Several years ago, the Wolman Steel site in Waterville -- an abandoned
industrial facility which turned out to be home to hazardous waste that
threatened public health -- couldn't be cleaned up because there was no
one to foot the $1.35 million cleanup bill. The soils at Wolman Steel
contained toxic PCBs; state tests showed that backyards adjacent to the
former steel manufacturer also contained hot spots of chemical and
metal contaminants. The site was also near an elementary school.
Unfortunately, a similar situation has emerged at the Augusta Tissue Mill alongside the Kennebec River in Augusta.
The Augusta mill has been owned by a succession of companies since its
heyday as the Statler Tissue Mill. Now, its virtually abandoned main
site, as well as a separate sludge disposal site in Augusta, have been
identified by the state as potential environmental disasters. At the
paper mill site, state regulators say the last owners have failed to
remove substantial amounts of hazardous wastes, including thousands of
gallons of acids and flammable liquids; at the sludge site, they have
failed to grade or cover the paper mill waste so now it's leaking into
nearby Riggs Brook. One lawyer in the state attorney general's office
says he wouldn't be surprised if there's groundwater contamination at
the Kennebec River mill.
And so far as state regulators can see, there's no money to pay for
cleanup at the Augusta Tissue Mill. The mill's previous owners have
failed to even respond to a state lawsuit demanding cleanup of the
site.
There is a state fund, administered by the Department of Environmental
Protection, that could be used to pay for such emergency cleanups. The
Legislature wisely chose to establish the Uncontrolled Hazardous Sites
Program on the premise that waiting to clean up a hazardous waste site
until a responsible party came forth with the money could endanger both
public health and the environment.
The program is essentially the state's equivalent of the federal
Superfund program and has been used to clean up tanneries and woolen
mills and other former industrial sites polluted by hazardous waste.
The state's program has historically been funded by environmental
bonds; it was used to pay for remediation at numerous sites across the
state where the cleanup urgency outpaced the state's ability to find
responsible parties that would ante up.
But that program's funds have been almost used up and no bond has been
passed to replenish them. When it was run down to its last dollars,
lawmakers were literally forced to choose between conducting one
environmental cleanup over another.
So, in the case of Wolman Steel, cleanup couldn't start until Gov. John
Baldacci and the Legislature found money to deal specifically with the
problem. That's not exactly a recipe for the kind of prompt action that
needs to be taken with an environmental time bomb. And with the Augusta
Tissue Mill's polluted main site, which sits next to the Kennebec
River, there is real urgency to the cleanup need. The Kennebec has been
the beneficiary of millions of federal, state and private dollars in
environmental restoration and redevelopment funds up and down the river
over the last decade; pollution from the mill could significantly set
back those efforts.
The state Legislature must get beyond the knee-jerk anti-bond rhetoric
that has characterized recent sessions and appreciate that there are
some situations that demand state action in the name of public and
environmental safety. The Augusta Tissue Mill is one of them. We cannot
substitute erecting chain link fences -- as has been done at far too
many hazardous waste sites across the state -- for meaningful
environmental cleanup efforts. And indeed, there's not a chain link
fence in the world that can stop groundwater contamination from
happening, or a river from being polluted.
