About 10 percent of the nation's 1,230 Superfund toxic waste sites have not yet been cleaned up enough to guarantee safe drinking water supplies, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.
An additional 13 percent of the sites have generated insufficient data for officials to assess possible future problems.
In 2002, the agency began using a new measure — "human exposure under control" — to assess risk at the Superfund sites. The last complete review was in September 2003, although EPA's website provides more recent data on some of the sites.
Environmentalists said Tuesday those figures show the Bush administration is failing to protect public health, and Congress and the White House should reinstate a special tax to help fund the Superfund program.
But EPA officials called it misleading to suggest a connection between the figures and the $3 billion Superfund program's overall funding levels.
The Sierra Club and some Democrats have urged Congress and the White House to reinstate a tax put into a Superfund trust fund and used to pay for cleanups at about one-third of the sites.
Congress let the tax expire in 1995 and has been appropriating about $1.3 billion yearly in general tax revenues to compensate for it. That money goes into the trust fund, which has depleted the money from the tax.
The trust fund had received about $1.5 billion each year from an excise tax on the sale of petroleum and some chemical feedstocks, as well as from a corporate environmental income tax — all of which expired in 1995.
The cleanup of the other two-thirds of the sites generally is paid for by polluters under orders from EPA. Those commitments plus the tax revenues have kept the program at about $3 billion yearly.
Source: The Associated Press, EPA
