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EPA’s Abusive Power Play |
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Written On: December 5, 2003 |
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Take your pick: “Snatching defeat from the jaws of victory,” “cutting off your nose to spite your face,” “shooting yourself in the foot.”
They all describe the refusal by Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Region 10 to approve a voluntary cleanup plan for Lake Roosevelt. In fact, the agency’s position is so puzzling that some observers wonder if the EPA has a hidden agenda.
Lake Roosevelt is the giant reservoir behind Grand Coulee Dam in central Washington. Teck Cominco, a Canadian company, has run a smelter at Trail, British Columbia, since the early 1900s and acknowledges that it legally deposited millions of tons of glassified slag in the Columbia River over the years. Even though everything Teck Cominco did was legal at the time and permitted under Canadian law, some say metals that make up three percent of the slag pose potential environmental and health hazards for Lake Roosevelt.
Teck Cominco stopped the practice in 1994 and spent more than one billion dollars (U.S.) to clean up around the plant and the community. Even though Washington state’s own Health Department says the health risks around Lake Roosevelt are “very low,” the company is offering to:
·Fund more than $13 million in studies supervised by the EPA to gauge the health and environmental impacts on Lake Roosevelt;
·Pay to remediate any damage it caused; and
·Do all the work requested by the EPA.
But the EPA says, “No deal.”
For the time being, the EPA is delaying its threat to declare the popular tourist destination a Superfund site, a move that would devastate the region’s tourist-based economy. But throughout almost a year of negotiations with Teck Cominco, the agency has constantly “moved the goal posts,” imposing additional conditions whenever the company agreed to EPA demands.
For example, the EPA wants Teck Cominco to pay for testing for pollutants that have nothing to do with the company’s operations. In addition, the agency wants Teck Cominco to sign a document agreeing to recognize U.S. jurisdiction over Canadian facilities and accepting sole responsibility for all the pollutants in Lake Roosevelt, even though several other companies and facilities contributed to the problem.
Local officials and several members of Washington’s congressional delegation have praised Teck Cominco’s cooperative approach with surrounding counties and the state, and urged the EPA to work out a solution; still the agency refuses to budge. The EPA claims Teck Cominco is being uncooperative and vows to conduct its own studies – at taxpayers’ expense – and sue the company to recover the costs, a move that could lead to decades of costly delays and expensive court battles.
So what’s really going on here?
Some believe the EPA is using this case to try to establish jurisdiction over Canadian facilities. Others believe that the agency is responding to lobbying from the Colville Tribe, which wants a Superfund designation so it can begin trying to collect hundreds of millions of dollars in natural resources damages. Still others question why, according to public documents, the EPA stopped sampling in the reservoir just short of where drainage from the Colville Tribe’s mining operations could have been detected.
Whatever the motivation, the EPA’s unreasonable stance will discourage other U.S. and foreign companies from cooperating on cleanup efforts. The agency’s inexplicable behavior merits review by the new EPA administrator or even the President himself to discover what’s really going on. In the meantime, we should support Teck Cominco’s efforts to privately fund the federally-supervised studies at the lake.
Ensuring that Lake Roosevelt is safe is too important to be caught up in a federal bureaucratic power play.
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