NEW BEDFORD – Between $25 million and $35 million in federal stimulus dollars will be used to speed up the cleanup of contamination in New Bedford Harbor, federal and state officials announced today.
The new administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Lisa Jackson, announced the funding at a news conference that was also attended by Mass. Gov. Deval L. Patrick, U.S. Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., and New Bedford Mayor Scott Lang. U.S. Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass., who is battling brain cancer, was expected to join by phone.
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“EPA has an answer to these challenging economic times,” Jackson said in a statement. “Under the Recovery Act, we’re getting harmful pollutants and dangerous chemicals out of these communities and putting jobs and investment back in,” she said, referring to the official name of the stimulus package, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.
From the 1940s through the 1970s, two electrical capacitor manufacturing plants contaminated the sediment in New Bedford Harbor with discharges of toxic PCB (polychlorinated biphenyls) waste, according to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which describes it as “one of the largest and most challenging hazardous waste sites in the country.”
PCBs were banned in 1973, and the EPA designated New Bedford Harbor, along with parts of the Acushnet River and Buzzards Bay, as a Superfund site in 1983. The Superfund is a special trust fund created by a 1980 federal law and paid for by fines on polluters to finance the restoration of contaminated sites.
EPA says it has spent more than $250 million on the New Bedford Harbor cleanup project over the past quarter century. As of last fall, the agency said it had cleaned up only about 14 percent of the roughly 880,000 cubic yards of contaminated sediment in the harbor, and estimated it would take another 38 years to complete the project if funding levels remained the same.
The New Bedford Harbor cleanup is receiving the largest portion of roughly $600 million in Superfund cleanup funding that Jackson is to announce today, The Associated Press said.
Kennedy, Frank and other lawmakers wrote a letter to Jackson asking her to allocate $110 million for the harbor cleanup over the next two years, according to The AP. In recent years, about $15 million has been earmarked for the project annually.
“We’ve been on this mission for more than 30 years, and today is a celebration for New Bedford,” Kennedy said in a statement. “We can see the light at the end of the tunnel.”
For more information on the New Bedford Harbor Superfund site, visit EPA.gov.
