The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers said it could not clean up Missouri’s West Lake Landfill Superfund site any faster than the Environmental Protection Agency, which state lawmakers have been trying to take off the job.
That’s one of the takeaways from a June 2 letter a top Corps official sent to Rep. Fred Upton (R-Mich.), chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. The Bridgeton, Mo., landfill, which contains radioactive waste from the former uranium production facility at Mallinckrodt Chemical Works in St. Louis, is adjacent to the Bridgeton Landfill, where an underground fire has been burning since 2010. Environmentalists and residents there have joined in criticizing EPA’s more-than-25-year cleanup effort at the site, railing against the agency’s monitoring of radioactive material.
The U.S. Senate passed legislation in February that would transfer cleanup authority from EPA to the Corps’ Formerly Utilized Sites Remedial Action Program (FUSRAP), and companion legislation has been introduced in the House.
“The addition of the site to the FUSRAP program would not accelerate remediation at the WLLF,” FUSRAP Director of Civil Works Steven Stockton wrote. “The FUSRAP program would only address the cleanup of low level radiological material at the site, which is only one issue of concern at the landfill. … Transferring the site to FUSRAP would subject the site to the limitations of the FUSRAP budget and appropriations process, and its necessary prioritization with respect to the sites currently competing for the program’s limited appropriations. Additionally, there is no guarantee that the ultimate cleanup actions would be different than those which would occur under the current process.”
Stockton noted that the Corps does not take a position for the administration in support for or opposition to pending legislation. If enacted, he said, the Corps would execute cleanup of the site.
House and Senate energy and water appropriations bills for fiscal 2017 both propose to fund FUSRAP at $103 million, which is about $50 million less than the program’s annual funding levels from 1998 to 2008.
