Superfund

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has used incineration--controlled, high-temperature burning--to clean up some of the most toxic forms of contamination at the nation's most severely contaminated hazardous waste sites. However, local community groups, concerned that incinerators could emit hazardous substances, have often protested the choice of incineration as cleanup remedy. This report examines (1) the safeguards that EPA uses to promote the safe operation of incinerators at these sites and (2) whether EPA has fully implemented its planned system of safeguards.

GAO noted that: (1) EPA relies upon four main methods to promote the safe operation of incinerators used at Superfund sites; (2) these methods are: (a) required site-specific standards for an incinerator's emissions and performance; (b) engineering safety features built into the incinerator's systems; (c) air monitoring to measure the incinerator's emissions; and (d) on-site observation of the incinerator's operations; (3) EPA sets standards after it studies each site's characteristics; (4) each incinerator is designed with safety features intended to stop its operation if it fails to meet the specified operating conditions; (5) air monitors are placed in the incinerator's stack and around the site's perimeter to measure the incinerator's emissions; (6) at the three Superfund sites with ongoing incineration projects at the time of GAO's review, EPA had arranged for 24-hour, on-site oversight from either the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers or a state government to ensure that the incinerator was operating properly; (7) in addition to the four methods discussed above, EPA managers intended to use two other techniques, inspections and applications of lessons learned, to encourage safe operations, but neither was fully implemented; (8) EPA has not used inspectors from its hazardous waste incinerator inspection program to evaluate the operations of all Superfund incinerators as it required in a 1991 directive; (9) only one of the three incinerators GAO visited had received such an inspection; (10) EPA regional staff responsible for hazardous waste incinerator inspections were unaware that the Superfund incinerators were supposed to be inspected, and EPA headquarters officials were unaware that the inspections were not occurring; (11) EPA managers did not follow through on their intention to systematically apply the lessons learned from incineration at one site to other sites; (12) they had intended to prepare documents describing problems and solutions at each incineration project for use in designing and operating other projects and to hold periodic conference calls with the managers from incineration sites to discuss issues of common interest; (13) both of these methods of transferring information were dropped for various reasons; (14) GAO found that the lessons learned from the problems experienced at the sites GAO visited could benefit other sites; and (15) EPA headquarters officials told GAO that they encouraged Superfund project managers to share their experiences with incineration but had not facilitated this exchange in a structured way.

Recommendations

Our recommendations from this work are listed below with a Contact for more information. Status will change from "In process" to "Open," "Closed - implemented," or "Closed - not implemented" based on our follow up work.

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