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This article is the second in a five-day series that won the 1993 AAAS/Westinghouse Science Journalism Award.

Superfund, The Road to Nowhere, Day 2

Relocated lives: In 1981, 21 families were uprooted to make way for the Southern Connector. Twelve years later, the anguish remains.

From The Burlington Free Press, Feb. 8, 1993

By Nancy Bazilchuk

John Van Sleet and his wife lived in their quiet Burlington home for 17 years. They loved their house because they could walk to Queen City Park on Lake Champlain and to nearby shops.

Then one day 12 years ago the state sent them a letter and told them they had 30 days to pack their bags and move, to make way for a road. The road, the Southern Connector, has never been completed.

"We got a road where my house is, and no one can use it,'' Van Sleet said. ''I am thoroughly disgusted. ... We like to walk. Now where we live (in South Burlington) we have to take a car everywhere.''

The Van Sleets weren't the only ones who were moved for the road to nowhere. There was Marjorie Sleeper, who moved out of the house her father built for her. Her mother, who was in her 90s at the time, lived next door. She moved, too. The move was so painful for Sleeper that she did not want to talk about it more than a decade later.

Twenty-one families moved. A total of $24 million was spent to design the road and build the one-mile section that ends near the former Van Sleet home. The congestion it was designed to ease has grown worse, and state officials say they don't think the road will ever be finished.

Even as Transportation Agency officials were planning and building the road, they were involved in a struggle with the Environmental Protection Agency that would eventually stop the road as surely as a huge cement roadblock.

The argument was over the fate of the Pine Street Barge Canal Superfund site, 60 acres of contaminated swamp land that lies in the cradle of Burlington harbor on the shores of Lake Champlain. The land was contaminated with coal tar, dumped and spilled behind a plant that made gas for heating and lighting f for nearly 60 years. Transportation Agency officials knew as early as 1968 the swamp where they hoped to build the road was contaminated. Nonetheless, they hoped to build their way around the problem.

What they did not factor into their plans was Superfund, the nation's hazardous waste law.

The Pine Street Barge Canal was Vermont's first site named for cleanup under the 1980 law. Like 102 of the other 115 Superfund sites on the original November 1981 list, it has yet to be cleaned up.

Nationwide, there are 1,275 Superfund sites; 44 others were considered clean enough to be removed from the list. The slow pace of cleanups is a result in part of bad management by the EPA, federal studies indicate. Vermont state officials would agree with the assessment.

Officials said if they had known then what they know now, they never would have tried to run the road through the waste site. At first, the site seemed like a technical problem that EPA would help the state solve. Then, for no apparent reason, the encouraging messages from the federal agency changed.

"It was always EPA's ball game, and EPA kept changing the rules as to what they wanted from us,'' said John Malter, who supervised the site for the Vermont Environmental Conservation Agency.

The changing rules had disastrous and costly results. The Transportation Agency spent $505,000 on a study of contamination at the site that EPA, after initial encouragement, finally rejected.

At one point, after a letter from EPA said no federal permits were needed for the Transportation Agency's cleanup plan, officials went ahead and bought two charcoal filters, at a cost of $26,985. The filters still sit behind a Colchester warehouse.

Transportation officials were so sure they would be able to work out technical difficulties with EPA that they purchased three parcels of land for the road well after the land had been declared part of the Superfund site. Those purchases made the state potentially liable for the entire cost of the cleanup.

A marshy, vacant site

In 1965, a state study suggested that Burlington build a four-lane beltway around the city to ease the north-south flow of traffic. That idea gradually gelled in a proposal to build northern and southern connectors to bring traffic into the city and its downtown shopping center. By 1973, city officials, including Mayor Gordon Paquette, saw the connectors as vital to the economic heart of the city.

The southern part of the city, especially, was snarled in an asphalt jungle of roads that snaked through small neighborhoods. U.S. 7 was choked with traffic. Pine Street, which paralleled U.S. 7, was equally congested. By 1976, then-state traffic engineer Gordon MacArthur proposed for the first time routing about a mile of the 2.5-mile road through the marshy, vacant land -- the Barge Canal site, parallel to Pine Street.

From the earliest proposals, the concept of the Southern Connector faced citizen opposition because families would have to be moved. The Transportation Agency persisted, however. In March 1981 the state's District 5 Environmental Commission gave the agency a land-use permit to build the road as long as an estimated 200,000 cubic yards of contaminated coal tars at the site were removed. The cost of moving the coal tar looked prohibitive. Enter Superfund.

Sen. Robert Stafford, R-Vt., was instrumental in passing the nation's first hazardous waste cleanup law in 1980. He pulled strings to get the Barge Canal on the list, despite the opposition of state environmental officials. With Stafford's intervention, the EPA and Superfund became a party to the work being done on the site.

A brief honeymoon

After initial haggling about what needed to be done, the parties settled down to work. The honeymoon was brief, however. It wasn't long before letters to EPA officials rained down on the Boston office from anxious Vermont. Files indicate the state asked EPA officials for help in understanding how Superfund would affect road construction.

State officials were told one thing by the EPA, while staff members were told another, said John Ponsetto, then-commissioner of environmental conservation, to Merrill Hohman, chief of the EPA Boston division that oversees Superfund sites.

Ponsetto recognized that Superfund gave EPA the authority to approve every move the state made on the Barge Canal.

"Please advise me if you see any problems with the approach we are taking,'' Ponsetto wrote in an Oct. 20, 1982, letter asking for help with the law.

The records indicate no answer from Hohman. Later, state officials tried again.

"The Agency (of Environmental Conservation) has repeatedly requested EPA ... for a policy decision on whether EPA permits for treatment and disposal will be necessary at this site,'' wrote Richard Valentinetti, Environmental Conservation Agency Air and Solid Waste director, in a Feb. 15, 1983, letter.

By then, Perkins-Jordan, the contractor to the Transportation Agency, had devised a cleanup plan. Before building the road, the plan was to squeeze the highly compressible, coal-tar soaked peat with weights so the coal tar and the groundwater could be collected and treated in a special $8 million wastewater treatment plant.

Hohman wrote back this time. In an April 7, 1983, letter, Hohman told Valentinetti no federal permits were needed because the coal tar wastes were not considered hazardous, according to federal law.

With that information, and certain of state permits to clean up the site, the Transportation Agency ordered the charcoal filters for the treatment plant. To this day, the filters sit behind a Colchester warehouse, waiting for the road that might never be built.

Part of the problem

As late as 1987, the state, the EPA and the Federal Highway Administration appeared to be working toward the same goal -- cleanup of the Barge Canal and construction of the Southern Connector.

Unfortunately, the working partnership was complicated by constant changes in EPA project managers -- the EPA engineers who supervise work on just a few sites and work closely with state agency staff. Since the site came under Superfund jurisdiction 12 years ago, there have been at least nine project managers.

"It was almost unbearable to deal with the changing of the guard," Malter said. "I got the feeling after a while we were the training ground for new project managers. We saw an awful lot of people go through the door.''

Arthur Goss, then-director of planning for the Transportation Agency, remembers one incident when ''the person that was supposed to be following the project was transferred out west, and the files disappeared.''

"Every time we tried to talk to those people, we got a different answer,'' he said, often because a different person was responsible for the site. The concerns expressed by Malter and Goss eventually gained the attention of management.

In response to complaints by Jonathan Lash, then-Vermont Water Resources commissioner, an EPA official listed a chronology of meetings held between the state and the EPA to show how closely the groups were working.

"The enclosed chronology will, I believe, demonstrate the close coordination that has been ongoing between EPA and state staff,'' wrote Paul Keough, deputy director for the EPA's Boston office, in an April 20, 1987, letter to Lash.

The relationship had to be more formal, Keough said, because the state was considered by EPA to be possibly legally responsible for the entire cost of cleanup. That legal complication came from the Transportation Agency's purchase of three plots of land in the Superfund site, in March and April 1984 and April 1986.

"It definitely bought us the liability,'' said Thomas Viall, assistant attorney general for the Transportation Agency, who declined to comment further on the purchase because of the legal issues involved.

"We had willing sellers,'' said Gordon MacArthur, director of engineering for the Transportation Agency, defending the purchases. ''We took advantage of that.'' The purchases threw a monkey wrench into a complicated relationship, MacArthur said.

"We became part of the problem rather than part of the solution,'' he said.

Chilly relationship

By 1990, the relationship had become antagonistic. EPA officials said the Southern Connector road could not be built until the Barge Canal was cleaned up.

It took congressional assistance to set up a May 1990 meeting between state and federal officials, Burlington Mayor Peter Clavelle said.

Notes from the meeting reflect the chilly relationship.

"Since EPA has taken the lead on the Barge Canal Superfund site, progress in addressing the cleanup issues, essential to the furtherance of the roadway project, has slowed to a crawl,'' Transportation Agency notes said. The road as constructed ''stands as a mute testimony to the bureaucratic inefficiency which has lately characterized this project.''

State officials hoped to persuade the EPA to allow the road to pass through the edges of the site so S-curve shaped links could be made around the site to Pine Street. Progress was made. At the meeting, EPA agreed to test areas of the site that could be used for the S-curves.

Since May, EPA has made an effort to expedite investigation of the areas you identified as being of concern,'' wrote Ross Gilleland, in a Dec. 4, 1990, letter to then-Transportation Secretary Paul Philbrook. EPA should have the sampling results available in ''three months or less,'' Gilleland said.

Even though the EPA agreed to do the tests, however, the agency refused to release them.

The results had to be obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request, said Clavelle, in a letter thanking Sen. James Jeffords, R-Vt., for his help.

Clavelle's experiences with Superfund have given him a new appreciation of the problems cities and towns nationwide face.

"I find it deeply disturbing that EPA considers their own actions acceptable at this site, and I am concerned about the fate of those near Superfund sites far more toxic than ours,'' he wrote in the Oct. 4, 1991, letter to Jeffords. Clavelle wrote that he was especially concerned because the EPA told him that ''since 1987, work has proceeded (on the Barge Canal) at a pace consistent with other Superfund sites of this size and complexity.''

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