Jonathan Campbell, Health Consultant
Natural Therapies for Chronic Illness & Health Maintenance

ToxicAlert

Helping people take charge of their health

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The EPA "Superfund" (CERCLIS) List

"Superfund" is the commonly-used name for the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Contamination and Liability Act (the "Superfund" law). The Environmental Protection Agency was empowered to accept reports of toxic spills and pollution, and created the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Contamination and Liability Information System (CERCLIS) database.

The EPA now maintains these lists in up-to-date, searchable, form at http://www.epa.gov/superfund/sites/ and you can download the complete databases at http://www.epa.gov/superfund/sites/phonefax/products.htm. In addition, the EPA main search engine can often find site information if you just type the name of the company in the search box.

Once you have found a site, you can use its EPA site number to search the entire EPA website for more information, or call the EPA Regional Office and ask to get a copy of the "Consultant's Report" for the site, and, if any available, remediation reports. They charge between 30c and 50c per page for copying.

Below are the state-by-state lists extracted from the EPA CERCLIS database of 1997. They include all sites from the "current" Superfund list and from the "archive" list - those in the original CERCLIS database but later removed from the "current" listing.

A large number of sites were removed from the Superfund "current" list as a result of agreements by the companies involved to perform the cleanup privately, whether or not the cleanup has actually been performed adequately, although many of these sites have been properly remediated. Some were removed because a decision was made that the contamination was not severe enough for Superfund listing. The highest priority sites were placed on a special list called the National Priority List (NPL). There are a total of more than 40,000 CERCLIS sites in the U.S. and its territories, of which only about 1000 were chosen as priority cleanup sites. Call the EPA Regional Office to check the status of a site.

In general, CERCLIS sites are those where serious hazards exist or have existed which are threats to health. Most states have reporting mechanisms for hazardous waste problems, and only the most serious of these incidents are reported to EPA for the Superfund list. For example, the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection lists over 8,000 sites, of which only about 1,000 were placed on the CERCLIS list.

Note: the lists for states with a large concentration of industrial development are large - some 200K bytes or more. Please be patient.

The entries for each site includes only name, address, city, and EPA file number.

There is also a website you can use to track the cleanup levels of many Superfund sites. I do not usually endorse other commercial websites, but this website appears to be unique in the amount of data that they can provide regarding these sites, data that would take most people enormous amounts of time and money to find and classify.

The website is: http://www.cleanuplevel.com.