On any given day, thousands of trains move across the American landscape. While accidents are rare, they aren’t unknown. Each year nearly 1,000 people are killed in train-related accidents. That’s one reason that federal and state governments are trying to build pipelines so that oil can be shipped more safely with less use of oil-tanker rail cars.
The concerns about shipping oil by rail are only multiplied when the issue is toxic waste. And there’s a lot of it, with the Environmental Protection Agency identifying over 1,300 Super Fund sites worthy of cleanup. But any cleanup has to be careful that it lowers risks rather than raises them.
Take the West Lake Landfill, near St. Louis’s Lambert International Airport. It has been a local eyesore since 1974 but has posed no discernible danger to local public health and safety despite some radiological material left over from the 1940s-era Manhattan Project.
The Centers for Disease Control says that there is no health risk to local residents from groundwater, air, or soil contamination. The federal Environmental Protection Agency and state environmental agencies have also found no indication of immediate health risk.
Nonetheless, the EPA has long had the site on its list of Superfund cleanup projects.
But after 30 years, there has been no cleanup. Local residents complain about the foul-smelling landfill and have been demanding action. The EPA is finally moving and proposed removing 70 percent of the waste and transporting it to the Mountain West. The remaining 30 percent would be capped under an additional five feet of crushed rock, clay, and soil.
But the EPA’s years of inaction led some fed-up local activists to demand more. They are calling for the full excavation and the transport of all the waste to the Mountain West.
The problem is that even if the EPA somewhat steps up its snail-like pace, transport of the waste could take decades and cost up to $600 million. New risks would also be introduced. Officials at St. Louis’s nearby Lambert Field warn that excavating the waste could attract birds, increasing the likelihood that birds would strike planes while they are landing or taking off. (Recall the Tom Hanks movie Sully where he plays a real-life pilot whose plane was hit by birds while taking off from New York’s LaGuardia Airport.)
And since almost all of the waste from West Lake would have to be transported by trains, the risks of accident and subsequent contamination would also be greater. A far better move would be cap all of the toxic waste and make sure none of it is ever disturbed.
In the long run, a larger solution to the problem of toxic-waste dumps is not counting on the sluggish EPA. Federal Superfund sites should have responsibility and funding for cleanups transferred to the states, which could establish their own priorities for cleanups. Micromanaging such decisions from Washington rarely improves outcomes.