The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is adding 11 new hazardous waste sites that pose risks to human health and the environment to the National Priorities List of Superfund sites. Also, EPA is proposing to add 10 other sites to the list. Superfund is the federal program that investigates and cleans up the most complex, uncontrolled or abandoned hazardous waste sites in the country.
To date, there have been 1,607 sites listed on the NPL. Of these sites, 336 sites have been deleted resulting in 1,271 final sites currently on the NPL, including the 11 new final sites added in this rulemaking. With the proposal of the 10 new sites, there are 66 proposed sites awaiting final agency action: 61 in the general Superfund section and five in the federal facilities section. There are a total of 1,337 final and proposed sites.
Contaminants found at the final and proposed sites include antimony, arsenic, barium, benzo-a-anthracene, boron, cadmium, chloromethane, chromium, copper, dichloroethene (DCE), hexachlorobenze, lead, mercury, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), selenium, silver, tetrachloroethene (PCE), trichloroethane (TCA), trichloroethene (TCE), vinyl chloride, and zinc.
