Act on the part of Eureka: fail-
ure to report an oil spill to EPA.
Spill reports to State authorities
are routinely forwarded to the
EPA and are usually checked
against reports filed directly
with the Agency. One set of
Eureka spil! reports forwarded
to EPA by West Virginia did not
appear in the Agency's records.
Further checks revealed that
a large number of spills report-
ed to the State by Eureka had
not been reported to the EPA.
In addition, the number of spills
reported by Eureka to the EPA
had dropped suddenly in 1977
and 1978 when 19 and 25 spills
respectively had been reported.
In comparison, for the period
1972 through 1976, Eureka had
reported an average of 94 spills
per year.
EPA legal staff felt the mat-
ter was serious enough to take
enforcement action. A case was
prepared and referred through
the Department of Justice to the
U.S. Attorney in the Southern
District of West Virginia in
January 1979.
When the U.S. Attorney con-
fronted Eureka with the facts of
the case, the company readily
admitted its guilt. However, it
claimed that the non-reporting
was not deliberate. A new em-
ployee had not understood that
the spills had to be reported to
both the State and EPA.
Through negotiations,
Eureka finally agreed to plead
guilty to 1 5 counts of failure to
report. The incidents occurred
in August and September 1977.
In return for the guilty plea,
EPA would not press enforce-
ment action on any of the other
non-reporting incidents that
occurred up to June 1979.
The case was formally filed
in court in June, 1979, and
Eureka pleaded guilty before
U.S. District Judge John T.
Copenhaver, Jr. on August 7,
1979.
Judge Copenhaver issued a
judgment and order on Sep-
tember 27. He fined Eureka
$25,000 for five of 1 5 counts.
The fines were paid into the
Federal government's oil spill
cleanup fund. Eureka was also
placed on probation for four
years on the other 1 0 counts.
The terms of the probation re-
quire that company to reduce
the total volume of oil spilled
during each of the next four
years. In 1980, spills must be
reduced to 2,600 barrels, down
from the 3,200 barrels spilled
in 1979. Spills must also be
reduced to 2,000 barrels in
1981; 1,500 barrels in 1982;
and 1,000 barrels in 1983.
Should Eureka fail to live up
to the terms of the probation, it
could be subject to additional
fines of $100,000.
Cleaning
the Air
An EPA criminal suit filed
against Allied Chemical Com-
pany of Ashland, Ky., resulted
in a maximum fine of $925,000.
The step also led to the first
installation in the United States
of the Minister-Stein advanced
technology air pollution con-
trol system.
The criminal action against
Allied Chemical was fifed after
a long history of non-compli-
ance with Kentucky air emis-
sions standards. The action,
filed on June 9, 1976, was
based upon Allied's violations
of an EPA Administrative
Order designed to bring the
facility's coke batteries into
compliance with applicable
particulate emission standards.
Allied had consented to the
terms of the order in February,
1975.
In October, 1976, Allied
pleaded nolo contendere to the
criminal charges. Of the penalty
assessed by the court,
$125,000 was to be paid im-
mediately and the remainder
was to be paid for each sixty-
day increment that the facility
was not in substantial compli-
ance with the terms of the EPA
Administrative Order. Allied
was ordered to pay $100,000
for violations during the first
increment, after which the court
amended the sentence, ordering
Allied to pay the remaining
$700,000, if substantial com-
pliance with the Order had not
been attained after approx-
imately one year.
Under the pressures of the
EPA Region 4 criminal action.
Allied Chemical began a pro-
gram to reduce emissions. The
company agreed to meet both
the terms of the Administrative
Order for its existing battery of
coke ovens and, for a battery
which was reconstructed, the
emission rates for new sources
being built in areas of non-
attainment.
The effort to achieve compli-
ance included the installation
of the Minister-Stein system for
air pollution control on the
reconstructed battery. The
capital costs of the renovation
program exceeded $15 million.
JUNE 1980
17
-------
(The Minister-Stein system is
used to control air pollution
emissions that result from push-
ing coke out of a coke oven
into a railroad car.)
Four years after the initiation
of the criminal proceedings
against Allied, the facility is in
compliance with the Adminis-
trative Order except for emis-
sions on one battery. Allied is
currently installing the Minister-
Stein control system on its
existing battery to provide addi-
tional controls in an effort to
achieve full compliance with
the order and the Kentucky
emission standards.
Because of its good faith
effort to achieve compliance
with the court order, Allied has
not had to pay any of the addi-
tional $700,000 in penalties.
More importantly, the firm
made positive steps toward full
compliance and the develop-
ment of a "model" facility. The
installation of the Minister-
Stein system has created a
great deal of interest in the
industry and Allied has hosted
a large number of visitors from
the industry and government
agencies.
Innovating
to Comply
One of the world's largest auto-
makers has developed a new
technology to control air pollu-
tion at six of its plants in Ohio,
in response to Region 5 EPA
and State of Ohio enforcement
actions. Savings to the company
at one plant alone are expected
to exceed $1 million over what
would have to be spent to reach
compliance by more costly,
available technologies.
In late 1979 Region 5 and
General Motors Corporation
(GM) announced an agreement
in which GM would be given
time to install new, cost-saving
technology that will reduce
paniculate pollution from
smokestacks at six of its Ohio
Assembly plants. The order was
final in February 1980; the
agreement ended a long-stand-
ing environmental dispute and
augurs well for that technology
to be adopted by other manu-
facturing installations with
coal-fired boilers.
Filters inside sheet metal housing catch emissions of particles from coal-fired boilers at General Motors
plant in Warren. Mich.
With this cooperative effort,
GM benefits: It is saving an
estimated S7.8 million over
what it would spend in order to
reach compliance by other,
more costly means. The envi-
ronment benefits: It is estimated
that particulate pollution at the
six plants will be reduced from
previous levels of more than
550 tons per year to less than
200 tons per year with the new
technology.
As a bonus, other companies
that utilize or convert to coal-
burning boilers will also benefit:
GM is testing out its new sys-
tem and is making available
engineering data to other com-
panies interested in finding
ways to burn coal more eco-
nomically and in an environ-
mentally sound manner.
GM's difficulties in meeting
Ohio's stringent particulate
standards became known to
EPA in the mid-1970's, after
the company had applied to the
State for permits allowing vari-
ances from the State's Imple-
mentation Plan (SIP) for seven
of its plants with coal-fired
boilers. The Region 5 Enforce-
ment Division requested emis-
sions data from the plants, and
engineers' analyses indicated
that two of the facilities were in
violation of State standards.
In October, 1976, Region 5
issued a Notice of Violation of
the SIP particulate standard to
GM's New Departure Hyatt
Bearings Division in Sandusky
for alleged emissions of more
than twice the allowable rate in
tons per year. Company repre-
sentatives met with Region 5
representatives in November
andagain in July, 1977. GM
representatives stated that the
company disagreed that a viola-
tion of Ohio regulations exist-
ed, and that GM requested a
hearing before the director of
the Ohio EPA to challenge his
proposed denial of a variance
forthe company. The State
denied that variance.
In April 1977, Region 5 is-
sued a Notice of Violation of
the Ohio particulate standard to
GM's Packard Electric Div/ision
in Warren. At this facility emis-
sions were also alleged to be
approximately twice the allow-
18
EPA JOURNAL
-------
able limits in tons per year.
Company and EPA representa-
tives met the following month;
the same points were raised by
GM, and the two notices of
violation and their appeals
were joined in one legal case.
Although no Notices of Viola-
tion were issued to GM's Fisher
Body Division installations in
Columbus, Elyria, Mansfield,
and Hamilton, Region 5 and GM
agreed to include the plants in
settlement discussions. To-
gether the four plants were"
alleged to emit more than 300
tons per year of particulates;
1 47 tons per year are allowable
under Ohio's regulations.
In November, 1978, GM
applied to EPA for an Innova-
tive Technology Order as pro-
vided for in the Clean Air Act.
Such an order allows a plant up
to five years to comply with
emission standards if certain
conditions are met. Among
these conditions is that the in-
novative technology achieve
greater continuous emission
reduction—or the same con-
tinuous reduction at lower cost
in terms of energy, economic or
environmental impact other
than air quality—than would be
possible with available
technology.
GM requested an Innovative
Technology Order so that it
could install a new system to
reduce paniculate emissions at
1 5 boilers at the six plants.
The system, called a side
stream separator, is a modifica-
tion of an existing industrial
pollution control device for
filtering particulates out of
boiler exhaust gases before they
reach the stack. GM's Fisher
Body Division spearheaded
development of the side stream
separator; its engineers were
reported to have worked for
more than a year with suppliers
to develop the system.
In that system, exhaust gases
and particulates from plant
boilers are directed through a
series of vertical tubes inside
conventional mechanical dust
collectors. As many as 80 of the
tubes, each about six feet long
and six inches in diameter, are
clustered in each collector.
Small steel vanes, or diverters,
on the tubes direct the air so
that it "whirls" like a cyclone
inside the tubes, which causes
the larger particulates to fall
into a collection bin.
Most of the remaining par-
ticulates are captured on small
filter bags that are hung in a
collection chamber next to the
mechanical collector. This soot
is sucked onto the filters
through "side stream" exhaust
ducts attached to the main
collector.
After a thorough investiga-
tion of all relevant facts, includ-
ing public comment, EPA set a
1 5-step schedule that will bring
the six plants into compliance
with Ohio's regulations for par-
ticulates by July 1 981. The
company submits quarterly
reports of its progress toward
compliance for each of the
plants' side stream separator
systems. At the conclusion of
the quarter just past, all plants
were proceeding on schedule.
A Chemical
Bomb
Near the small town of Reserve,
Louisiana, EPA found a chem-
ical time bomb waiting to ex-
plode. The fact that it didn't go
off is a testimony to the coordi-
nated efforts of EPA employees.
In 1979, International Gas-
ohol thought it had found a per-
fect site for its new home in an
abandoned chemical plant
which had once been operated
by Southeastern Chemical.
When Southeastern ceased
production of a pesticide chem-
ical, it walked away and left
things exactly as they were.
There were hundreds of
metal and cardboard drums
scattered over the site and in
the buildings. Most of these
drums contained chemical
wastes, unused materials, and
unsold products. There were
more than two dozen large stor-
age tanks left on the site. Some
of these tanks still contained
highly corrosive acids. No one
who was left in the area knew
how deadly these acids and
wastes were. And, as the years
passed, nature was slowly but
surely wearing away the out-
side of the containers. At the
same time the contents of the
containers were slowly eating
through the confining walls.
Chlorosulfonic acid in one tank
was able to make small breach-
es in the walls and began to
slowly escape as a thin white
vapor trail.
International Gasohol be-
lieved that the site needed some
cleanup and they hired a com-
pany to identify the materials in
the tanks. But still no one was
aware of the danger of the site
and how close it was to being
an exploding bomb.
It wasn't until January 29,
1980 when an EPA inspector
reviewed the site as part of a
routine investigation of hazard-
ous waste locations, that the
imminent threat began to be
recognized. When a toxicologist
reviewed the inspector's report,
he noted the potential for acids
and sodium cyanide to mix and
produce deadly hydrogen cya-
nide. The EPA inspector found
cyanide in two mislabeled bar-
rels and there was acid vapor
in the air. He was also quite
disturbed over the fuming
chlorosulfonic acid tank.
EPA Region 6 Enforcement
and Surveillance and Analysis
Divisions worked on the
sampling plans and the Hazard-
ous Waste Task Force and
Department of Justice were
informed when more tests con-
clusively proved the danger.
On March 5, 1 980, suit was
filed in Court in New Orleans
against Southeastern Chemical
and 2001 Inc., the present
owners of the site. A motion for
a Temporary Restraining Order
and Preliminary Injunction was
also filed and a hearing was
held on that day. EPA employ-
ees testified as to the hazard-
ous condition of the site. It was
simply a matter of luck that a
disaster had not already oc-
curred. EPA also testified that
if enough water were to get in
the tank that was leaking chlo-
rosulfonic vapor, there would
be an explosion.
At the hearing the Louisiana
Department of Natural
Resources intervened in the
action with the consent of all
parties.
On March 6, the court
ordered the defendants to
immediately remove the cya-
nide and the acids in the
storage tanks and to conduct a
study to identify the wastes
that were once drummed in
order to properly dispose of
them.
The cyanide has been re-
moved and properly disposed
of. While other acids were
in the process of being
removed, there was a small
explosion in the chlorosulfonic
tank which blew a vapor cloud
about 100 feet into the air, but
the tank did notbfow up and
no one was hurt. Removal of
the other acids has been de-
layed until the chlorosulfonic
can be removed safely. Inter-
national Gasohol is currently
negotiating for possible pur-
chase of the site.
Legal
Precedents
Two important legal precedents
were established in Region 7's
enforcement of Missouri's
sulfur dioxide standards against
Union Electric Company in
St. Louis, Mo.
In 1972, Missouri Governor
Kit Bond submitted to EPA an
implementation plan which con-
tained State emission regula-
tions designed to ensure attain-
ment and maintenance of the
national standards for sulfur
dioxide. (These regulations
limited sulfur dioxide from the
Union Electric Power Plants
located in the St. Louis metro-
politan area to 2.3 pounds per
million BTU heat input.) The
Administrator approved Mis-
souri's plan and thus the state
emission regulations became
enforceable by EPA under the
Clean Air Act.
Based on a finding that sulfur
dioxide emissions from Union
Electric's Labadie, Sioux, and
Meremae Power plants were
exceeding the limit, EPA issued
a Notice of Violation to Union
Electric on May 31, 1974. On
Augusts, 1974, Union Electric
filed a petition in the Eighth
Circuit Court of Appeals chal-
lenging EPA's approval and
authority to enforce the state's
sulfur dioxide limit on grounds
that it was neither technologi-
cally nor economically feasible
to comply and that such a re-
quirement was more stringent
JUNE 1980
-------
than necessary to insure attain-
ment and maintenance of the
national standard.
The court dismissed Union
Electric's petition saying it was
without jurisdiction to consider
the claims raised by the com-
pany in its petition. This deci-
sion was unanimously affirmed
by the U ,S. Supreme Court in
July 1976.
This finding established the
important legal precedent that
the States may submit emission
regulations more stringent than
necessary to meet national air
quality standards and EPA can-
not consider the technological
or economic feasibility of
achieving such regulations
when determining their approv-
ability. The Supreme Court in-
structed the company that it
should seek any necessary
relief from the State of
Missouri.
Following the Supreme Court
decision, Union Electric peti-
tioned the Missouri Air Conser-
vation Commission in Septem-
ber, 1976, for a relaxation of
the sulfur dioxide emission
limitation or a variance to allow
its individual power plants to
continue to operate with exces-
sive sulfur dioxide emissions.
When these issues were not
resolved at the State level, the
Region 7 Administrator issued
a second Notice of Violation to
Union Electric Company on
January 13, 1978.
Union Electric Company then
sought a stay in Federal Court
-------
tions of the Clean Water Act.
Subsequently, the second con-
sent decree was worked out
which settled the enforcement
action, setting out new dead-
lines and stipulating a penalty.
Commenting on the second
consent decree, Roger Wil-
liams, EPA's Regional Admin-
istrator in Denver, said that he
feels "the company, State and
EPA have found an acceptable
solution to a long and continu-
ous problem at Lead which is
not only acceptable to the par-
ties but one which will have
positive environmental benefits.
EPA is encouraged by the pre-
sent commitment of Homestake
to protecting water quality. In
this case, we have certainly
come a long way since the early
days of mining when streams
were thought of simply as
vehicles for disposal of
wastes."
Sugar
Cases
Final settlement is expected
soon in Region 9 enforcement
actions taken against two of
Hawaii's largest and most
prominent sugar companies.
The firms are the Honokaa
and Laupahoehoe Sugar com-
panies. The EPA civil actions
began early in 1975.
The actions arose out of the
firms' inability to comply with
Hawaii's particulate and visible
emission regulations. Violations
were caused by the burning of
trash and bagasse, wastes
which remain after sugar cane
is harvested and the raw sugar
has been removed from the
cane.
The sugar cane waste is
burned in boilers, thereby dis-
posing of the waste and also
serving as a source of fuel
utilized in generating power for
the sugar company. This burn-
ing process is the source of
particulate and visible emis-
sions. The task of part icuiate
control and the more difficult
problem of meeting visible
emission limitations are para-
mount concerns in the sugar
industry's struggle for compli-
ance with Hawaii's stringent air
pollution regulations.
Results obtained from Region
9 efforts to improve air quality
and increase energy self-suffici-
ency are believed to be among
the best in the sugar industry.
Both companies have installed
substantial controls with com-
bined costs approaching $2
million. One has also installed
a new high efficiency boiler.
Settlement of the civil actions
included the payment of
$32,800 in civil penalties for
past violations.
Subsequent to the filing of
EPA's actions, the companies
merged and the single unit now
operating under a new name
has further plans. A plant to be
constructed soon will pre-dry
and pelletize the wastes former-
ly burned without any type of
pretreatment. The pelletizec
wastes will be stored and later
used as fuel to generate elec-
tricity to be used by the com-
Suc/ar cane harvest in Hawaii.
pany and to provide extra elec-
tricity to be sold to the Hawaii-
an Electric Company. This pel-
ietizing process will not only
further contribute to better air
quality but will also promote
energy self-sufficiency.
Protecting
Drinking Water
In one of the first decisions of
its kind anywhere in the coun-
try, a Federal court last year
ordered a community water
supplier in Oregon to correct
the conditions that in 1978 con-
tributed to the outbreak of gas-
trointestinal disorders among
more than 1 70 persons in the
small coastal town of
Neskowin.
The order, issued in May,
1979, in U.S. District Court in
Portland, applied provisions of
the Safe Drinking Water Act of
1974 that allows the EPA to
seek injunctive relief in situa-
tions where drinking water
standards and other require-
ments of the statute are being
violated.
The case against the Nesko-
win water system rested on
EPA's allegations of dozens of
violations of the Safe Drinking
Water Act. The violations were
discovered by EPA's Northwest
regional personnel from Port-
land and Seattle. The violations,
discovered as early as July,
1977, and continuing until the
judge issued his order,
included:
• violations of bacteriological
standards.
• violations of requirements
that call for water suppliers to
take drinking water samples,
analyze the samples, and reg-
ufarly report the results to EPA.
• violations of national drinking
water standards for turbidity.
• failure of the Neskowin water
system to notify its customers
of the standards violations.
After repeated attempts by
EPA to obtain satisfactory cor-
rective action were unsuccess-
ful, the matter was referred by
EPA to the Department of Jus-
tice. A complaint was filed in
U.S. District Court in Portland
where it was successfully
argued by Assistant U .S.
Attorney Thomas C. Lee.
Under the terms of the court
order, Neskowin Enterprises
Inc., the privately owned firm
that operates the drinking water
system, was directed to begin
immediately to make improve-
ments in the facilities that pro-
vide water to its customers.
Although the Neskowin sys-
tem was small, it served thou-
sands of vacationers who an-
nually visited the town to stay
in its lodges and eat in its res-
taurants, all of which were
served with water from Nesko-
win Enterprises Inc.
Despite the court ruling,
Neskowin Enterprises failed to
comply with the order and two
months later—in July 1 979—
the company was held by the
court to be in willful contempt
of the Court's prior order.
The contempt order was not
the end of the case.
Because of the obvious lack of
diligence on the part of Nesko-
win Enterprises in taking the
remedial action ordered by the
court, EPA incurred extraordi-
nary expenses in enforcing
compliance. EPA personnel
made frequent trips from Port-
land to Neskowin for field inves-
tigations and data accumula-
tion, and from Seattle to Port-
land for court appearances
made necessary by the defend-
ant's failure to promptly make
the required corrections to the
system. Lawyers in the Region
10 enforcement division peti-
tioned the court for recovery of
those expenses, and were suc-
cessful in being awarded
$5,327. The funds, since paid
to the U.S. Treasury, were the
first such recovery made in the
Nation in pursuing drinking
water compliance.
The penalty phase of the
case is still pending. Issuance
of the order against Neskowin
Enterprises represents only half
of the relief sought by the U.S.
Department of Justice. In addi-
tion to the injunctive relief, the
complaint also asked for as-
sessment of civil penalties in
the sum of not more than
$5,000 a day for each day in
which violations of the Safe
Drinking Water Act occurred. [~]
JUNE 1980
,M
-------
Auto
Pollution:
The Remaining
Job
By Benjamin Jackson
On November 8, 1979, the EPA denied
certain requests for waiver of the
carbon monoxide auto emission
standard, while granting others. In doing
so, we determined that a majority of the
automobile industry is able, given current
auto emission technology, to meet the
more stringent carbon monoxide standard
that becomes effective in 1981.
This decision may not have the appear-
ance of great importance, but it does
demonstrate that overall, the emission
standards established by the Clean Air
Act can be met by the auto industry. There
should be no more arguments about the
standards: they are established; industry
can meet them and the cars rolling off
the assembly line should be in compliance
with the emission standards.
But, despite the fact that industry is able
to meet them, much work remains in the
auto cleanup area. Why?
First, some cars are not meeting stand-
ards when new. In January of 1977, EPA
initiated its assembly line testing program,
known as Selective Enforcement Auditing.
The program tests statistically representa-
tive samples of production vehicles to
determine their compliance with standards.
Results from the program indicate that
about 18 percent of the 1979 models did
not meet one or more standards at the
assembly line—and this is after some mile-
age had been put on the car and careful
dealer preparation had been performed.
Second, cars contain defective emission
control components and systems. EPA sur-
veillance programs have discovered a sig-
nificant number of instances in which the
failure of an emission-related component
has caused the vehicle to exceed stand-
ards. If the component does not work pro-
perly due to an inherent defect, a weak-
ened braze joint, for example, all of the
components built using that same manu-
facturing technique may be susceptible to
failure. Since a component manufacturer
may build the same part for a number of
auto manufacturers, the probiem can be
widespread.
Another reason for vehicles not meeting
emission standards in-use is that cars are
tampered with. Our most recent survey
indicates that tampering—removing or
rendering inoperative emission controls—
occurs in the emission control components
of 18 percent of cars. The most prevalent
tampering was with the exhaust gas re-
circulation system. Further, the incidence
of tampering increased with age from a low
of 10 percent in one-year-old cars to over
30 percent in five-year-old vehicles.
Fourth, cars designed for the use of un-
leaded gas are being fueled with leaded.
Lead destroys the catalytic converter
which is the principal emission control on
most post-1975 model cars. A survey of
over 40,000 vehicle fuelings showed that
fuel switching is occurring at a rate of
8-10 percent.
Part of the problem in dealing with the
fuel switching phenomenon is that there
are several contributing factors—the price
differential between leaded and unleaded,
the perceived reduced performance from
a vehicle operating on unleaded gas, and
the lack of availability of unleaded gas
during a gas crisis. There are common mis-
conceptions, for example, that engine
"knock" is caused by unleaded gasoline
and that vehicles will get better fuel econ-
omy with leaded gasoline. Engine "knock"
is caused by insufficient octane of the gaso-
line and there are unleaded gasolines on
the market that cover the spectrum of
octane quality.
We also suspect that some motorists
believe that the reason they are not getting
the fuel economy they expected from the
EPA mileage figures is because of emission
controls, specifically, the catalyst. Thus,
they befieve that using the cheaper leaded
fuel will deactivate the catalyst, improve
fuel economy, and save money. Of course,
this is not at all true. Catalyst deactivation
or removal will not affect fuel economy,
and while some money may be saved
initially by purchasing leaded gasoline, the
added exhaust system and engine main-
tenance associated with the use of leaded
gas will tend to offset the price differential
saving.
The energy problems facing the Nation
may further exacerbate the fuel switching
probiem. If gasoline supplies are short,
we fear switching may increase.
Fifth, owners are not seeking service at
recommended intervals and cars are not
being properly serviced by mechanics.
Proper maintenance is required to assure
continued emissions control as well as fuel
economy. Manufacturers have reduced the
amount of periodic maintenance required
for their cars which is attributable, in part,
to the use of unleaded gasoline which in-
creases the useful life of engine parts such
as spark plugs and engine oil. Our informa-
tion indicates that owners, nevertheless,
do not perform the periodic maintenance
required to keep emission controls operat-
ing efficiently. Many motorists wait until
they encounter performance problems be-
fore they seek maintenance. In fact, our
contractor-operated recall testing facility in
Springfield, Virginia, rejects 20-25 percent
of vehicles in classes selected for emission
testing because of improper maintenance.
In addition to not performing the required
maintenance, malmaintenance and deliber-
ate misadjustment are occurring on a large
number of in-use vehicles. We believe that
the owner's dissatisfaction with his ve-
hicle's performance and inadequate me-
chanic training accounts for a significant
amount of malmaintenance.
It is difficult to assess how much each of
these causes contributes to air pollution.
It is clear, however, that these problems
rob the American public of air quality im-
provement that has already been paid for
in the purchase price of new cars. For ex-
ample, in 1981 we will spend $5 billion on
the emission controls of new cars and $ 1.3
billion on unleaded gas (over leaded) for
the lives of those cars. If we assume that
all of the above causes for in-use non-
compliance will reduce control effective-
ness by about 1 2 percent over the life of
the car, we will lose three quarters of a
billion dollars in the investment in pollu-
tion control. In terms of air quality, this
means that the mobile source contribution
to air pollution from that 1981 fleet will
almost double.
In order that we do control emissions
from mobile sources, it has been necessary
for us to develop and implement a wide
range of enforcement programs. The Selec-
tive Enforcement Audit program is one
which has achieved one of its most impor-
tant objectives of encouraging manufactur-
ers to identify and correct emission prob-
lems before they are tested by EPA. For
example, during the 1979 model year, we
required 38 configurations to be tested,
comprising a total of 344 cars.
In anticipation of an EPA audit, and to
prevent failure of such an audit, manufac-
turers tested over 1 6,000 cars. Even
though our information indicates that about
18 percent of new cars failed the audit in
1979, the number has decreased from over
20 percent in 1978 and the audit practice
has become an integral part of the auto
manufacturing industry. More stringent
application of the assembly line test pro-
gram can reduce these percentages even
further.
Under the Clean Air Act, we are author-
ized to order the recall of vehicles if they
do not conform to standards. Recall inves-
tigations are initiated based upon the
analysis of data from a surveillance pro-
22
EPAJOURNAL
-------
gram which incorporates data from assem-
bly line test audits, vehicle manufacturers,
inspection/maintenance and other field
programs, and reports of defective emis-
sion components. To supplement the avail-
able surveillance data, EPA personnel
conduct an in-usa surveillance test program
at two contractor laboratories to assess
emission performance. From, information
supplied by this surveillance network,
classes of vehicles suspected of exceeding
emission standards are selected for formal
investigation and, if noncompliance with
the Federal standards is evident, the manu-
facturer is required to submit a recall plan
to remedy the nonconformity.
Because tampering and fuel switching
activities represent a significant threat to
the national vehicle emission control pro-
gram, we have launched a new mobile
source enforcement initiative directed spe-
cifically at controlling tampering and fuel
switching, We have recently established
field offices in Denver, Colorado, and
Washington, D.C. to conduct investiga-
tions and prosecute violators with the
emphasis focused on major vehicle fleets,
new.car dealerships, commercial auto re-
pair facilities, and service stations. This
program includes a special effort directed
at preventing a widespread increase in fuel
switching caused by a shortfall in unleaded
gasoline which is accompanied by monitor-
ing of the petroleum industry to detect the
locations and severity of such shortages.
It is our contention that the antitamper-
ing and anti-fuel switching enforcement
effort will complement and facilitate the
implementation of inspection/mainte-
nance programs by preventing further
deterioration of the vehicle fleet before
inspection/maintenance programs are im-
plemented. It is simply not fair to permit
the public to believe that tampering and
fuel switching is OK by not enforcing now,
only to find that the practice will require
remedial expenditures by the public when
I/M is implemented.
Additional support is provided for the
adoption of inspection/maintenance
through two important warranty provisions
in the Act—production and performance
warranties. The new provision in the 1977
Clean Air Act Amendments for Federal -
enforcement of emission warranties holds
a strong promise for truly effectuating the
production warranty against vehicle de-
fects that cause a vehicle to exceed stand-
ards. Prior to the Amendment, a lawsuit by
the owner was the only means of recovery
if the manufacturer or dealer refused to
This is a poster developed by EPA to help
the effort to clean air pollution by urging auto
tune-ups. For a copy of the poster, contact
the public information office at the EPA Motoi
Vehicles Emission Test Lab. 2565 Plymouth
Road, Ann Arbor. Mich. 48105
honor a valid warranty claim. Now the
Agency can investigate consumer com-
plaints covered by the warranty for possible
violation and take appropriate enforcement
action when such violations are identified.
Just as valuable is the performance war-
ranty which enables vehicle owners who
fail a State inspection/maintenance test to
repair their cars at the manufacturers'
expense if the vehicle has been properly
maintained.
Finally, there is the State inspection/
maintenance. I/M is a program under con-
trol of a State or local government which
periodically measures the emissions of
vehicles, and requires cars which fail the
I/M emission standards to be repaired.
Thus, the program is intended to identify
cars which need remedial maintenance or
adjustment and require their repair. By
providing an incentive for owners to main-
tain their vehicles, and for mechanics to
properly ad just and repair cars, it is this
program which has the greatest potential to
effect a reduction in in-use emissions. The
Clean Air Act Amendments of 1977 re-
quired the States to submit implementation
plans by January 1979 demonstrating
attainment of the ambient air quality
standard by 1982. If such a plan did not
show attainment of the carbon monoxide or
oxidant standard at that time, the Act pro-
vides for an extension until as late as
1987 provided the plan schedules I/M
implementation by 1982. Currently, 50
urban areas are required to implement this
program. Not only will the I/M program
have a major impact on the need for im-
proved automotive service, both in terms
of the quality of service and the owner's
understanding of its need, but it will be an
important deterrent to emission control
tampering and fuel switching.
As you can see, the mobile source en-
forcement program has a critical and com-
plex mission in controlling mobile air pol-
lution. Only through developing comple-
mentary and inter-related programs can
we begin to tackle the enormous pressures
opposing our stance in preserving the en-
vironment. And it is our belief that only by
concentrating resources on in-use vehicles
and particularly, a directed effort to sup-
port inspection/maintenance, can auto-
related urban air pollution be brought
under control. Q
Jackson was until recently EPA 's Deputy
Assistant A dministrator for Mobile Source,
Noise and Radiation Enforcement.
JUNE 1980
23
-------
The New
Philadelphia
Story
in settlement of a decade-long EPA en-
I forcement case, Philadelphia will stop
I dumping its sewage sludge in the ocean
and will complete building one multi-
million dollar modern waste treatment
piant this year.
Construction of two other huge waste
treatment plants in Philadelphia has also
started and the city has agreed to establish
a special $2 million environmental trust
fund for environmentally-beneficial proj-
ects not currently required by law.
These developments are described by
Jack J. Schramm, EPA Region 3 Adminis-
trator, as "very important steps toward
providing the people of Philadelphia and
their neighbors with a cleaner environ-
ment."
The settlement concludes lengthy liti-
gation involving suits, countersuits, and
several government agencies.
When William Penn founded Philadel-
phia on the banks of the Delaware River
some 300 years ago the river and estuary
offered an excellent harbor, a good loca-
tion for business and industry, and out-
standing recreational opportunities.
Unfortunately, the city has spent most of
its history polluting the very river to which
it owes its life. For most of this time, the
pollution was unintentional and no one
really thought much about water quality.
But as early as the 1920'sthe city's
sewage disposal practices were recognized
as inadequate. A 1929 study sponsored
by the Chamber of Commerce stated, "The
city of Philadelphia discharges its sewage
and liquid wastes, with the exception of
about 10 percent of the total flow, un-
treated into the streams coursing by its
front door." The study concluded, ". . .
this neglect... is a major factor in produc-
ing the heavy pollution of the raw water
used for the city's water supply."
It was not until the 1950'sthat what was
considered adequate sewage treatment
was finally provided for the entire city.
Three major treatment plants were built.
Two of the plants provided primary treat-
ment (about what most cities had), while
one provided intermediate treatment
(slightly less than today's secondary treat-
ment, and considered advanced for the
times). These combined plants discharged
about 500 million gallons a day of waste-
water into the Delaware River. Sludge
from the facilities was first stored in
lagoons at the plant sites. When space ran
out in 1961, the city started to dump its
sludge in the Atlantic Ocean at a site 12
miles off the Delaware-Maryland border.
In comparison to what it had done ear-
lier, the city's sewage treatment and dis-
posal practices of the early 1960's were
considered as good. It did not take long,
however, to discover that pollution from
Philadelphia was still degrading the river
and ocean too.
First, the Food and Drug Administration
(FDA) discovered that shellfish living on
the ocean bottom at the sludge dump site
were being contaminated by the sludge.
The FDA closed the site to shellfish
harvesting.
At the same time, the newly created
Delaware River Basin Commission
and a special Department of the Interior
study group were looking into the pollu-
tion problems of the Delaware River.
Based on this work, the river basin com-
mission established water quality stan-
dards for the river in 1967, and the fol-
lowing year set maximum allowable waste
discharge limits for each of the more than
90 major discharges located from Trenton,
N.J., to below Wilmington, Del.
As part of this cleanup effort, Philadel-
phia was ordered by the river basin com-
mission and the Commonwealth of Penn-
sylvania to upgrade its sewage treatment
plants. The cost at the time would have
been $100 million. The city's response
was to appeal the order, but the appeal
was denied the following year.
During 1970, city officials developed a
schedule for upgrading the treatment
plants. Completion dates ranged from
October 1975, until October 1977. During
the next two years preliminary design work
was completed for al I three plants.
In 1972, new impetus was given to the
drive to clean up water pollution. The£lean
Water Act Amendments required that all
municipal treatment works must achieve
secondary treatment efficiency by the end
of 1977. In accordance with these require-
ments, the city signed a memorandum of
understanding with the EPA and the
Commonwealth of Pennsylvania pledging
upgrading of the treatment plants. Com-
pletion dates under the memorandum were
somewhat different than those agreed
upon two years earlier, but final comple-
tion of all three plants slipped only two
months to December 1977.
The clean water law also significantly
expands a Federal grants program to help
municipalities build sewage treatment
works. The Federal share of costs was
increased from 55 to 75 percent, and $18
billion was earmarked ior the program.
Philadelphia gained hundreds of millions
of dollars through the program.
But just as the Clean Water Act seemed
to help solve.some of the city's sewage
problems, another new law complicated
the picture. The Marine Protection,
Research and Sanctuaries Act required that
Federal permits be obtained from EPA in
order to dump wastes into the ocean.
The city applied for such a permit,
essentially requesting that it be allowed
to conduct dumping as usual. However, an
EPA review of the application and asso-
ciated data revealed that damage was
being done to the ocean at Philadelphia's
12-mile site. A strong indication of the
problem was FDA's ban on shellfish
harvesting there. As a result of the review,
EPAgranted Philadelphia a dumping
permit, but required that the site be moved
to an area almost 30 miles east of the old
site about 40 miles off the coast.
In the meantime, Philadelphia was
confronted by another aspect of the-Clean
Water Act. The law required that all waste-
water discharge receive a Federal permit
to do so. For municipal sources, the permit
acted as a compliance and enforcement
tool for the December 1977 secondary
treatment requirement.
In 1974, EPA was ready to issue
Philadelphia its first discharge permits. By
this time, however, it had become obvious
that the upgrading schedules agreed upon
in 1972 would not be achieved. Construc-
tion and grant delays were blamed. With
reluctance, EPA gave the city from
December 1978, until July 1980, to com-
plete construction of the plants and bring
them into compliance. During the interim,
the permits required that each of the three
plants be operated at their maximum
design efficiency.
Back on the ocean dumping front, EPA
was faced with issuing Philadelphia
another ocean dumping permit. Monitoring
of the new 40-mile dump site revealed
environmental degradation similar to that
which occurred at the earlier 12-mile site.
In fact, FDA had banned shellfish harvest-
ing at the new site just as it had at the old.
EPA felt that the intent of Congress in
the ocean dumping law was to ban such
dumping if it proved harmful to the
environment. Since the evidence seemed
to prove that Philadelphia was harming the
ocean, EPA moved to end Philadelphia's
dumping. The permit issued in 1975
required that the city reduce dumping from
the previous 145 million dry pounds per
year to 120 million pounds per year. The
permit also required a 50 percent reduc-
tion by 1979 and a complete halt to ocean
dumping by the end of 1980. The city was
required to find land-based alternatives
to sludge dumping in the ocean.
24
EPAJOURNAL
-------
EPA officials aboard a U. S. Const Guard vessel monitor the effects of sewage sludge
disposal in the Atlantic by the City of Philadelphia. The City's dumping is scheduled to stop
hy the end of 1980.
The city quickly appealed the conditions
of the permit. The appeal was rejected by
the EPA Administrator. The city also
appealed its wastewater discharge per-
mits. Discussions over this appeal
continued.
While all these appeals were going on,
Philadelphia was violating the conditions
of its wastewater discharge and ocean
dumping permits. EPA registered a total
of 72 discharge violations and six com-
pliance schedule violations for the treat-
ment plants. Some 32 violations of the
ocean dumping permit, mostly related to
developing alternative disposal methods,
were also noted.
In 1976, EPA issued a notice of viola-
tion to the city concerning the ocean
dumping violations. During hearings the
following year, an administrative law judge
recommended that EPA assess Phila-
delphia $225,000 in penalties for the
violations. City officials vowed not to pay
the fine if assessed.
At this point, EPA felt that something
had to be done about Philadelphia's
multiple water pollution problems. The
issues were complex, and the solution to
one problem often exacerbated other
problems. In order to tie all the loose ends
together, EPA's legal staff developed a
draft consent decree which would hope-
fully lead to a final solution.
This draft consent decree was sent to
the city in July, 1977, as the basis for
further negotiations.
Over the next several months, intensive
discussions were held between city and
EPA officials. Slowly, tentative agreements
were reached on most of the outstanding
issues.
In March 1 978, EPA sent to the city a
revised consent decree which incorporated
the results of the negotiations. EPA con-
sidered this version non-negotiable and
informed the city of such. Nevertheless,
within a few weeks, the city returned the
decree to the EPA with several "minor"
changes. The changes rendered the docu-
ment useless in EPA's view.
With negotiations now at a standstill,
EPA informed the city that it would ask
the Department of Justice to formally bring
suit. Within a week, the city sued EPA
first, claiming that the Agency was
deliberately holding up construction grants
and harrassing the city over other sewage
treatment matters.
In May 1978, EPA Regional Administra-
tor Schramm formally assessed the city
the $225,000 ocean dumping fine which
had been recommended by the adminis-
trative law judge. Later in the month,
Justice, on behalf of EPA, filed suit against
Philadelphia for failure to upgrade its
treatment plants in a timely manner. The
Commonwealth of Pennsylvania was also
a party to the suit against the city. EPA
also brought suit to collect the ocean
dumping fine.
Within a few days, Philadelphia coun-
tersued, asking that the court stop EPA
from collecting the fine. Soon afterwards,
the State of Maryland, the Delaware River
Basin Commission and the Sierra Club
asked the court to become intervenors in
the suit on the side of EPA.
The court consolidated all the suits and
asked the parties to sit down again and
try to work out an agreement. There
followed almost a year of intense negotia-
tions. Finally, a compromise agreement
was reached and a consent decree was
formally signed by all the parties on
May 30, 1979.
Regional Administrator Schramm
hailed the agreement as "testimony to the
fact that confrontation can lead to nego-
tiations and finally to a pledge of
cooperation."
The consent decree pledged Phila-
delphia to complete upgrading of all its
treatment plants by November of 1983.
EPA would provide over $519 million in
grants to help to defray the costs of the
projects which had by now soared to
approximately $700 million. The city also
reaffirmed that it would stop all ocean
dumping by the end of 1980.
To settle the ocean dumping fine and its
other violations of water pollution laws,
Philadelphia agreed to establish a special
environmental trust fund to be used by
the city to undertake environmentally
beneficial projects not currently required
by law. The initial deposit to the fund was
$2.165 million.
At the time of this writing, the city
seems to be keeping fairly close to the
deadlines established in the consent
decree. One treatment plant is all but
completed, and construction at the others
is underway. Ocean dumping has steadily
decreased. Only 1 0 million pounds of
sludge will be dumped the last six months
of this year. Both EPA and the city fully
expect ocean dumping to end on time,
a full year before the Congressionally-
mandated deadline. D
JUNE 1980
25
-------
Economic
Law
Enforcement
By William Drayton, Jr.
Regulatory law enforcement,
from the time a violation
is detected onward, is a
mess. If an agency is lucky
enough to detect a violation,
it is often able to do little more.
If jawboning fails to induce
compliance, regulators must
either give up or litigate, and
litigation is uncertain, slow, and
costly. Even if the agency does
prevail in court, it cannot be
sure that the judge, who may be
reluctant to' impose over-crimi-
nalized and standardless penal-
ties, will provide an adequate
remedy. As a result, massive
delay occurs, public and private
resources are wasted, scofflaws
are rewarded, and voluntary
compliance is undermined.
Breaking this vicious cycle
which engenders ever-decreas-
ing voluntary compliance re-
quires a quick, sure, and fair
method of ensuring compliance
by those violators who have
been discovered. The State of
Connecticut, with the financial
assistance of the EPA, has
developed and successfully
tested such a method. Connec-
ticut's innovation can be
adapted to other enforcement
programs, including those out-
side the area of environmental
regulation.
Central to the Connecticut
approach is an economic stand-
ard that recaptures the gains
realized from noncompliance by
charging violators an amount
just sufficient to make compli-
ance as economically attractive
as profitable commercial expen-
ditures, thereby denying scof-
flaws the unfair advantage they
would otherwise have over law-
abiding competitors. This re-
capture standard sets a finan-
cial charge exactly fitted to the
facts of each case, one that
varies directly with the value
and duration of noncompliance.
A simple formula using capital
budgeting concepts translates
capital costs, operating and
maintenance expenditures,
taxes, lost profits, and other
variables over time into a
monthly assessment equal to
the average monthly benefits of
noncompliance. In a case in-
volving past delinquency, the
total benefits of noncompliance,
and therefore the assessment,
is easily calculated by multiply-
ing this monthly figure times
the number of months of
delinquency.
Using this recapture stand-
ard, a regulatory agency can
adopt a host of economic reme-
dies which lie between jawbon-
ing, which is often ineffective,
and major sanctions, such as
permanent injunctions, which
are often too expensive and
politically unwise. As an upper
limit, an administrative agency
could impose a civil assess-
ment that would fully recapture
the benefits of noncompliance.
Less severe impositions, such
as surety devices, which would
provide for payment of some
fraction of the full assessment,
could also be based on the re-
capture standard. The ability to
require immediate payment of
only part of the full assessment
while retaining the option of
demanding full payment pro-
vides an agency with a flexible
range of enforcement responses
the agency can adapt to the
facts of each negotiating situa-
tion. These quick, low-cost, in-
termediate measures with esca-
lating impact enable an agency
to avoid the dilemma of doing
all or nothing.
This economic standard
makes it reasonable to allow
administrative agencies to
impose assessments without
first going to court. The for-
mula-defined assessments are
ministerial and can be reviewed
and corrected easily. There is
also the safeguard that no
firm can ever be charged more
than it has saved by ignoring
the law. The Connecticut
legislature authorized—and
the Connecticut business com-
munity did not oppose—the
delegation of administrative
civil penalty powers to the
State's environmental agency
chiefly because they under-
stood that these safeguards
would be effective. By thus
removing the chief grounds for
fearing such delegation, the
Connecticut economic standard
opens the way for widespread
legislative adoption and judi-
cial acceptance of administra-
tive civil assessments.
Early indications are that this
economic approach to enforce-
ment, which has been in use in
Connecticut's air compliance
program for five years, works
well. Where the response to
noncompliance has been auto-
matic (small assessments for
procedural violations), com-
pliance rates have risen from
just over 50 percent to 98 per-
cent. In two cases where the
agency used surety devices
(enforceable escrow agree-
ments), firms that had previous-
ly overrun compliance dead-
lines by 66 percent and 1 33
percent thereafter remained al-
most exactly on schedule. In
other cases of potential or exist-
ing deliquencies in meeting
compliance deadlines, sources
improved their performance
without assessments having to
be made. In short, the early evi-
dence is that these tools do
what they are supposed to do—
reinforce compliance by the
majority and deal effectively
with the recalcitrant minority.
Many of the elements of the
Connecticut approach could be
applied to meet the needs of
other regulatory programs.
Indeed, several of these inno-
vations have already been
adopted elsewhere. In 1977,
the Clean Air Act was amended
to require major sources that
failed to meet a July, 1 979,
abatement deadline to pay a
"delayed compliance penalty"
determined according to the
Connecticut formula. The
Carter Administration sought
similar authority in the Clean
Water Act Amendments of
1977, but this provision was
lost in the final compromises
of the House-Senate Confer-
ence Committee, in part be-
cause the EPA could seek such
remedies in the courts under
existing law. The EPA has also
initiated a new penalties policy
that calls for the Agency and
its State counterparts to seek
cost-of-cornpliance penalties
in all its court cases. Portions
of the approach have been used
in court cases in several other
States, including Illinois and
Pennsylvania.
Economic law enforcement
makes compliance just as
profitable as commercial
investment. Because it is an
equitable and objective tool,
regulators can be given minis-
terial authority to use it
quickly without first having to
go to court. It is also a simple
tool; staff members can apply
it in ten to twenty minutes.
This new economic approach
can greatly strengthen regula-
tory law enforcement. It has
worked well in Connecticut,
cutting noncompliance rates
and delay in both largeand
small cases. It opens the way to
widespread, philosophically
acceptable use of administra-
tive civil penalties. It makes
possible a wide array of finely
modulated responses to non-
compliance, such as the flexible
reserve escrow. It allows
regulators to break free from
the frustrating role of issuing
ineffectual threats that are only
occasionally backed up by
bouts of slow, uncertain, and
probably ineffectual litigation.
It can force prompt compliance
by hard-core recalcitrants,
thereby strongly reinforcing
the voluntary compliance of the
majority. It can build on this
initial compliance to insure
proper operation and mainte-
nance of the installed control
equipment. It is a simple,
practical idea that can make
regulatory law enforcement
work better. Q
Drayton is EPA Assistant
A dministrator for Planning and
Management. This piece is
excerpted from an article by
him published recently in the
Harvard Environmental Law
Review. Copies of the full
article may be obtained by
writingPM-208, EPA, Washing-
ton, D.C. 20460.
EPA JOURNAL
-------
World
Environmental
Law
By Peter Thacher
Less than ten years ago the U.N. General
Assembly decided there should be a
U.N. Conterence on the Human En-
vironment "to encourage, and to provide
guidelines for action by governments and
international organizations designed to pro-
tect and improve the human environment."
Such a conference was held in Stock-
holm in June 19/2. Delegatestrom 1 13
nations approved an Action Plan with 1 09
recommendations and a declaration of
26 principles, and recommended the insti-
tutional and financial means by which
to set the Plan in motion. UiMHP, the
United Nations hnvironment Program,
came into being January 1, 1973, head-
quartered in Nairobi, Kenya. Its global
objective is "to safeguard and enhance the
environment for the benefit ot present and
future generations ot man."
International treaty agreements are one
major instrument to meet the UNEP objec-
tive. In this short appraisal of environmen-
tal progress since Stockholm, I will con-
centrate on examples of international law
which have come into force as a result of
UNEP's work with governments in that
most "international" region ot the planet,
namely, the area beyond national juris-
diction. Among the many important treaty
accomplishments which are thus excluded,
and which deserve more detailed consid-
eration than is here possible are the con-
ventions on International Trade in Endan-
gered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora
(1973) and on the Prohibition of Military
or Any Other Hostile Use of Environmental
V f
EPA Administrator Douglas M. Costle (left)
and Dr. M.K. To/ba. Executive Director of
the U.N. Environment Program, confer at
the Program's headquarters in Nairobi,
Kenya.
Modification Techniques (1976) and the
Convention on Long-Range Transboundary
Air Pollution which was signed on Novem-
ber 13,1979.
Governments were largely motivated to
convene the U.N. Environment Conference
by an awareness of the geographic spread
of pollutants, more exactly, of their effects,
far beyond the place of their release. A
disturbing signal in the late 1 960's was the
discovery of DDT in penguins in far away
Antarctica.
Early in the preparatory process for
Stockholm, protection of the oceans was
singled out as a major task for the Confer-
ence, and, in February, 1971, an Inter-
governmental Working Group on Marine
Pollution was set up to design a master
plan to safeguard the health of the oceans
for the greater benefit of all mankind, and
to initiate actions with a view to inter-
governmental agreement by the time of the
Stockholm Conterence on some particular
measures which were both urgent and fea-
sible, such as a convention on the control
of ocean dumping.
Important tor the design of the "master
plan" to protect oceans was the revelation
that the major sources of the most damag-
ing marine pollutants were man's activities
on land, which reach the oceans through
sewers, continental run-off, rivers, or
atmospheric transfer, almost none of which
had come under international review or
control. (A notable exception was the Par-
tial Test Ban Treaty of 1 963 which sharply
Continued to next page
Douglas
Costle's
Balancing
Act
By Rich Jaroslovsky
By his own definition,
Douglas Costie is a
statesman.
A statesman, the Environ-
mental Protection Agency head
maintains, is an official
"propped up by pressure
equally applied from all sides."
That is a pretty fair account of
Mr. Costle's current situation.
These are tough times to be
the nation's top environmental
regulator, President Carter and
Congress are pushing energy
initiatives that may have less-
than-congenial environmental
effects. Business lobbyists,
sensing an antiregulation mood,
have redoubled their efforts to
weaken what they see as re-
strictive laws and rules. Envi-
ronmental groups, thrown on
the defensive, are struggling
merely to hold their hard-won
legislative victories of the early
and mid-70's.
Mr. Costle's response to all
this is a casebook study in
bureaucratic survival. On the
one hand, he has given ground
to business on some issues to
avoid potential bruising battles.
On the other, he has carefully
chosen which battles to fight,
and has more or less main-
tained his credibility with the
environmental movement.
A Less Visible Target
"I think Doug has decided
that he doesn't want to be a
lightning rod for all the storms
that are going around," says
Gus Speth, a veteran environ-
mental activist who is now
chairman of the White House
Council on Environmental Qual-
ity. "I think that's been a wise
course."
What he's trying to do, Mr.
Costle says, is to make his
agency a less visible target for
its opponents to shoot at. "I
have consciously tried to posi-
tion the agency in what, clearly,
are harder times," he says.
So far, it seems, his strategy
has worked fairly well. While
some environmentalists com-
plain that he isn't aggressive
enough, others say he's doing
the best job possible, given the
political realities. And while
industry still regularly blasts
EPA regulations, some execu-
tives quietly admit that the
agency has shown more flexibil-
ity than in prior years and has
trimmed some of its red tape.
"Costle is a very astute pol-
itician," says Donald Cannon,
environmental director of the
National Association of Manu-
facturers. "He's saying nice
things to everybody and trying
notto alienate anybody."
Mr. Costle puts his strategy
in terms of "reasonableness
and responsibility." His job as
administrator, he says, "is to
make a reasonable decision,"
considering both economic and
environmental concerns. "If I'm
not balancing those things, I'm
not doing my job," he says.
In recent months, Mr. Costle
has shown his "reasonable-
ness" towards industry on a
number of issues. He adopted a
so-called "bubble" policy,
avidly sought by steel, chemical
and other companies, for meas-
uring some types of industrial
Continued to next page
JUNE 1980
27
-------
adingpagt!
curtailed the release of radionuciides from
nuclear weapons explosions.)
As a result of working group meetings
in London, Ottawa, ana Reykjavik, this pre-
Stockholm working group had produced an
agreed on international treaty to control
Ocean Dumping which was endorsed by the
Stockholm Conference and opened for sig-
nature in London in December 1972. It
entered into force on August 30, 1975 and
provides guidelines on a global scale for
the controlled disposal of terrestrial wastes
in the oceans.
This was early evidence of the feasibility
of establishing new international law
through an approach which concentrated
legal, scientific, and economic attention on
a carefully defined problem.
Aiso, recommendations presented to
governments at the Stockholm Conference
reflected the need for international cooper-
ation in assessment activities—to identify
high priority pollutants, their principle
sources, pathways and risks, trends and
consequences. This has been a major area
of activity in all parts of the globe by UNEP
and its partners throughout the U.N.
System. In addition to providing better in-
sights for national policy decisions, re-
search and monitoring information gener-
ated by UNEP's "Earthwatch" program
have significantly helped negotiations lead-
ing to agreed measures to control pollution.
But without waiting for more complete
information, the Stockholm Declaration set
forth the 26 principles in a statement of
political concensus to guide negotiators on
new international law, calling on nations to
take all possible steps to prevent pollution
of the seas, to halt excessive discharge of
toxic substances, to prevent serious dam-
age to ecosystems, to ensure that activities
within national jurisdiction do not damage
the environment of other nations or of
areas beyond national jurisdiction, and to
cooperate to develop international law on
liability and compensation tor victims of
environmental damage.
A specific set ot 2 I marine pollution con-
trol principles was also endorsed as guid-
ing concepts for future conferences, among
them: that every country has a duty to pro-
tect and preserve the marine environment
and, in particular, to prevent pollution that
may affect areas where an internationally-
shared resource is located, that govern-
ments should adopt appropriate measures
to prevent pollution whet her act ing individ-
ually or on the basis of international agree-
ments, that nations should cooperate with
one another and with competent interna-
tional organizations in the implementation
of agreed on rules, standards, and proce-
dures, and that regional measures should
be adopted to prevent pollution of areas
which, for geographical or ecological rea-
sons, form a natural entity and an
integrated whole.
At the first meeting of UNEP's Council of
58 governments in 1973, a policy objective
was set to detect and prevent serious
threats to the health of the oceans through
controlling both ocean-based and land-
based sources of pollution, and UNEP was
asked to stimulate regional agreements for
this purpose. This policy directive to con-
centrate on the regional approach has been
reiterated at nearly all council sessions
since the date, and UNEP, together with
many other agencies of the U.N. system
have helped a growing number of countries
to agree on new international agreements
to protect the oceans.
First, and best known of these was the
1976 Barcelona Convention for the Protec-
tion of the Mediterranean Sea Against
Pollution, "to preserve this common heri-
tage for the benefit and enjoyment of pre-
sentand future generations." Originally
outlined as part of a comprehensive Action
Plan to Protect the Mediterranean, ap-
proved by the governments surrounding the
Sea in early 1975, this treaty agreement is
linked intimately to other elements—scien-
tific and economic—which are mutually
reinforcing; the treaty provides the legal
basis for related monitoring and other
activities, without which governments
would find it difficult to discharge their
treaty obligations on a continuing basis.
The most recent accomplishment in
international law in UNEP's program is the
Continued Iron: preceding page
pollution: the policy allows
companies to limit emissions
on a plant-wide basis, rather
than forcing them to meet spe-
cific limits for every individual
pollution source in the plant.
The administrator has also
allowed Ohio utilities to keep
burning local, high-sulfur coal,
instead of requiring them to in-
stall costly equipment or to look
elsewhere for cleaner fuel. Just
last month, he granted ailing
Chrysler Corp. a special waiver
of certain pollution rules for its
crucial new line of autos.
ina similar vein, Mr. Costle
recently gave all auto makers
two extra years to meet the
agency's new limits on soot
emissions from diesel cars. The
diesel issue had taken on a
familiar pattern; when the EPA
first proposed the rules in 1979,
auto makers—who want to
make more diesel cars to help
them meet government fuel-
efficiency standards—com-
plained that the limits were too
strict and couldn't be met with
current technology.
When he announced the time
extension—which Mr. Costle
says was based on "engineer-
ing" grounds and won't seri-
ously harm human health—the
Administrator was careful to
sound conciliatory to the indus-
try. He said the auto companies
had told him they could meet
the new deadline, and he even
publicly praised their "can-do"
attitude.
But if he expected the indus-
try to be openly grateful, he was
disappointed. General Motors,
the U.S. company with the big-
gest stake in diesel cars, said
that even the new timetable
could "seriously jeopardize the
use of diesel engines with all of
their fuel economy advan-
tages." It accused the EPA of
setting "unnecessarily strin-
gent" limits that "could stifle
diesel technology."
That response, some envi-
ronmentalists say, illustrates
what's wrong with Mr. Costle's
approach. If extending the
deadline "was part of a real
deal worked out with the auto
industry, where they say, fine,
we can meet these, that's OK,"
says Carl Pope, an official of the
Sierra Club. "But Doug isn't
getting anything in return" for
his concessions, he complains.
The end-result, Mr. Pope
says, is that Mr. Costle conveys
an impression of weakness to
industry. "They think that if
they raise a stink, he'll stop,"
Mr. Pope says. "So everybody
pressures him." For his part,
Mr. Costle concedes that
"some people are going to try
to take advantage," but he says
that's an unavoidable fact of
life.
To be sure, industry is hardly
convinced ithasafriendatthe
EPA. Much of Mr. Costle's
supposed flexibility is just
"rhetorical," the NAM's Mr.
Cannon maintains. Meanwhile,
he says, the agency keeps com-
ing up with "proposals that are
just out of whack with the real
world."
In one recent battle, Mr.
Costle took on—unsuccess-
fully—a coalition of coal inter-
ests, electric utilities, powerful
legislators and his own Carter
administration colleagues in the
Energy Department. The issue
was the President's huge, $10
billion proposal to get electric
utilities to burn coal instead of
oil. Mr. Costle wanted tight
pollution limits attached tothe
Federal aid, and took his case
all the way to the President be-
fore losing.
Mr. Costle was arguing that
the increased sulfur emissions
28
EPAJOURNAL
-------
Kuwait Regional Convention on the Protec-
tion of the Marine Environment •from Pollu-
tion and its associated Protocol concerning
Regional Cooperation in Combatting Pollu-
tion by Oil and Other Harmful Substances
in Cases of Emergency. Both treaties were
negotiated and signed as part of a compre-
hensive Action Plan for the protection and
development of the marine environment
and the coastal areas of Bahrain, Iran, Iraq,
Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the
United Arab Emirates. The treaties entered
in force on June 30, 1979 and all eight
governments have since completed
ratification.
Like the Barcelona Convention these
countries have bound themselves to protect
their sea for the benefit of future genera-
tions, and have accepted a number of gen-
eral obligations (to establish national
standards, laws, and regulations to give
effect to these obligations, to avoid mere
transformation of one type of pollutant to
another which could be more detrimental,
etc.), and have agreed to tackle all sources
of pollution whether from ships, dumping,
land-based sources, offshore exploration
and exploitation, or other activities such as
land reclamation and dredging, as well as
to set up specific procedures and institu-
tions to deal with pollution emergencies.
One such, a Marine Emergency Mutual Aid
Center (MEMAC) is now being established
in Bahrain, and a survey mission to identify
national institutions and start the support-
ing scientific program is now visiting the
countries involved.
Most significantly, in an area which
many view as the most rapidly developing
portion of this planet, these nations agreed
on what I believe to be the most far-sighted
environmental obligation agreement among
sovereign states.
Article 11 of the Kuwait convention pro-
vides that each nation "shall endeavor to
include an assessment of the potential
environmental effects in any planning ac-
tivity entailing projects within its territory,
particularly in the coastal area, which may
cause significant risk of pollution in the
Sea area," and, further "to develop individ-
ually or jointly, technical and other guide-
lines in accordance with scientific practice
to assist the planning of their development
projects in such a way as to minimize their
harmful impact on the marine environ-
ment." Projects now being developed by
UNEP in its role as providing secretariat
services to these governments will
strengthen national machinery and proce-
dures to help them fulfill these commit-
ments.
To UNEP, as a global organization, the
Kuwait treaty has a value extending far
beyond the immediate needs of this region,
important as they are, because it demon-
strates the willingness of a most significant
group of developing countries to commit
themselves collectively to take environ-
mental considerations into account in their
development planning and decision-making
at the national level for the sake of their
shared common future.
Closely allied at the international level
has been the generation of "guidelines" far
short of international law. An extremely
important example, directly relevant to the
above treaties, was signed in New York on
February 1, 1980, as a result of an initiative
by UNEP, the U.N. Development Program,
and the World Bank in which nine inter-
governmental development assistant
institutions, "convinced that in the
long run environmental protection and
economic and social development are
not only compatible but interdependent
and mutually reinforcing," and recognizing
their responsibility to ensure the substain-
ability of activities financed by them, have
declared their support for the Stockholm
principles and Action Plan and their deter-
mination to develop environmental meas-
ures in the design of development activities
and to support these with training and other
assistance. As a result of this agreement by
institutions which supply not less than
$25 billion for international development
assistance throughout the world, govern-
ments will be assisted not only in projects
to rehabilitate environmental problem
areas, but in the vital, preventive area
where the choice between "clean" and
"dirty" development has often been dic-
tated by short-term costs, to the defeat of
long-term benefits. D
Thacher is Deputy Executive Director of
the U.N. Environment Program.
caused by more coal burning
would worsen the problem of
acid rain in the Northeast and
Canada. But the Energy Depart-
ment and the others said the
curbs sought by the EPA would
make the bill impractical and
so unappetizing to industry that
it wouldn't pass Congress.
"The President was caught
between a rock and a hard
place," one senior EPA official
says. Mr. Carter's ultimate de-
cision to forgo the tight curbs
was a defeat for Mr. Costle, the
aide says, but the attention
generated by his efforts is
"helping put acid rain on the
map" as an issue the country
must deal with.
One Energy Department offi-
cial offers another explanation
for Mr. Costle's pressing the
matter. It was "costless to his
campaign to keep on the good
side of the environmentalists,"
the aide observes. Whether that
was the administration's inten-
tion, things worked out that
way. Environmental groups
applauded him, even in defeat.
"Doug Costle, to his credit,
really didgotothematonthis,"
says Robert Rauch, an official
of the Environmental Defense
Fund.
Mr. Costle claims a few vic-
tories, too. For instance, after
laboring mightily, the EPA last
year'issued emission standards
for new coal-fired power plants.
The rules were among the most
important and politically sensi-
tive ever issued by the agency,
and while they didn't delight
either environmentalists or in-
dustry—both sides sued—the
level of outrage wasn't nearly
so great as agency officials had
feared.
'A Convert on Coal'
"I'm a convert on coal," Mr.
Costle maintains. "New coal-
fired power plants, I'm delight-
ed with. They're very clean."
Also, the Administrator has
been able to head off, at least
so far, attempts by business
and some legislators to soften
the Federal Clean Air Act. A
number of industries, including
coal, steel and oil, insist that
the law must be changed if the
Nation is to meet its energy
goals and continue economic
growth. "There must be a revi-
sion of the Clean Air Act," de-
clares Charles DiBona, presi-
dent of the American Petroleum
Institute, the oil-industry group.
"I think that will happen in the
next year or two."
Mr. Costle insists that "envi-
ronment and energy don't nec-
essarily have to conflict." But
he fears that, given the current
political climate, any major
legislative review of the law
might result in weakening it.
Observes another administra-
tion environmental officer: "If
Costle pushed too hard, I think
you'd have the Clean Air Act
opened up in, oh, about 25
minutes."
One Energy Department offi-
cial, who has tangled with Mr.
Costle from time to time, puts
the present situation this way:
"Costle is very, very skillful.
He knows this is a terrible pe-
riod for the environmentalists,
and he's just playing it beauti-
fully—giving a little ground
here and there but holding out
where he wants.
"The environmentalists may
be angry at him now," this offi-
cial says, "but they'll thank him
later."D
Reprinted with permission of
the Wall Street Journal' J980
Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All
Rights Reserved. Jaros/ovsky,
a member of the Journal's
Washington bureau, covers
energy and the environment.
JUNE 1980
29
-------
Around the Nation
Cleanup Suit
U.S. Attorney Edward F.
Harrington at the request
of the EPA has filed suit
against W. R. Grace &
Co., charging that the dis-
posal of hazardous waste
at the firm's industrial
complex in Acton, Mass.,
has polluted groundwater
in that town and caused
the closing of two public
drinking water supply
wells,
The civil complaint
filed in U.S. District Court
in Boston asks the court
to enjoin W. R. Grace
from disposing of any
hazardous waste in the
ground or groundwater
at its Acton plant, and to
order W. R. Grace to
undertake a program
approved by EPA to in-
vestigate the extent of the
contamination and to
clean up and remove con-
taminants and pollutants.
Two public drinking
water wells owned and
operated by the Acton
Water Supply District are
located between the W. R.
Grace plant and the Assa-
bet River and draw water
from the aquifer. These
wells were closed down
in 1978 when unsafe
levels of contaminants
were discovered. The
complaint asks the court
to order W. R. Grace to
investigate and monitor
any health consequences
to individuals who have
consumed contaminated
water from these wells,
and to finance the acqui-
sition of alternative
sources of public drink-
ing water.
Pollution Settlement
Region 2 recently reached
a settlement with N.L. In-
dustries, Inc. of Sayre-
ville. New Jersey, on
alleged air pollution vio-
lations, that requires N.L.
to pay $1.1 million dol-
lars in civil penalties.
This represents one of
the largest fines ever col-
lected under the Federal
Clean Air Act.
It was the cooperative
approach between EPA
and the New Jersey De-
partment of Environmen-
tal Protection that Region-
al Administrator Charles
Warren emphasized when
he stated that the execu-
tion of the N.L. consent
decree "should be viewed
as compelling proof that
the Federal and State
agencies are capable of
constructive cooperation
when confronting the
health concerns in air
pollution problems."
The pollution
abatement plan is expect-
ed to reduce emissions of
particulate matter from
one operation alone by
more than 125 tons per
year.
RGB Fines
Region 3 has assessed
fines totalling $76,000 for
the spilling of polychlori-
nated biphenyls (PCB's)
in a Philadelphia street
last May. The PCB's came
from electrical transform-
ers belonging to the bank-
rupt Independent Wiring
Co., Inc.
Approximately 300 to
400 gallons of highly
concentrated PCB's were
released from the trans-
formers into the street.
Some 20 local residents,
including some children,
came into contact with
the PCB's.
A joint cleanup effort
by EPA and the city of
Philadelphia removed all
the PCB-contaminated
pavement, soil, and water
at a cost of over
$166,000.
Treatment Plant
A U.S. Magistrate re-
cently fined the town of
Ashland, Va. (Hanover
County) $2,500 and
placed it on one year's
probation for failure to
maintain sewage treat-
ment plant operating rec-
ords. Daily operating and
analysis records are re-
quired to be stored fora
period of three years.
EPA and State investi-
gators discovered the
missing records while
seeking information about
operating violations that
had occurred at Ashland's
treatment plant. EPA re-
ferred the case to the
Department of Justice
which filed suit against
the town. During nego-
tiations, Ashland officials
agreed to plead guilty to
the charges and pay a
fine.
Toxics Study
A comprehensive study
of toxics in the Memphis/
Shelby County, Tenn.,
area is underway. Investi-
gators are examining air
emissions, water dis-
charges, and waste dis-
posal practices of a va-
riety of industries.
Some residents of the
Frayser community in
North Memphis have re-
ported physical ailments
which they believe may
have been caused by
chemical contamination
of their environment. The
ailments include aller-
gies, rashes, and respira-
tory problems. Air, water,
and soils samples taken
earlier in the year failed
to show abnormally high
contaminant levels in the
Frayser community.
Chemical Site
A regional response team
from Region 5 was sent
to Seymour, Ind., on
March 29 to work with
State and local officials
responding to a reported
spontaneous chemical
reaction and the very
serious possibility of se-
vere contamination ente'-
ing a stream adjacent to
the Seymour Recycling
Company, a chemical
storage and recycling site
some 75 miles south-
southeast of Indianapolis.
EPA's On-Scene Co-
ordinator quickly set in
place a containment oper-
ation that began early on
March 29 and included
the digging of a 2,700-
foot long ditch.
Some 48,000 55-
gallon drums were found
on the site, including
4,200 barrels stored out-
side the fenced area.
While the ditch was be-
ing constructed, crews
set to work clearing away
empty barrels and re-
mains of old buildings.
They also began exam-
ining contents of the bar-
rels. Within a few days
they had identified nearly
50 of the priority chemi-
cals listed on EPA's
register of 299 hazardous
substances. At least 25
of these chemicals had
been found in the stream;
results of groundwater
tests were not immediate-
ly available. By April 15,
nearly half of the barrels
had been processed—
examined and restacked
by chemical "families"
on freshly graveled work
areas.
A dual filtration system
was placed in operation
to treat contaminated
water before discharge
into the city's treatment
system.
Four barrels of nitro-
celluose in liquid state
were found and were dis-
posed of by burning.
Approximately 100
pounds of explosive
chemicals found on the
site were detonated in a
nearby field by an Explo-
sive Ordnance Demoli-
tion team from Ft.
Benjamin Harrison.
(See News Briefs
Page 40)
Comey
David Comey, who was
cited in the April issue
of EPA Journal for his
contribution to the envi-
ronment, was an official
of Citizens for a Better
Environment. This isa
30
EPAJOURNAL
-------
non-profit organization
involved in environmen-
tal research, litigation,
and public education.
Comey was president of
the group from June,
1976, until his death in
January, 1979, Comey's
association with the or-
ganization was inad-
vertently omitted from
the April article.
Construction Grants
Regional Administrator
Adlene Harrison and the
Oklahoma Commissioner
of Health, Dr. Joan
Leavitt, recently signed
an agreement delegating
administration of the
Construction Grants Pro-
gram to the State over
the next three years. The
program is for construc-
tion of sewage treatment
plants. The State agency
was awarded a $359,000
grant to pay administra-
tive costs for the rest of
this fiscal year.
Hazardous Wastes
The Region's investiga-
tions of hazardous waste
sites in Arkansas, Louisi-
ana, New Mexico, Okla-
homa, and Texas are now
in full swing, triggering a
strong public response.
Region 6 is advising
the public when sites are
selected for inspection
and again when EPA
reaches its final disposi-
tion—letting people
know what action has
been taken on each site
and why—and if any site
is a threat to public health
or the environment.
The Region plans to
use emergency funds,
provided for in Section
311 of the Clean Water
Act, for the cleanup of the
abandoned French Lim-
ited hazardous waste site
near Barrett, Texas. The
Coast Guard is doing the
same at the Motco site in
Texas City, Texas.
Conditional Okay
The EPA has condition-
ally approved all but two
revisions of the New
Mexico State Implemen-
tation Plan to bring air
quality in the State up to
National Air Quality
Standards. The plans in
all five Region 6 States
have now been approved.
Regional Administra-
tor Adlene Harrison said
major improvements in
the revised New Mexico
plan included the sulfur
dioxide control program
for the Four Corners area
and the regulations for
the potash industry in
Eddy and Lee Counties.
Sludge Disposal
Nearly 200 of the 500
residents of Verona, Mo.,
gathered recently at an
EPA-sponsored town
meeting to discuss the
disposal of 4,300 gallons
of sludge in the town.
The sludge, containing
343 parts per million of
dioxin, is currently being
held in a tank at a local
chemical plant. Residents
also discussed the testing
of a farm site a few miles
away where barrels of
chemicals possibly con-
taining this deadly sub-
stance were buried.
Emergency Aid
Region 7 recently re-
sponded to a request for
emergency assistance
from the Iowa Dept. of
Environmental Quality
when over 1,100 barrels,
some containing poten-
tially explosive and toxic
chemicals, were discov-
ered in an old egg proc-
essing plant at Malvern,
Iowa.
EPA obtained a tem-
porary restraining order
from the U.S. District
Court in Des Moinesand
sent members of the
Region 7 Emergency
Response Team to the
site to direct immediate
removal of the 55-gallon
drums to a safer place.
EPA then requested
that the U.S. Attorney file
a civil complaint for in-
junction relief under Sec-
tion 7003 of the Resource
Conservation and Recov-
ery Act.
Proposed Standards
The EPA recently pro-
posed cleanup standards
for open land areas and
buildings contaminated
with radioactive materials
from inactive uranium
processing mills.
Roger Williams, Re-
gional Administrator,
said the new standards
concern wastes from old
uranium mills that proc-
essed uranium ore sev-
eral decades ago.
EPA is concerned
about health hazards from
the tailings. Radium in
the tailings decays into
radioactive radon gas.
Radon and its decay
products emit cancer-
causing alpha particles.
They also emit gamma
rays which can travel
through foundations
slabs, footings, and walls.
Energy, Environment
Regional Administrator
Paul DeFalco, Jr. recently
addressed the annual
meeting of the American
Society for Public Admin-
istration. He discussed
the subject, "The Con-
vergence of Energy and
Environmental Policy."
"There is a clear mes-
sage that in balancing
our energy and environ-
mental needs there is
truly 'no free lunch!'
However, we in EPA are
convinced that the coun-
try can solve its energy
problems withoutturning
back the clock on envi-
ronmental progress," he
said.
to attain the carbon mon-
oxide standard by the
deadline. If the Spokane
plan in its present form
were to be submitted to
EPA after the conclusion
of the State approval
process, EPA would seek
to approve it as long as
Spokane had aggressively
pursued its implementa-
tion. D
Air Plan
Region 10 has recom-
mended that the City of
Spokane promptly submit
its transportation control
plan to State authorities
so they can begin the
process to adopt it as part
of the State Implementa-
tion Plan to achieve air
quality standards. The
Spokane plan, which
seeks to bring carbon
monoxide levels into
compliance by December
1982, does not include
provisions for a manda-
tory auto emission in-
spection program. In-
stead, it relies on parking
bans and other measures
States Served by EPA Regions
Region 1 (Boston)
Connecticut, Maine.
Massachusetts. N
Hampshire. Rhode I:
Vermont
617-223-7210
Region 2 (Now York
Citv)
New Jersey. New York.
Puerto Rico. Virgin
Islands
212-264-2525
Region 3
(Philadelphia)
Delaware. Maryland.
Pennsylvani.
West Virginia. District of
Coin"'
215-597-9814
Region 4 (Atlanta)
\i. Georgia
Florida. Miss.
Norlh Carolina. South
Carolina T cnncs:.
Kentucky
404-881-4727
Region 5 (Chicago)
Iliinins Indiana Ohio.
Michigan Wisconsin.
Mmnr
312-3532000
Region 6 (Dallas)
Arkansas. LIHHSI;SIKI
Oklahoma. Texas. New
Mexico
214-767-2600
Region 7 (Kansas
City^
Iowa. Kansas Mis--.
Nebraska
816-374-5493
Region 8 (Denver)
Colorado Utah.
Wyoming, Montana.
North Dakota, South
Dakota
303-837 3895
Region 9 (San
Francisco)
Arizona, California,
Nevada, Hawaii
415-556-2320
Region 10 (Seattle)
Alaska, Idaho, Oregon.
Washington
206442-1220
JUNE 1980
31
-------
Controlling
Pollution in
China
By Qu Geping
China takes environmental protection
seriously, for as a socialist country
her highest principle is to safeguard
and foster the interests of the people.
Some good results have been achieved.
One of the problems that arises with
widespread use of chemical insecticides is
pollution of the soil, water and crops,
which directly or indirectly endangers the
people's health. These insecticides also kill
many beneficial insects and birds, thus
reducing natural preventives of plant
diseases and insect pests.
China's agro-scientists sought to cut
down on these undesirable effects through
using selective insecticides, mixtures and
thinner solutions. When this did not funda-
mentally solve the problem they turned to
biological control. Some success has been
gained in employing beneficial insects and
pathogenic microbes to prevent and control
plant diseases and pests. Insects iike
trichogramma, ladybirds and green lace-
wings kill pests that harm grain, oil crops,
cotton and trees. Microbes control the corn
borer, pine moth and rice plant skipper.
Antibiotics are employed to prevent rice
sheath and culm blight, rice blast, millet
smut and apple rot. In rice-growing areas
ducks turned out into the paddy fields to
eat rice hoppers get rid of 70 to 80 percent
of them.
Such measures are being widely intro-
duced throughout China. Figures for 1978
show that they were used on 6,700,000
hectares of land, counter-insects on
2,070,000 ha. and antibiotics on
2,000,000 ha. against plant diseases and
1,800,000 against pests. Ducks were used
to kill hoppers on 670,000 ha. of paddy
fields. Biological control networks have
been set up in many regions, as well as pest
forecast stations and biological breeding
farms. Millions of peasants are taking part
in this work and cooperating with the
scientists on control.
Eighty percent of China's population
lives in the countryside where brush and
other vegetation is the traditional domestic
fuel. About 500 million tons a year of such
fuel, the equivalent of 400 million tons of
coal, is burned and thus does not return to
the soil as organic matter. In the past in
some places indiscriminate tree-felling for
fuel aggravated soil erosion and began to
affect the climate.
New Sources of Energy
New sources of energy are being promoted
in the countryside to protect the natural
environment and the ecological balance.
Chief ones are small hydropower stations
and marsh gas. China has water resources
for small- or medium-sized hydropower
stations capable of producing a total of
150 million kilowatts. A total of 88,000
such stations have been set up in three-
fourths of China's 2,100 counties, with an
installed capacity of 5,300,000 kw. These
now provide an inexpensive source of
power and lighting and will play a big role
in modernizing agriculture.
Marsh gas is also widely used. Home
garbage, night soil and vegetation are
fermented in sealed methane-generating
pits, each of which can serve one or several
households. By 1978 China had 7,000,000
of them and they had become the main
source of energy for cooking and lighting
in 21 counties. Altogether 35,000,000
people throughout the country are cooking
or lighting with methane.
Marsh gas does not pollute the environ-
ment and the residue after fermentation is
good organic fertilizer. In addition, fermen-
tation in the generating pits kills most
bacteria in the night soil as well as eggs of
parasites such as liver fluke and hook-
worms, thus greatly lowering the chance
for spread of disease that exists with
unfermented night soil.
Curbing Industrial Pollution
Pollution is in some measure cut by the
policy followed since liberation of setting
An aqueduct in a Chinese countryside.
EPAJOURNAL
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JUNE 1980
33
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up new industries throughout the country
instead of being concentrated in the coastal
cities as they were before. The policy is
also to build smaller, scattered industrial
towns to avoid concentration of population
and the pollution that accompanies it.
Many measures are taken to transform
or renovate existing enterprises to cut pol-
lution. They include comprehensive utiliza-
tion of raw materials and recycling of toxic
substances into some useful product. Gas
from oil refining serves as raw material for
synthetic fibers and rubber, plastics and
chemical fertilizer. Factory and mine tail-
ings, instead of being dumped and cover-
ing up cultivable land, are reprocessed to
yield valuable industrial chemicals and
chemical fertilizer, and made into cement
bricks and refractory materials. Several
hundred products are being recovered from
water expelled from chemical, pharmaceu-
tical and light industrial plants.
Factories contributing to inner city pollu-
tion are moved to the suburbs, and when
new ones are set up they are built some
distance from the city. As an initial meas-
ure, those discharging gases must be
placed downwind from the cities and those
expelling polluted water must lead it away
from rivers or lakes.
In the atmosphere of anarchism fostered
by Lin Biao and the gang of four during the
cultural revolution such regulations were
ignored in many factories and mines. In the
past few years the authorities have re-
viewed existing laws on environmental
protection, drafted some new ones and
made efforts to put them into effect. Un-
fortunately, solving many of the problems
takes time and money, so solutions can be
reached only step by step. Starting from
what is feasible in the current period, in
1 978 the State set dates by which 167
industrial and mining enterprises with seri-
ous pollution problems must solve them or
be closed down. Research is being done on
control of city noise and air and water
purification, and some measures have been
taken.
Proper salvage of refuse, both from
home and industry, also helps keep the
environment clean. Between 1956 and
1977 the State collected 89,000,000 tons
of reuseabie refuse, including leftover
materials, discarded equipment, glass,
plastics, rubber, scrap metal, rags and
paper. Because through treatment and re-
processing it could be turned into some-
thing useful, it was valued at 19.5 billion
yuan, (more than $13 billion at the official
exchange rate—Ed.). In some cities refuse
like vegetable leaves and fruit peels is
taken to the suburbs for composting as
fertilizer.
Saving a Lake
A general survey of river, lake and coastal
pollution near cities has been made in the
past few years. Cleaning up the Guanting
reservoir, Baiyangdian Lake, Jiyun Canal
and the Zibo industrial district has been
some of the initial work.
Ya'er Lake in Hubei province on the mid-
dle reaches of the Changjiang (Yangtze)
River is a shallow freshwater system con-
sisting of 13 small lakes which used to
teem with fish, shrimp and lotus. Three
chemical plants built around the lake
caused serious pollution and were slowly
poisoning all life in them. One of them,
Yanjia Lake, became a "death lake," its
water instantly lethal to all marine life.
After the fali of the gang of four a big
army of government workers, technical
personnel and 20,000 rural commune
members began a battle to purify the lake.
Over two years they built four sets of con-
necting pools covering a total of 200 hec-
tares into which the chemical-laden water
is drained and purified through the use of
algae. Gradually Ya'er Lake has resumed
its purity. Last year it yielded 2,500 tons of
fish, more than in any previous year.
Many new measures are being utilized to
prevent pollution or cut it down to a mini-
mum. They include the use of mercuryless
instruments, electroplating without cya-
nides, recycling of waste water from oil
fields, ferment molting treatment for
leather and paper manufacture with
ammonium nitrite.
The Environmental Protection Law of the
People's Republic of China, issued by the
Standing Committee of the Fifth National
People's Congress in September 1979, will
give us a firmer ground for the continuing
battle against pollution. D
Qu Geping is Vice-Chairman of the
Environmental Protection Office under the
State Council. This article and the extracts
following it are from China Reconstructs,
3 magazine published by the People's
Republic of China. EPA Administrator
Doug/as Costle met with Qu Geping during
a recent visit to China for the signing of
a protocol between China and the U.S.
for environmental protection. An interview
with Costle on the trip was printed in the
April EPA Journal.
Extracts of China's Envi-
ronmental Protection Law
• China's environmental protection law is
designed to guarantee a rational utilization
of natural resources in socialist moderniza-
tion, to prevent environmental pollution
and violation of ecologic balance, so as to
create a clean living and work environment
for the people, protect their health and
promote production.
• Guiding principles for environmental pro-
tection area rational distribution of indus-
tries, comprehensive utilization of products
and materials, changing of wastes into use-
ful things and mobilizing and relying on the
people to control pollution.
• When a project is built, enlarged or re-
constructed, measures protecting the en-
vironment must be designed, constructed
and put into operation at the same time as
the main body of the project, otherwise the
project may not go into production. Those
which are already causing pollution must
take effective measures to eliminate it
within a specified time limit, or else stop
production, switch to making other
products or move away.
• Forest resources must be protected and
developed and great efforts made to mak-
ing the country green. Natural flora and
fauna must be protected, developed and
rationally used.
• Measures must be taken to control and
eliminate factors that pollute cities and
industrial and mining areas. These include
waste gas, liquids and solids, dust, gar-
bage, radioactive materials, noise, vibra-
tion and foul smells.
• Foreign travelers or foreign planes, ships,
motor vehicles, materials, plants and ani-
ma Is that enter or pass through China are
subject to her environmental protection
laws and regulations.
• Units and persons who make outstanding
contributions to environmental protection
are to be commended and rewarded. Prod-
ucts made from waste are wholly or parti-
ally exempt from taxation'. Profits of fac-
tories making these products are not
handed over to the state, but may be used
for dealing with pollution and bettering the
environment. Units that cause pollution are
subject to criticism, warnings or fines, or
being closed down until corrective meas-
ures are taken. Leaders of units as well as
individuals responsible for serious pollu-
tion that have led to loss of life or serious
damage to agriculture, forests, animal
husbandry, sideline occupations or fishing
will be held to account both administrative-
ly and financially and may be punished by
law. Every citizen has the right to report
and file charges in court against violations
of environmental protection regulations. D
EPA JOURNAL
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Environmental Almanac: June 1980
A Glimpse of the Natural World We Help Protect
Surgery in
the Park
Avood thrush high in a
towering elm tree be-
gins its sad sweet
singing while far away the wail
of an ambulance siren gives the
song special poignancy.
A young couple with their
arms wrapped around each
other stroll along the woodland
path between the thick clumps
of rhododendron and mountain
laurel
An orchestra begins playing
at the open-air amphitheater
and the strains of Mozart are
heard as fireflies begin to flash
their signals in the gathering
dusk.
These are sights and sounds
on a summer evening in a
lovely park in Arlington, Va.,
which will soon undergo a
major operation that could
change it dramatically.
ironically, the gash that will
be cut through the approxi-
mately 20-acre park is needed
for a new sewer designed to
provide better environmental
protection.
The Lubber Run Park,
Arlington's oldest, is located
in a ravine in a well-established
neighborhood between major
highways that carry thousands
of commuter cars daily.
Yet most of the noise from
the almost ceaseless rumble
of traffic passes over the park
which is protected on three
sides by sharply rising wooded
hillsides. On these banks and
the ravine floor grow mature
elm, oak, and beech trees,
some rising 75 feet high, which
also help screen out the hub-
bub of the busy world above.
The park gives a congested
neighborhood a leafy oasis
where young children can
splash their bikes through the
shallow stream as it crosses a
ford in the bike path, where
scarlet tanagers, warblers and
woodpeckers dart through
thick green foliage, where
spring beauty, violets and other
wifdflowers bloom, and where
frogs croak in the night as the
stream that gives the park its
name gurgles and splashes
over huge boulders.
Yet like many stream parks
it is also the site of a sewer
line which follows a descend-
ing route to the treatment plant
and the river. The reason for
building a sewer along a stream
is that the downward pathway
of the pipe permits the sewage
to be carried by gravity alone.
Because of the construction
of high rise apartments, town
houses and office buildings
around Lubber Run Park the
flow of sewage now sometimes
exceeds the capacity of the
sewer line built in the park
40 years ago.
As a result, sewage some-
times leaks into Lubber Run,
creating foul and unhealthy
conditions. When the flow in
the present sewer line is at
peak capacity it sometimes
backs up into the homes of
nearby residents.
To correct these conditions,
the Arlington Department of
Public Works proposed build-
ing of a parallel supplementary
sewer line to handle the mount-
ing volume of wastes.
Replacement of the existing
sewer line was ruled out
because of the substantial
number of large trees that have
grown over the pipe route.
Also, if the existing line were
to be replaced, a complicated
and expensive system would
have to be set up to bypass the
sewage during construction of
the new line.
Another alternative which
would have provided for build-
ing the relief sewer outside the
park and under a nearby
residential street was rejected
by the Arlington County gov-
ernment because it would have
required pumping the sewage,
a process that would
depend on the costly use of
electricity for years to come.
Reluctantly, the county
government finally over-ruled
the objections of many citizens
concerned about damage to the
park and voted to build the new
line along the stream bed.
Construction scheduled to
begin this fall will require the
removal of 163 trees and will
disrupt recreational activities
in the park for at least one year.
The Arlington Public Works
Department states that great
efforts have been made to
avoid cutting the larger trees.
In addition, the department
says, all trees and vegetation
removed in construction will
be replaced. Funds are to be
provided also for trees that
may die later on as a result of
excavation injuries.
Consideration is also being
given to the appointment of an
independent arbitrator to settle
disputes between park lovers
and construction engineers in
such matters as whether a
particular tree must be
destroyed.
The need for sewer improve-
ments is developing in many
Drawing by Francis L.fc- Jmjues
urban area stream parks where
population growth makes old
sewer lines inadequate. In such
cases local sanitary engineers
and EPA are sometimes seen as
the villains who are destroying
the beauty of nature.
There is no universal pain-
less solution. While people are
becoming increasingly aware
of the value of parks and the
natural world, the temptation
to use open space for sewers
and highways has always
been powerful.
In addition to fiercely guard-
ing against unnecessary
intrusion in open areas, park
supporters must see that when
construction work is done it is
carried out with minimal
damage.
After the operation, tender
loving care can help assure
that parks recover much of
their former beauty.
While change in nature may
be inevitable we can often help
shape it for the better. Rene
Dubos, the noted environmen-
tal authority, stated in an inter-
view in EPA Journal two years
ago that "anywhere in the
world, almost, an ecosystem
that has been damaged can be
brought back to a good condi-
tion if you help nature repair
systems that exist."
Of course, this does not
diminish the need to jealously
guard the natural treasures
which, in Shelley's phrase,
give"grace and truthto life's
unquiet dream."—C. D. P.
JUNE 1980
35
-------
Update
A review of recent major
EPA activities and devel-
opments in the pollution
control program areas.
AIR
Ozone Protection
EPA Deputy Administra-
tor Barbara Blum said
that the United States will
propose this fall limiting
future domestic produc-
tion of stratospheric
ozone-depleting chloro-
fluorocarbons to 551 mil-
lion pounds, the same
amount manufactured in
1979, Worldwide produc-
tion of the chemicals was
1,927 million pounds in
1977, according to the
latest available figures.
Blum made the state-
ment at the conclusion of
a two-day meeting in
Oslo, Norway recently at
which seven nations and
the European Commission
discussed additional con-
trols on chlorofiuorocar-
bons. The seven nations
present were the U.S.,
Canada, Norway, Den-
mark, Sweden, West Ger-
many, and the Nether-
lands.
These compounds—
banned for use as propel-
lants in most aerosol
sprays in this country—
can destroy the strato-
spheric ozone layer that
shields the earth from
harmful ultraviolet radia-
tion that can cause skin
cancer and damage
animalsand plants.
Blum noted that re-
maining uses of the chem-
icals, such as the refriger-
ant in air conditioners,
refrigerators, freezers,
solvents, and the manu-
facture of various plastic
foams, continue to threat-
en people and the environ-
ment. She said additional
controls are needed in
the U.S. and other
countries.
Late last year, the Na-
tional Academy of Sci-
ences estimated that con-
tinued global emissions
of the compounds would
lead to thousands of more
cases of potentially fatal
skin cancer, and hundreds
of thousands of addition-
ally non-fatal cases.
"Action by the U.S. or
any other single country
—regardless of how
severe—will never elimi-
nate the threat chloro-
fluorocarbons pose," said
Blum. "Rapid, parallel
actions by all nations
producing chlorofluoro-
carbons are needed
soon."
CEQ Report
About 14,000 lives and
$21.4 billion were saved
in 1978 as a result of air
quality improvements
since the 1970 Clean Air
Act was passed, accord-
ing to a report on the
benefits of pollution
control released by the
President's Council on
Environmental Quality
(CEQ).
The report, prepared
by A. Myrick Freeman
III, professor of eco-
nomics at Bowdoin
College, also translates
health and other benefits
of air and water pollution
control into dollars.
In measuring the posi-
tive effects of air pollu-
tion control, Freeman
notes improvements in
human health, reduced
household cleaning
costs, less damages to
vegetation and crops, and
lower damages to ma-
terials, Some increases
in property values were
included.
The water pollution
benefits consist mainly
of improved recreational
opportunities for swim-
mers, fishermen and
boaters. Pollutant
removal also reduces
certain waterborne
diseases, lowers munici-
pal water treatment costs
and reduces costs to
households and
industries.
Copies of the Freeman
report, Benefits of A ir
and Water Pollution
Control: A Review and
Synthesis of Recent
Estimates, can be ob-
tained from the Council
on Environmental Quality,
722 Jackson Place, NW,
Washington, D.C. 20006.
Enclose a self-addressed
mailing label.
HAZARDOUS
WASTES
Waste Regs
The Environmental Pro-
tection Agency has
announced a national
system designed to pre-
vent future hazardous
waste disasters such as
the Love Canal health
catastrophe and April's
Chemical Control Corp.
dumpsite explosion in
Elizabeth, N. J.
"These new hazardous
waste controls will pre-
vent random dumping of
dangerously toxic and
explosive industrial
waste products," said
EPA Administrator
Douglas M. Costle. "We
know that today 90 per-
cent of the millions of
tons of hazardous waste
being produced by indus-
try each year is disposed
of in ways that will not
meet the new standards."
All businesses which
handle hazardous wastes
as defined under the new
regulations must notify
EPA, giving the Agency a
national inventory of
businesses that handle
hazardous wastes and an
inventory of the kinds of
wastes discharged. A
tracking or "manifest"
system begins in Novem-
ber, requiring the pro-
ducer to designate the
approved facility to
handle his wastes, and
to report to EPA if these
wastes fail to arrive
safely at the designated
site.
Costs of compliance
with these regulations for
22 major industrial
sectors are estimated to
be $510 million a year,
less than 0.2 percent of
the $350 billion annual
gross sales for the
affected industries.
RADIATION
EPA Named
The EPA has been desig-
nated by the White House
as the lead Federal agen-
cy responsible for the
monitoring of off-site
radiation levels around
Three Mile Island, and for
the implementation of a
comprehensive program
to keep the local elected
officials and the public
fully informed of near-
and long-term cleanup
activities.
The Agency will be
kept informed of the
status of the disabled
reactor number two and
proposed on-site cleanup
actions by the Nuclear
Regulatory Commission.
The Commission will
work with EPA to provide
the public and State and
local officials with all the
necessary information on
cfeanup operations in a
manner that will allow full
and open discussions
prior to any final action.
H. Matthew Bills, of
EPA's Office of Monitor-
ing and Technical Sup-
port in Washington, D.C.,
will coordinate the Agen-
cy's activities in the Three
Mile Island area.
The Agency announced
the establishment of an
environmental radiation
monitoring information
office to be located in
Middletown, Pa. This
office will collect informa-
tion on radiation levels in
the environment around
the plant and communi-
cate this information
directly and promptly to
the public and the news
media. An extensive radi-
ation monitoring system
has been in place around
Three Mile Island for the
last year. Erich W. Bret-
thauer. Director of EPA's
Nuclear Radiation Assess-
ment Division, has been
named project director
for this program.
RESEARCH AND
DEVELOPMENT
Research Deadline
The deadline for apply-
ing for funds under a new
EPA research program is
June 30. The new system
makes a wider use of
peer panel review to
determine the scientific
merit of aid requests and
will involve a more active
solicitation of proposals.
Under the existing
system, EPA receives
most applications for
funding assistance on an
unsolicited basis and
conducts a mail review
to evaluate their scientific
merit. The Office of
Research and Develop-
ment (ORD) currently
awards about $70 million
annually in research
grants and cooperative
agreements.
Proposals now being
sought by EPA include
those involving environ-
mental pollutants, en-
vironmental chemistry
and physics, environ-
mental biology, control
technology and source
characterizations studies.
Inquiries about the
new process as well as
requests to receive
solicitation should be
forwarded to Dr. Richard
Marland (RD-675), U.S.
Environmental Protection
Agency, 401 M Street,
SW, Washington, D.C.
20460,or phone(202)
426-2355 (FTS426-
2355).
36
EPAJOURNAL
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WATER
Environmental Strategy
EPA Assistant Adminis-
trator for Water and
Waste Management
Eckardt C. Beck called
recently for "administra-
tive creativity" to solve
environmental and public
health problems facing
the Nation during the
1980's.
Beck contrasted ac-
complishments during the
'70s with emerging prob-
lems of the '80s in a
luncheon address before
the Government Affairs
Seminar of the Water Pol-
lution Control Federation
held in Washington, D.C.
Terming the 1970's "a
tough environmental act
to follow," he said the
decade "will be remem-
bered as the definite
benchmark of environ-
mental accomplishment."
"The goals of the com-
ing decade can best be
attained through four fun-
damental initiatives: a
construction grants strat-
egy geared to meet the
needs of the next decade;
the institutionalizing of
methods for properly
controlling hazardous
wastes; a plan of attack
for 'going after' the next
generation of toxic sub-
stances, and finally, a
comprehensive ground
water strategy," said
Beck.
Beck noted that while
these initiatives were not
all-inclusive, they consti-
tuted new areas whose
total development over
time is inevitable.
Women-owned Firms
As part of a design to
stimulate the participa-
tion of women's busi-
nesses in its Construc-
tion Grants Program, the
EPA has established a
Task Force to identify
women-owned firms that
can provide services in
the planning, design and
construction of waste-
water treatment works.
The Task Force is con-
ducting a survey that will
directly benefit women-
owned businesses in two
ways: (1) by providing a
list of Women's Business
Enterprises (WBE) from
which bids may be solic-
ited on EPA projects, and
(2) by establishing a per-
centage goal for participa-
tion by women-owned
businesses.
The Task Force is seek-
ing information from per-
sons and organizations
who know of or qualify
as women-owned firms.
(In order to qualify as a
firm under this EPA pro-
gram, the firm must be at
least 51 percent owned
by a woman or women
who also control or oper-
ate the firm.) Interested
persons are invited to
write or call: Ms, Joan
Arnold, or Michelle Weiss
WBE Survey Staff
(A-105),U.S.EPA,
401 M Street, S.W.,
Washington, D.C. 20460,
telephone 202/755-0540.
Cleanup Fund
"The Federal government
may soon lose much of its
ability to protect the pub-
lic from dangerous chem-
ical and oil spills," EPA
Administrator Douglas M.
Costle warned recently.
Costle noted that a spe-
cial fund set up to pay for
Federal spill cleanup is in
danger of being
exhausted.
Costle said that only
about $3.2 million re-
mains in the fund to re-
spond to environmental
emergencies and that the
fund could run out of
money in the near future.
A supplemental appropri-
ation request of $21.3
million was submitted by
the U.S. Coast Guard to
replenish the fund.
The fund—established
under Section 311(k) of
the Clean Water Act—
provides that $35 million
be maintained for use by
EPA and the Coast Guard
to respond to spills of oil
and designated chemicals
and other emergencies
involving water pollution.
Congress intended that
those responsible for a
spill would repay the
fund, within the limits of
established liability, for
any money used by the
Federal Government in its
responses; hence, the
fund is known as a revolv-
ing fund.
In practice, however, it
is impossible in some
cases to determine who is
responsible; in other
cases the responsible par-
ties are able to tie up in
court the process of re-
covering cleanup costs.
In such cases, the costs
are never recovered or, at
best, are only partially
recovered by the govern-
ment. Such situations
have reduced the amount
of money available in the
fund to deal with future
incidents.
Congress has acted
several times in recent
years to replenish the
fund when it was in
danger of being depleted.
AGENCY WIDE
Identifying Hazards
The EPA has joined with
the Consumer Product
Safety Commission, the
Food and Drug Adminis-
tration, and the Food
Safety and Quality Serv-
ice—all members of the
Interagency Regulatory
Liaison Group—to begin
a program to effect quick-
er identification and re-
moval of serious public
health hazards.
In the past, whenever
one inspector observed a
situation which seemed
in violation of another
agency's rules, the infor-
mation was passed along
to the appropriate agen-
cies for followup. More
recently, the agencies'
regional offices independ-
ently developed check-
lists, forms, procedural
guidelines and other aids
to facilitate such
reporting.
The new referral pro-
gram, however, estab-
lishes a formal, standard-
ized procedure for report-
ing observations of sus-
pected violations to the
agency responsible. Most
major industries are visit-
ed by inspectors from one
or more of the Liaison
Group agencies. Exam-
ples of businesses that
would be affected by the
cooperative inspection
program include chemical
manufacturing, food proc-
essing, drug production,
and the manufacturing of
various consumer goods.
Inspectors from each
of the agencies will be
trained to recognize pos-
sible violations of another
agency's regulations.
However, a determination
that a violation exists will
be made only by the
agency having the legal
jurisdiction over the sus-
pected Violation, and then
only on the basis of the
responsible agency's own
followup investigation.
Examples of violations
that might be referred are:
foam, scum, or dead
aquatic life near a waste
discharge; open burning
of trash piles; pesticide
misuse; oil or chemical
spills; or mishandling of
drugs or toxic substances.
The fifth IRLG member,
the Occupational Safety
and Health Administra-
tion, will continue to
cooperate with the other
agencies on an informal
basis for such referrals,
but is not joining the
initial stages of the more
formal program pending
clarification of various
legal points.
In addition, because of
the complexity and scope
of its field structure, the
Food Safety and Quality
Service does not antici-
pate full implementation
of the program until
September 1, 1980.
Regulatory Reform
In a move to keep the
public informed, the EPA
has issued an Agenda of
210 Regulations current-
ly under development and
invited public participa-
tion in their formation.
The Agency prepares
and issues regulations to
implement environmental
programs in the areas of
air and water pollution
control, drinking water
protection, noise abate-
ment, radiation protec-
tion, solid waste manage-
ment, and pesticides and
toxic substances control.
The agenda includes
new regulations, existing
regulations which the
Agency is reviewing or
revising, and non-regula-
tory actions which the
Agency believes are im-
portant. Along with each
regulation is a brief de-
scription of the rule, the
name of the EPA contact
person and an estimated
schedule for issuance.
Interested persons are
encouraged to get in
touch with these contact
people to provide or ob-
tain information concern-
ing the development of
these regulations.
EPA will issue its next
agenda in June, 1980,
and thereafter in Decem-
ber and June on a semi-
annual basis.
JUNE 1980
37
-------
People
John C. Chamberlin
He has been appointed Deputy
Director, Budget Operations
Division, Office of Planning and
Management at EPA Head-
quarters. He was most recently
Chief of the Budget Review
and Analysis Branch and re-
sponsible for review and anal-
ysis of program/resource
issues for the entire Agency.
Prior to that, he spent three
years as branch chief respon-
sible for all regional program/
budget issues and two years as
the senior program analyst for
Enforcement.
In these positions, Chamber-
lin played a major role in the
transition of EPA's budget
formulation process to the zero-
based budgeting system. He
won an EPA Special Achieve-
ment Award for his effort dur-
ing the first year of transition.
Chamberlin also spent time
with the Peace Corps in Peru,
assigned to the Peruvian Devel-
opment Corporation, and
worked as an associate indus-
trial engineer with IBM.
He received a B.S. in Indus-
trial Engineering from Virginia
Polytechnic Institute and a
MBA from the University of
Pittsburgh.
Gene Lucero
He has been named Deputy Re-
gional Administrator at EPA's
office in Denver. Lucero had
been Deputy Director for Com-
pliance at ACTION, the Federal
agency for Volunteer Service,
in Washington, D.C., a post he
had held since 1978. He served
as Assistant Attorney General
for the Colorado Department of
Law from 1975 to 1978, where
he handled legal cases, includ-
ing those involving air and
water pollution. From 1972
through 1975 he was an attor-
ney with the Metropolitan Den-
ver Legal Aid Society, and pre-
viously he had been a law clerk
with the Health Facilities Foun-
dation in Berkeley, Calif. Lucero
graduated with honors from
Stanford University in 1970
and earned a law degree from
the University of California at
Berkeley in 1972. He is a mem-
ber of the Colorado Trial Law-
yers Association and the Colo-
rado Chicano Bar Association.
I
Dr. Michael D. Waters
He has been named Director of
the Genetic Toxicology Divi-
sion of EPA's Health Effects
Research Laboratory at Re-
search Triangle Park, N.C.
Dr. F. Gordon Hueter, labora-
tory director, said in announc-
ing the appointment, "Dr.
Waters will be responsible for
building an existing nucleus of
scientists and research activi-
ties into a major EPA program
to conduct bioassay studies on
potential environmental toxi-
cants which exert their effects
via genetic routes, causing
such problemsas mutations
and cancer."
Dr. Waters had been Acting
Director of the office since
December. Prior to that time,
he had been Chief of the lab-
oratory's Biochemistry Branch.
A nativeof Charlotte, N.C.,
Dr. Waters joined EPA in 1971
after having served as a cap-
tain in the U.S. Army Reserve
in charge of the Tissue Culture
Laboratory at Edgewood Arse-
nal, Md. He recently was
elected councilor of the Envi-
ronmental Mutagen Society,
and he holds an appointment
as Adjunct Professor in the
School ofMedicineatthe
University of North Carolina
at Chapel Hill.
Other honors include mem-
bership in the American Chem-
ical Society, New York Acad-
emy of Science, Society of the
Sigma Xi, Tissue Culture Asso-
ciation, Who's Who in North
Carolina, and Who's Who in
the South and Southwest. He
was awarded an Army Com-
mendation Medal for Bio-
medical Research.
He received his bachelor's
degree in pre-medicinefrom
Davidson College in 1964 and
a doctorate in biochemistry
from the University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1969.
William J. Lacy
He has been elected to a second
two-year term as a director in
the Environmental Division of
the American Institute of Chem-
ical Engineers. Lacy is a mem-
ber of the Board of Directors of
the International Ozone Asso-
ciation and Vice Chairman of
the American Society of Testing
and Materials' Committee on
Hazardous Wastes. He is the
director of the Water and Haz-
ardous Materials Monitoring
Research Division, in EPA's
Research and Development
Program.
Joseph A. Krivak
He has been appointed Direc-
tor, Criteria and Standards
Division, Office of Planning
and Standards, Office of Water
and Waste Management. He
was most recently Deputy
Director, Division of Water
Planning. In his new position,
he will supervise a staff of 50
scientific professional tech-
nical, and administrative
personnel. His principal
responsibilities will include
serving as an Agency spokes-
man on technical and scientific
information on water quality
and standards and as the man-
ager of the Clean Lakes and
the 404 Dredged or Fill
programs.
Prior to this, he held a num-
ber of administrative positions:
Chief of the Nonpoint Sources
Branch at EPA, Director of the
Division of Intergovernmental
Coordination in the Department
of the interior's Office of Land
Use and Water Planning, and
Chief of the Planning and
Standards Branch of the EPA.
Krivak also held several
positions with the Soil Conser-
vation Service of the U.S.
Department of Agriculture,
including eight years of
Watershed and River Basin
Planning and related construc-
tion activities.
•'.'.
EPA JOURNAL
-------
Monitoring
Coal
By Richard Wilson
Sampling and monitoring of emissions
from air pollution sources are crucial
aspects of EPA's air quality enforce-
ment program. Information collected from
individual plants is used in assessing the
adequacy of control equipment, the con-
tinued performance of that equipment, and
in defining the capabilities of certain equip-
ment to meet "Best Technology" require-
ments of air quality control regulations.
A review of sampling and monitoring
approaches for coal fired power plants
illustrates some of the methods and proce-
dures currently used by industry and gov-
ernment in meeting the requirements for
attaining and maintaining a clean
environment.
Coal Sampling
Coal sampling is a procedure used by most
coal-fired utilities to determine the charac-
teristics of the coal that is being purchased.
Of particular interest to the utility is the
amount of heat that will be released from
the coal when it is burned. This is called
the BTU value of the coal. Another key ele-
ment of the coal is its sulfur content. This
is important from a regulatory standpoint
because the sulfur in the coal will be
emitted as the pollutant sulfur dioxide (for
every 1 ton of coal burned with 2 percent
sulfur, about 80 pounds of sulfur dioxide
will be emitted).
The coal analysis also checks the ash
content of the coal which is the amount of
noncombustible material. Ash and other
noncombustible material in the coal causes
substantial paniculate matter emissions if
control equipment is not installed and
operated properly at the power plant. When
something goes wrong with this equipment,
a visible smoke plume can be seen from
miles away.
Stack Sampling
Stack sampling is a procedure used by
most regulatory agencies, including EPA, to
determine the exact amount of pollutants
that are being emitted from power plants.
Sampling is also used to judge how effec-
tive control equipment is in removing pollu-
tants before they are emitted to the atmos-
phere. Stack sampling procedures pri-
marily consist of a probe inserted into the
stack to withdraw gases (including particu-
lates) at about the same velocity as the
exhaust gases are emitted into the
atmosphere.
The pollutants in these gases are then
collected for further measurement in a
laboratory. These tests are usually very
expensive and require substantial prepara-
tion prior to the actual sampling. One test
costs between $10,000 to $25,000 and if
all goes well can be completed in two to
three days.
Although these tests are accurate, they
are not generally used for determining
day-to-day compliance because of the time
and expense involved. Stack sampling is
mainly used to determine if new pollution
control equipment is capable of performing
at the desired level of pollutant removal.
In most cases subsequent sampling is only
performed at the request of a regulatory
agency. Such requests are relatively in-
frequent and usually are prompted by some
indication of noncompliance.
Continuous Compliance Monitoring
The primary EPA enforcement emphasis in
the past several years has been on assuring
that air pollution sources initially achieve
compliance with emission limitations. As a
result, compliance monitoring was general-
ly limited to infrequent tests such as fuel
sampling or stack sampling. The Agency
has recently begun to focus on the day-to-
day, continuous compliance of sources.
The need for this change in focus is demon-
strated by recent joint field studies by EPA
and the Council on Environmental Quality
that found excess emissions at 70 percent
of the sources studied. Emissions at these
sources average 25 percent over allowed
levels.
On June 11, 1979, the EPA Administra-
tor published requirements for new electric
utility steam generating units. These in-
cluded for the first time in EPA's regula-
tions a rule that each source continuously
monitor its emissions and be judged for
compliance on a daily basis using the con-
tinuous monitoring data.
As implementation of this new approach
begins to furnish information about con-
tinuous emissions from sources, operators
of the control equipment will be able to
identify periods when maintenance or ad-
justments in operation are necessary to
reduce emissions. This new information
should greatly improve industry's ability to
design and operate control equipment for
the constant removal of pollutants resulting
in continuous compliance by sources.
Regulatory agencies realize that the sam-
pling methods of the past were not telling
the entire story about emissions from a
source. The new continuous emissions data
will improve the data base used by regula-
tory agencies in establishing reasonable
emission standards. Additionally source
compliance will be judged by examining
emissions on a day-to-day basis. Enforce-
ment to assure compliance each day will
assure acceptable air quality at all times.
Currently EPA is evaluating several op-
tions for enforcement against sources that
fail to meet the required emission levels on
a daily basis. One of the more promising
options is the use of an administrative
penalty assessed by State and local agen-
cies. Currently several regulatory agencies
are using this type of a procedure for
improving compliance.
The coming months will see a further
shift of emphasis to continuous compliance
monitoring. Pro grams a re being developed
that will require such monitoring by all
major air pollution sources. Such monitor-
ing should lead to the proper operation and
maintenance of pollution control equip-
ment and thus maximize the environmental
benefit from existing air pollution
controls. D
Wilson is EPA's Deputy A ssistant
Administrator for General Enforcement.
Coal samp/ing by Potomac Electric Power Company at its generating plant in Alexandria,
Va, Sulfur, ash, and capacity to produce heat are measured.
JUNE 1980
•;>.
-------
News Briefs
EPA SUES
The Department of Justice at the request of
EPA is seeking $860,000 in penalties and the
cleanup and removal of 40,000 to 60,000 drums
of chemical waste by the owners and operators
of an inactive hazardous waste dump in Seymour,
Ind. The Justice Department made these
requests in a civil suit filed against twelve
parties alleged to be engaged in hazardous
waste treatment, storage and disposal at the
Seymour Recycling site in Seymour. The site
poses a substantial fire and explosion
hazard, according to the suit.
PROPOSED
FINES
Action on the administrative civil complaints
EPA's Region 7 office has filed against the
Kansas City Power and Light Co. and the
Radium Petroleum Co. of Kansas City had not
been completed when this item was written.
EPA was seeking $55,000 from Kansas City
Power and Light Co. and $131,000 from the
Radium Petroleum Co. However, neither company
had been fined yet as Region 7 reported in
the April EPA Journal.
Back Cover: Children on the Mall in Washington, D.C., helped celebrate Earth Day. (Article on P. 9)
Opposite: Reserve Mining Company sluiceway that was used to dump thousands of tons of taconite tailings into Lake Superior displays
only huge icicles after the discharge into the lake was finally stopped last March. (Article on P. 4)
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