Bank of Duvall,

The abovel links provided by Rockhopper are as good as any for listing Superfund sites...

Hmmm....how do they and their cleanup work?

Here's how the law is set up...

1. The sites are identified.
2. All owners of the property are lined up, and I mean all, everyone who has owned it from the time of its contamination up to the present.
3. Each one of them is jointly and severally obligated to pay for the entire clean up.
4. The only way off the "pay" list is to have exercised due diligence in examining the property before you bought it and not found any contamination (nearly impossible), or have one of the very few other exceptions.

So that's who pays for the cleanup...everyone, in addition to tax dollars.

Next, the cleanup....

1. Every bit of contaminated ground or water is actually removed via very extensive digging...every molecule of the contamination is removed.

2. It is hauled off to a hazardous waste dump, of which there are few, and they are very expensive, where it is incinerated, again under very extensive and expensive conditions.

The site is certified as "clean"...

Since most Superfund sites are too big to do this to, e.g., the entire town of Skykomish, the more usual way is to completely abate the contamination. That is, it is cleaned up as much as practicable under the above haul and burn steps, and the rest is left in place. It is completely contained, and capped, and is supposed to never leak out of where it is.

That's the law in a nutshell...the litigation concerned as to who is going to pay for it is also very long and expesive. Clean up may take a relatively short time (six months or a year, in the case of something like a corner gas station whose tanks have been leaking), to decades, perhaps tens of decades (like Hanford, or the Spokane River).

As usual, the biggest winners are the contractors who get the bids to do the actual cleanup, as it is really, really expensive, and takes a really, really long time.

Usually a site is discovered and remediation is began after massive pollution and investigation, so many sites may never be returned to "pristine" conditions, and irreversible damage may have occurred.

It's more of a forward looking law...one that is intended to abate current pollution, and to prevent future pollution, rather than actually fix the problems caused by past pollution.

Some of the more infamous sites around here are:

1. Hanford, of course.
2. The Duwamish Waterway and Harbor Island
3. Commencement Bay (Tacoma Kraft Mill)
4. The bay on Bainbridge who's name is escaping me right now...
5. The Spokane River/Lake Couer d'Alene

Most estuarine Paper Mills and Smelters either are, will be, or should be Superfund sites.

I'll see if I can find a link to the law itself, if people want to read up on it...it's very long and arduous....

Fish on...

Todd