Clean Water in the News

The Manufacturers and Chemical Industry Council of North Carolina wants regulations for cleaning polluted sites to be based on two factors: The future use of the site and the risk of polluting drinking water. Applying that kind of standard would reduce industries' costs and liability.

Cleanups at about 4,500 polluted industrial sites statewide could be affected, environmental regulators say, including the Ward Transformer site near Raleigh-Durham International Airport, DuPont plant sites near Fayetteville and Brevard, and the Weyerhaeuser paper mill in Plymouth.

A day after Preston Howard, president of the industry group, persuaded a House committee to endorse the legislation over objections of state regulators and Gov. Mike Easley, the House sponsor yanked the bill off the calendar without a vote.

"The process from this point forward was not going to be a pretty process," said Howard, who conceded it was dead this session. "We'll bring it back early next session. It's not going to go away."

The premise of the bill was to base the need for cleanup on the future use of the land. If the groundwater beneath an industrial site will not be tapped for drinking water, then the site could remain polluted as long as environmental officials determine there is no public health risk. As a result, cleanups would vary in scope. Some could leave pollution to biodegrade naturally, while others would remove portions of contamination.

In some cases, industries could simply slap deed restrictions on future use of the property and avoid a costly cleanup.

Current standards require companies to clean up contamination to state standards so there are no restrictions on future use of the groundwater. The average polluted site in North Carolina has 10 acres of contaminated underground water.

Opponents say a risk-based approach is shortsighted in a state with a growing population and increasing demands on its water -- whether for drinking, industrial uses or farming. Plus, many of the existing contaminated sites are in rural areas, where people rely on wells that aren't routinely tested, allowing contamination to go undetected.

Franklin Freeman, special assistant to Gov. Mike Easley, said the administration needs time to negotiate a program acceptable to environmental regulators as well as manufacturers before adopting a risk-based approach. The administration opposed the bill as proposed.

"It would allow the industry to walk away from sites -- fence them in and walk away," Freeman said. "That's not what any of us want."

Cleanup precedent

The manufacturers council has been pushing the legislation for five years. Howard said the state had embraced the idea of risk-based cleanups in the 1990s with leaking underground gasoline storage tanks and, more recently, with contaminated dry cleaners.

"There are manufacturers all over the state that don't get to enjoy the benefits of risk-based cleanups," Howard said.

Dexter Matthews, director of the Division of Waste Management, said the proposal the manufacturers had advocated was very different than the programs regulating cleanups at gas stations and dry cleaners.

"In both of those programs, there were steps taken to ensure we wouldn't have continued releases," Matthews said. "New regulatory requirements were put in place and funding was put in place to ensure the cleanup of abandoned sites."

A sales tax on dry-cleaned clothing goes into a fund to pay for cleanup of contaminated dry cleaners. Part of the state tax on gasoline and annual fees paid by owners of underground gasoline tanks goes into a fund to pay for cleanup of underground storage tank sites.

As part of any shift to risk-based cleanups, state officials said, manufacturers should pay the state about $33,000 per contaminated acre if they leave land and water dirty. Manufacturers have balked at that and have said other industries aren't required to compensate for loss of a resource.

Robin Smith, assistant secretary of the state Department of Environment and Natural Resources, said compensation recognizes that very little cleanup occurs in some risk-based cleanups and pollution remains at high levels.

"It's compensation to the state for the loss of a resource that will be unusable for drinking water or agriculture," Smith said.