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A Closer Look: What does Superfund mean?

By KFBB News Team

Story Created: Jul 17, 2009 at 11:20 AM MDT

Story Updated: Jul 17, 2009 at 6:56 PM MDT

Officially known as the comprehensive environmental response compensation and liability act, or CERCLA, Superfund passed congress and was signed into law by President Jimmy Carter in 1980. The law allows state governments to request assistance from the Environmental Protection Agency in cleaning up highly contaminated industrial sites in their state.

"Eligibility,” says Gwen Christiansen, an EPA scientist based out of Denver, “is determined by sampling, and what we do is we look at the contamination itself, the pathways of the contamination and the targets."

Fourteen sites in Montana are in various stages of clean-up under Superfund, including the Neihart mining site in Cascade County and the Libby vermiculite mine in Lincoln County. The proposed clean-up of the former Anaconda-Atlantic Richfield smelter was a hot topic of discussion this week in Black Eagle. "And even in my house, there are boards that are, probably, from the anaconda company,” stated a Black Eagle resident during the public comment portion of the meeting.

State Representative Sue Dickenson lived in Black Eagle in the 1960s while the smelter was still operating, "I think its vitally important as a state that's relied on resource development for it’s whole history, to be realistic, to look at that some of that can have long-term, some serious health consequences."

A scoring system is used to determine whether a site is contaminated enough for listing on the "National Priorities List," any site scoring above twenty-eight point five is eligible for Superfund status. According to the EPA's Christiansen, the Black Eagle smelter site scores well above the minimum required for Superfund status. In most cases, the company responsible for the contamination is required to pay for the clean-up, according to government standards. "If, however, the responsible party is bankrupt,” she says, “then we have funds to conduct the clean-up ourselves."

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