Nestled high in the Sawatch Range of central Colorado, Leadville glories in its colorful past. Every summer during the Boom Days festival, residents parade through town as gun-toting lawmen, grizzled prospectors and ladies of the night.
It all began in 1875, when a gold miner named Chicken Bill stumbled onto one of the world's richest veins of silver. Within two years, the silver rush had turned the remote mining camp into the state's second-largest town.The big lodes eventually petered out, but mining of gold, silver and, more recently, molybdenum, continued to feed Leadville well into the 1980s.
So when the Environmental Protection Agency identified much of Leadville as a hazardous-waste dump in 1983, townspeople reacted with predictable outrage.
"This was a mining town for 100 years," recalls Mary Hagan, an EPA community-relations specialist. "You can imagine how they reacted when we came in and told them that what had provided the sustenance for themselves and their families is bad. The Leadville site was nothing but trouble, terrible trouble."
Trouble is what many critics say the nation's hazardous-waste cleanup program has been from the start. Launched in 1980 by the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act (CERCLA), it was based on the fundamental principle that polluters should pay for cleaning up the hazardous wastes they create.
In Leadville, that meant getting rid of the lead-laced mine tailings and smelter waste on which much of the city was built.
The law authorized the EPA to identify the nation's most seriously contaminated sites and force the polluters to clean them. The law also established a "superfund" to pay for emergency cleanups and those where the responsible party was unknown, unwilling or unable to pay. It is financed by taxes on petroleum products and the raw materials used to make chemicals, as well as a general environmental tax on corporate earnings.
Superfund, as the program quickly became known, was Congress' response to the outcry that went up in 1977 over Love Canal. The Niagara Falls, N.Y., community, it was discovered that year, had been built atop a highly toxic chemical dump. As residents abandoned their homes, public officials discovered that the company responsible for the contamination was no longer in business, and that existing law provided no means to clean it up.
But Leadville is a far cry from Love Canal, residents of the mining town insist.
"The (scientific) model the EPA used to predict the effects of lead contamination was based on some really off-the-wall assumptions by wannabe, do-gooder scientists who couldn't get jobs in real industry," protests David Dunn, a metallurgical engineer and mining consultant who has lived in Leadville for 34 years.
One assumption, he says, would have required people to eat locally caught fish at every meal for a year. "If a person catches two or three fish a year around here, they're generally considered pretty lucky."
Dunn and other critics of superfund clean-up efforts also insist that the lead found in the region's tailings and smelter waste is not readily absorbed by the body.
"The lead here is present in the form of galena, which is lead sulfide, a very chemical-resistant mineral that decomposes very, very slowly and is almost totally insoluble in common acids," Dunn says. "But the EPA made no differentiation among lead sources."
Bad science is only one of the charges critics level at the superfund program. Even more controversial is the way it assigns liability for cleanup to anyone who once contributed to contamination - even if the contribution was minimal and the polluter broke no law by depositing waste at the site.
Not surprisingly, lengthy litigation has plagued the program from the start, often delaying needed remediation for years. Since superfund's launch 16 years ago, EPA has designated 1,387 seriously contaminated sites. At 362 of those sites, contractors have completed the construction necessary for cleaning up the contamination caused by chemical dumps, mines and abandoned industrial plants.
"Reforming superfund is not a luxury, it is a necessity," Rep. Blanche Lambert Lincoln, D-Ark., said at one of several congressional hearings held earlier this year on proposals to rewrite the law. "The program has not worked as intended. Small businesses and charitable organizations such as the Girl Scouts have been hauled into court; large corporations who have contributed only a small amount of hazardous waste have been liable for the lion's share of the cleanup because of their deep pockets; banks have been held liable only because they have mortgages on the land; and municipalities have been forced into hiring lawyers where their limited resources could be better used to upgrade essential citizen services."
Criticism of the superfund program runs so deep that it has been threatened with extinction every five years, when the law has come up for reauthorization.
Last Dec. 31, after Congress was unable to agree on reforms, superfund's taxing authority was allowed to expire for the first time. Lawmakers recently gave up trying to reauthorize the program with broad reforms this year as well. The program is able to continue operating only because it has collected enough funds to keep it going through fiscal year 2000.
"There is room for improvement," concedes Timothy Fields Jr., deputy assistant administrator for EPA's solid waste and emergency response office. "That is one thing that we and Congress agree on. There is a need to fix the law in order for us to have the kind of program we all want to have."
Noting that one in four Americans lives near a toxic-waste site, Fields says, "America cannot survive without a cleanup program. The problems of Love Canal and hundreds of other toxic-waste dumps in this country demand that we have a program, and that program will be needed for some time into the future."
Fields also notes that superfund has become far more effective and fairer in the past three years as a result of Clinton administration reforms that have speeded up cleanups, in part by letting marginal polluters off the hook.
Another Clinton reform encourages the use of less heavily polluted sites, known as "brownfields," for commercial and industrial development by protecting potential buyers from future liability suits. Such developments provide job opportunities to area residents, supporters say, offering hope for reviving some of the country's poorest inner-city neighborhoods.
Despite such reforms, superfund still has its critics.
"Unfortunately, when we go into some communities, we've become the enemy, more so than the people who caused the contamination," Fields says. "But we've got to uphold the law, and we've got to make sure that we're protecting people, even when people want us to go away."
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service.)