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This article is the introduction to a five-part series that won the 1993 AAAS/Westinghouse Science Journalism Award.

Superfund: The Road to Nowhere: A Five-Part Investigative Series

Day 1: Drowning in bureaucracy

After millions of dollars and more than a decade of research, the fate of the Barge Canal cleanup remains mired in red tape.

From The Burlington Free Press, February 7, 1993

By Nancy Bazilchuk

Back behind the Transportation Agency's District Five maintenance garage in Colchester, past the salt sheds and a mountain of gravel, sits a 10-foot-long, gray steel box. It is slim and not too tall, much like a giant's shoe box. Slender poplar trees crowd its corners, testifying to years of abandonment.

The box has been there so long -- nine years -- that few agency employees know it exists. Many of the people responsible for its 1984 purchase have retired.

The box holds $26,985 worth of high-tech carbon filters, acquired by the state in its aborted efforts to clean up thousands of tons of gooey coal tar wastes dumped in the Burlington Pine Street Barge Canal Superfund site wetlands.

The filters have never been used and the problem they were purchased to fix remains.

Eleven years after the Barge Canal was declared one of the worst toxic dumps in America, coal tar wastes still sit on the shores of Lake Champlain, where they were dumped for more than 40 years. The sticky, black coal tars are what's left from a Burlington-manufactured gas plant that turned coal into gas for heating, cooking and lighting.

A road designed to speed traffic into downtown Burlington at a proposed price tag of $38 million ends in a vacant field because the wastes lie squarely in its path. With the approval of the Environmental Protection Agency, state officials spent four years designing a cleanup to allow them to build the road -- only to have EPA officials tell them they needed to start all over. Twenty-one families were uprooted to make way for this road to nowhere.

After millions of dollars and more than a decade of research, the EPA has finally proposed a solution for the Superfund site – a $50 million cleanup plan that might do more harm than good.

The environmental and health threats from the site are not known, despite years of study. EPA officials say the coal tars, locked up in the spongy peat of the Barge Canal, do not pose a significant health risk.

They say wastes haven't contaminated Lake Champlain -- based on just a handful of samples. They say toxic fumes are not percolating out of the coal tar-laden soils based on one day of flawed testing.

What is at risk, officials say, are the clams and worms at home in the sediments of the Barge Canal. Fish and beavers and muskrats might be threatened by the coal tars, too, they say. Officials' fears aren't backed up by the facts. They say fish might be affected by the coal tars -- but they caught the wrong fish for analysis. The fish they did catch sat so long in a laboratory that the toxic chemicals they might have harbored evaporated.

Officials say they will restore the health of the Barge Canal by digging up enough wastes to fill a football field more than 100 feet deep -- with the risk that toxic fumes might waft out of the wastes when they are dug up.

The pile of wastes will be mounded into a 13-acre, 25-foot-high landfill. The landfill will become one of Burlington's largest structures. Because the weight of the wastes might squeeze coal tar out of the soil, the landfill will be a headache for the next generation, too.

Vermont's experience with the Pine Street Barge Canal typifies all that is wrong with Superfund, the nation's hazardous waste cleanup law. Since the law was passed in 1980, 1,275 sites nationwide have been added to Superfund's cleanup list, and Congress has appropriated $15.2 billion. Only 44 sites have been completely cleaned up. Of those 44, only 12 are from the 115 sites first named, like the Barge Canal, for Superfund cleanup. Experts say the nation might spend more than $700 billion in the next three decades to clean up Superfund hazardous waste sites.

The EPA program Americans have trusted with the cleanup -- and the purse strings problems. Countless government reports have identified Superfund's chief troubles: contractor mismanagement, bad communication between the state and federal governments, flawed risk analyses, cleanups that take too long, and solutions that just transfer the problem to the next generation.

All those troubles have played a part in the Barge Canal's woes.

Few of the reports tell the true costs of the mismanagement, the agony and anger of people wrenched from their homes by a road that was stopped as much by bureaucratic bungling as the black goop in the Barge Canal.

Nothing symbolizes the confusion and mismanagement more than Vermont's $26,985 carbon filters, sitting abandoned in a field of weeds.

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