Most Superfund sites vulnerable
WASHINGTON >> At least 60% of U.S. Superfund sites are in areas vulnerable to flooding or other worsening disasters of climate change, and the Trump administration’s reluctance to directly acknowledge global warming is deterring efforts to safeguard them, a congressional watchdog agency says.
In a report issued on Monday, the Government Accountability Office called on Environmental Protec- tion Agency Administrator Andrew Wheeler to state directly that dealing with the rising risks of seas, storms or wildfires breaching Superfund sites under climate change is part of the agency’s mission.
The findings in the report, obtained earlier by The Associated Press, emphasize the challenges for government agencies under President Donald Trump, who frequently mocks scientists’ urgent warnings on global heating. Wheeler’s highest-profile public remarks on the matter came in a March CBS interview, when he called global heating “an important change” but not one of the agency’s most pressing problems.
“Most of the threats from climate change are 50 to 75 years out,” Wheeler said then, rejecting conclusions by scientists that damage to climate from fossil fuel emissions already is making natural disasters fiercer and more frequent.
Largely avoiding the words “climate change,” the agency in a formal response rejected the GAO finding that the agency was making a mistake by not spelling out that hardening Superfund sites against a worsening climate was part and parcel of the EPA’s mission.
The EPA believes “the Superfund program’s existing processes and resources adequately ensure that risks and any adverse effects of severe weather events, that may increase in intensity, duration, or frequency, are woven into risk assessments,” assistant EPA administrator Peter Wright wrote the GAO in response.
The GAO review comes after a 2017 review by The Associated Press found that 2 million people in the U.S. live within a mile of 327 Superfund sites in areas prone to flooding or vulnerable to sea level rise caused by climate change. The AP analyzed national flood zone maps, census data and EPA records in the wake of Hurricane Harvey, which flooded more than a dozen Superfund sites in the Houston area, with breaches reported at two.