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EPA Adds Two Hazardous Waste Sites in North Carolina to Superfund’s National Priorities List EPA also proposes to add two new sites in Florida and one in North Carolina to the NPL

Release Date: 09/23/2009
Contact Information: Laura Niles, (404) 562-8353, niles.laura@epa.gov

(Atlanta, Ga. – September 23, 2009) The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is adding the Ore Knob Mine site in Ashe County, N.C. and GMH Electronics site in Roxboro, N.C., in addition to 9 new hazardous waste sites nationally that pose risks to human health and the environment, to the National Priorities List (NPL) of Superfund sites. Also, EPA is proposing to add the JJ Seifert Machine site in Ruskin, Fla., the Kerr-McGee Chemical Corp. site in Jacksonville, Fla., and the Kerr-McGee Chemical Corp. site in Navassa, N.C. to the list. Superfund is the federal program that investigates and cleans up the most complex, uncontrolled or abandoned hazardous waste sites in the country.

To date, there have been 1,607 sites listed on the NPL. Of these sites, 336 sites have been deleted resulting in 1,271 sites currently on the NPL (including the 11 new final sites added in today’s rulemaking). With the proposal of the 10 new sites, there are 66 proposed sites awaiting final agency action: 61 in the general Superfund section and five in the federal facilities section. There are a total of 1,337 final and proposed sites.

With all Superfund sites, EPA tries to identify and locate the parties potentially responsible for the contamination. For the newly listed sites without viable potentially responsible parties, EPA will investigate the full extent of the contamination before starting significant cleanup at the site. Therefore, it may be several years before significant cleanup funding is required for these sites.

Sites may be placed on the list through various mechanisms:

Numeric ranking established by EPA’s Hazard Ranking System

Designation by states or territories of one top-priority site

Meeting all three of the following requirements:

The Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR) of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has issued a health advisory that recommends removing people from the site;

EPA determines the site poses a significant threat to public health; and

EPA anticipates it will be more cost-effective to use its remedial authority than to use its emergency removal authority to respond to the site.