People who live near the most toxic sites in America say they saw a level of attention they hadn't seen in decades under Trump. But what happens now?
, “a pretty, twenty-seven-year-old woman with jetblack hair who proved remarkably adept at dealing with experienced politicians and at keeping the matter in the news.” Top: A stream containing an oily substance—likely PCB oil—photographed July 29, 2020 in Minden, West Virginia.
Buried in a number of closed mines in the area, the substance has been found in nearby streams that eventually run to the New River, bottom right, a prime recreational river known for its whitewater rafting. | M. Scott Mahaskey / POLITICO If Earth Day and the 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill opened Americans’ eyes to the environmental destruction industrialization had wrought, Love Canal and its “angry housewives” did the same for the 35 million tons of toxic waste being dumped near communities every year. In 1980, Carter signed into law CERCLA, which would create a “superfund” to cover the costs of remediating these toxic sites. At the signing, Gibbs stood next to the president, a young woman in a cardigan and a white carnation in her hair in a sea of fat ties and yawning lapels. Superfund, as it was first conceived, was just that—a big pot of money. Ideally, when a site needed cleaning up, the EPA would make the polluting company remove or contain enough toxic waste to eliminate the threat to human health.the agency used its own money for the cleanup. And when a polluter couldn’t be ID’d at all, the Superfund covered the costs of remediation itself. Congress got the funds the easy way: taxing crude oil and common industrial chemicals. In the years since, though, “Superfund” has become a misnomer. The fund grew to nearly $4 billion by the time the “polluter pay” taxes expired in 1995. Gibbs lobbied anyone she could to extend the tax, but the Republican Congress wasn’t interested. The huge pot of cleanup money dwindled and emptied in 2003. As president, Obama vowed to reintroduce the taxes, but bills to reup the fees never left committee. Today, Superfund is just an allocation from the congressional budget—and a paltry one, at that: slightly more than $1 billion in 2020, and facing a 10-percent cut in Fiscal Year 2021. At least a third of all Superfund sites have no known polluter to cover the costs of clean up; in these places, Superfund’s shrunken allocation is the only chance a site has for cleanup. When the money runs out, nothing more gets cleaned up at those so-called orphan sites. “Without the polluter pay fees, the program can only tread water,” Gibbs says. Indiana University’s David Konisky, one of Superfund’s few scholars, agrees. “To make real improvements would require an investment of resources that haven’t been available for years,” he says. And although the environmental cause has been solely the domain of Democrats for 30 years, neglect for Superfund cleanups is a bipartisan affair. “This shit is not Republican or Democrat,” laments Dawn Chapman, an activist fighting to clean up the West Lake Landfill near her St. Louis home. “These contaminants hurt everybody.” Over lunch at Old Ebbitt, which neither Gibbs nor Kelly actually ate, the activist and the ex-banker came to an understanding:Ruins of a house photographed on July 29, 2020, in Minden, West Virginia. The home was located near a place where testing first indicated elevated water toxicity levels and eventually led to Minden being placed on the EPA’s Superfund site list. | M. Scott Mahaskey / POLITICOshe began to meet, and her disdain for the president was palpable. But it’s not like working with the previous administration had been a cakewalk. “Obama was terrible on these issues,” she says. And don’t get her started on Gina McCarthy, Obama’s EPA administrator, whose name is nearly always preceded by an epithet when it leaves Gibb’s mouth. “All she cared about was climate, everything else went to hell in a handbasket, whether it was water or environmental justice,” Gibbs says, adding, “Gina, that bitch!”Gibbs watched as the agency’s record under Trump and Pruitt began to read like something out of. Rules designed to keep water clean, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, promote chemical safety, limit coal pollution, ban dangerous pesticides, increase fuel efficiency, reduce air pollution, and cut power plant runoff had all been targeted by the former lobbyists and industry officials who now ran the country’s premier environmental regulator. This was a regulator that would, at the height of the coronavirus crisis, when 700 New Yorkers were dying each day and air pollution was directly linked to Covid-19, nearly all pollution enforcement. Trump’s EPA, in the words of the agency’s first administrator, the late Republican powerhouse William Ruckelshaus, seeks to “dismantle—not improve or reform—the regulatory system for protecting public health and the environment.”When Pruitt came in, she recounts, he created a Superfund taskforce to “revitalize” the program. The group identified 54 Superfund sites to emphasize, and all across these sites, Gibbs says, the agency has made significant progress, from new settlements with polluting parties to cleanup plans and shovel-in-the-ground remediation. And, even more surprisingly, officials are inking aggressive settlements with corporations on the hook for cleanups. All told, polluters are ponying up at 80 percent of the sites prioritized under Trump—a ten percent increase over the agency’s historical average. With tens of millions of dollars at stake, these settlements are heated, and negotiations can drag on years. Under the Trump administration, the EPA—an agency run by veterans of the coal, chemical and petroleum industries—has pushed for forceful deals with corporate behemoths like Dow, International Paper, Honeywell and Atlantic Richfield. Top: Remains of an abandoned residence set ablaze, photographed on August 10, 2020 in Minden, WV. Just a week prior, the house was photographed standing abandoned but intact. As illness forces residents away from Minden, a rash of arson fires have emerged to permanently remove structures that effectively render the land worthless. | M. Scott Mahaskey / POLITICO Implausible as it may sound, it’s not fully crazy to believe that the Trump administration has actually prioritized toxic clean ups. Kate Probst, an independent consultant and one of Superfund’s longest standing outside observers, says the program is likely the most palatable of all environmental options for this administration. “Superfund is not a regulatory program. It is the only non-regulatory program at EPA—it’s a cleanup,” she says. And if all politics is local, Superfund plays there too. “Whether you are a Republican or a Democrat, if you live near a site, or you’re a member of congress with a site in your district, you want that site cleaned up,” she adds, noting that cleanups bring cash infusions into regions in the form of contract work for construction and remediation. Superfund, Probst says, “is not the same as anything else at EPA.” “The success during the Trump administration thus far,” Gibbs’ organization, the Center for Health, Environment and Justice, writes in a recent report, “is mostly due to an ability to find responsible parties who were willing to foot the bill.” In sites in Nevada, Montana and Texas, the agency has threatened to sue polluters for triple the damages they caused, a trump card in the statute that has rarely been invoked. In May, as environmentalists decried the agency for loosening enforcement in the face of coronavirus pandemic, the cities and corporations responsible for polluting the Portland Harbor Superfund site cried hardship and asked the administration to reduce the scale and cost of the cleanup. The agency refused. “You know the last time I saw something like this?” Gibbs asks. “Never.” Early in the administration, Kelly, Pruitt’s ex-banker buddy, became an unexpected ally, too. He visited activists’ homes, dropping off documents in person. He remembered when a family member had a surgery and handed out his cell phone number to worried mothers. Multiple people told me they saw him tear up discussing the illnesses plaguing residents near toxic sites. The outsider with no environmental experience became a favorite among the exhausted, embittered activists. “Some people say, ‘Oh girls, he’s playing you.’ But I don’t think he was. There were no points to score,” says Chapman, the toxic landfill activist outside St. Louis. “He’s the reason why we were able to—and I’m going to throw this word in—forgive. He challenged us, I think, to see that these are human beings, too, at EPA.” Each quarter Gibbs gathers a dozen or so local activists and residents like Worley-Jenkins and Chapman, flies them out to Washington, and marches them up to the third floor of the EPA’s imposing Federal Triangle building. At the meetings, which Covid has now made virtual, residents who have often endured decades of being ignored by Washington discuss the fine-tooth details of their hometown cleanups with administrator Wheeler and a bevy of other political appointees. It’s a bizarre scene: liberal environmental activists sitting across the table from staffers at the most business-friendly EPA ever. At regular intervals, EPA representatives file out of the room because a specific case has been brought up that involves a company where they previously worked—a potential conflict of interest. But each activist Gibbs takes to the quarterly meetings has a story, a success or a breakthrough that only happened because of their remarkable access to the agency’s political leaders. At one meeting in early 2018, Worley-Jenkins recalled, her tale of Minden’s cancerous plight moved Kelly from exasperation to anger. The Superfund boss slammed his fist on the table and turned to the staff attorney sitting next to him. “What the hell are we going to do about this,” he bellowed. “It’s going on 10 years that I’ve been working with Superfund and we’ve never seen this level of communication and progress since administrator Pruitt came in,” says Jackie Young, head of the Texas Health and Environment Alliance and a fierce advocate for the San Jacinto Waste Pit site outside Houston. “It’s ironic, but the Trump administration does seem to be making Superfund its quote un quote environmental focus,” says Lee Ann Smith, leading citizen crusader at the CTS site in Asheville, North Carolina, adding “I’m hopeful.” On Superfund, says Larry Davis, who fights for the East Chicago USS Steel site, “some political appointees seemed to be pushing the envelope.” Kim Kasten, a Columbia University professor who works with a local non-profit at the Acton, MA site, feels optimistic. “We’re definitely seeing some motion,” she says. Linda Robles, who lives near the polluted Tucson Airport site, agrees: “They are doing good things. I have no complaints.” Susie Worley-Jenkins’ victory came in 2019, when Minden, WV was added to the National Priorities List, the roll call of Superfund’s worst sites, and a critical step toward getting cleaned up. Despite her unprecedented access, however, Gibbs says no mainstream environmental organizations are interested in her “big, creepy” quarterly meetings. Maligned by the administration and opposed to nearly every other thing this EPA has done, the green groups aren’t about to focus on a Trump priority. “Nobody from any of these environmental groups wants to attend,” Gibbs says. “Nobody has asked.” And several of her donors, “who are progressive people with money,” have made “remarks” about her closeness to the administration. In May of 2018, Democrats in the House targeted Kelly, too. Facing an ethics investigation into his banking days, he resigned. “I cried when Kell left, I tell you,” Chapman says. She and another activist “sat in her living room and sobbed. We felt like we had lost a true ally.” For Gibbs, saddled between an environmental movement unwilling to cooperate and an administration she can’t bring herself to trust, it’s been an uneasy place to operate. And despite all her successes, like most things in Trump World, the story gets more muddled the deeper you delve.had limited number of places we could live,” Charlie Powell says from his home in North Birmingham, Alabama. “And they only didPowell refers to is a toxic mix of zoning and willful negligence, a neighborhood pocked and stained with heavy industry. For decades, his old 35Avenue neighborhood has suffered the fallout from a two nearby coke oven plants, multiple asphalt batch plants, facilities that manufacture steel and piping, quarries, a coal gas storage tank and purification system, and the Birmingham-Shuttlesworth International Airport. Powell grew up in a large extended family, and the neighborhood took its toll. “It was 16 of us and there’s only six left,” he says of his childhood household. “And I’m the only one that’s lived to be 60. I’m 66. All my brothers dead but me. I got one sister left. It was 10 boys and six girls.” For a decade, the EPA has said it plans to clean up the North Birmingham Superfund site, but the urgency and efficiency that have characterized the Trump administration’s approach to high-profile cleanups elsewhere have been absent in Powell’s home town. “I don’t really know what the EPA have been doing,” Powell, now 67, says. “Round here, to me, I think the whole thing is useless.” Sherie Huggins, 32, teaches her daughter Paris Powell, 6, to ride without training wheels in Birmingham, AL, on January 7, 2018. In the background a stack from ERP Coke juts above the landscape. Huggins said"it smells sometimes." | Bonnie Jo Mount/The Washington Post via Getty Images Selecting which Superfund sites get cleaned up and when is an inherently fraught decision. There’s not enough money to clean up every site in America and work deferred is more time residents spend suffering near toxic waste. But the Trump administration’s approach to prioritizing sites has left behind the Americans most often relegated to suffer the effects of environmental degradation: people of color. When the administration chose to make Superfund its environmental priority in 2017, it had to decide which sites were deserving of attention. But instead of simply picking the most polluted locations or the ones that threatened the most people, the agency took a different tack:Pruitt’s Superfund Task Force made for improving the program, more than half focused on creating and promoting redevelopment opportunities at sites. Finding ways to reuse or redevelop sites has been a Superfund priority for 20 years—Obama’s assistant administrator, Mathy Stanislaus, was particularly keen on it—but the Trump administration has taken it to new levels. Redeveloping sites bring contractor dollars into local districts and is excellent retail politics. And the emphasis shouldn’t surprise anyone, observers say: “The president is a developer!” former Obama EPA assistant administrator Thomas Burke says. But while finding uses for toxic sites may be admirable, Kate Probst says, “development isn’t in the law and shouldn’t be the priority.”explicitly prioritized and promoted . Toxic sites with primo redevelopment opportunities got an interactive map and glossy one-pagers, pamphlets reminiscent of the sheets realtors hand out at open houses. The EPA declined to make any official available for this story, but talking points sent over “on background” noted that promoting outside investments and redevelopment were key components of this newly prioritized Superfund program. In total, of the 54 sites the Task Force group decided to emphasize, 28 were promoted exclusively for their redevelopment possibilities. But it turns out the population near all these sites doesn’t look like a normal Superfund neighborhood. Across the country, people of color make up the majority of the residents near about half of all Superfund sites. The reasons why are warily familiar to people like Charlie Powell—redlining, zoning dangerous industries near poorer neighborhoods, lack of outreach and awareness. The cost is familiar, too. “Right now, my wife has phase 4 cancer,” Powell says, which he suspects is in connection to the site.the Obama administration prioritized Superfund clean ups in these majority-minority neighborhoods. But when Gibbs asked her researchers to look at the demographics of sites the Trump administration has focused on, a different pattern emerged. Under Trump, the practice has reversed. A full 61 percent of the communities Trump’s EPA has prioritized and promoted have been majority-white,. In other words: Trump’s Superfund focus has benefited white people more than people of color. A spokesperson for the EPA said that the sites the administration chose to prioritize represent a tiny fraction of the 1,339 sites currently on the National Priorities List and that cleanups have continued across the country. The sites the EPA under Trump prioritized were “were chosen because opportunities existed to accelerate the timely resolution of specific issues to move cleanups forward,” the spokesperson said. “EPA is dedicated to addressing risk and accelerating progress towards cleanup at all sites on the NPL, and we strive to work closely with all communities to provide opportunities and resources for them to be involved in the Superfund process.” Darrell “Butter” Thomas, photographed in July 2020 near a wall that seals an abandoned coal mine now believed to store remains of PCB oil in Minden, West Virginia. | M. Scott Mahaskey / POLITICOWorley-Jenkins’ friend Butter—Darrell Thomas, to anybody who doesn’t know him—took me out to one of his “honey holes.” Minden is exactly the kind of place Superfund is designed to fix. Industry poisoned Minden. Butter, who is mustached and wearing three different camo prints across his pants, jacket and hat, walks the muddy valley every day, even on these cold winter afternoons, and sees the evidence everywhere.Bring a pair of shoes you can throw away,” Worley-Jenkins had told me before I came to Minden, “because you don’t want to take any of this crap back with you,”—and I slipped as I followed Butter into what looked like idyllic woodland. “You can see the oil here all the time,” Butter said, trudging up a creek. We were on the site of the old Shaffer machine shop and slicks sat atop the water. PCBs, industrial products that were banned in 1979, “are insidious,” says Boston University’s David Sherr. They cause neurological disorders, cancers and other unknown disorders, he says, and they persist in nature for decades. EPA contractors are working the week I visit to remediate this site, but they’re working in small chunks—a couple hundred yards at a time. Butter walked me around the hollow, from the abandoned mines where he drank beers as a teenager to abandoned buildings where the previous generation of Mindeners worked before the mines closed. All along the way he pauses to point out sheens and chemicals. In Minden, the polluter should be on the hook for the clean-up. But there’s a catch here, the same catch that will ensure hundreds of sites are never cleaned up under the Trump administration. After the Trump administration’s EPA cuts, in real dollars, Superfund’s budget today is lower than it ever has been.that there were 34 Superfund sites where plans for remediation had been inked, but the agency lacked funding to carry out any work. It was the highest number of these “unfunded” sites in recent memoryDespite real successes and efforts that moved residents to joyful tears, Superfund can’t function on its shoestring budget. After bragging about the large number of cleanups completed in 2017 and 2018, finished sites dropped to just six last year, the lowest number since 1986. At a hearing in February, Democrats pressed Wheeler on the cuts’ impact on Superfund. He defended the curtailed budget, telling members that the agency’s aggressive settlements with polluting corporations would pick up the slack. “We're increasing enforcement actions,” he testified. “We go after responsible parties.” But that’s not the case in Minden, where self-inflicted budgetary constraints will be felt most dearly. Butter and Worley-Jenkins knew the men who ran Shaffer Equipment Co and, like so many locals, cancer took them years ago. Minden, like almost a third of all Superfunds, is a so-called “orphan site”—poisoned land with no existing corporation to foot the bill. Under previous administrations, orphan sites were often given extra attention. But under Trump, their neglect has been nearly complete. Just five of the 54 sites this administration chose to prioritize and promote are orphans. While going after polluters aggressively allowed the agency to fund cleanups elsewhere, budget cuts mean the EPA cannot possibly afford to clean up the country’s hundreds of orphan sites. Here in Minden, even though the administration moved its Superfund to the National Priorities List—showed up at the white church on the main road with a senator and local poohbahs, drew up plans for remediation, hauled contaminated dirt from a lot the size of a basketball court— without a corporate polluter on the hook, the administration can’t possibly remediate the place. Across the country, sites with dire public health threats but no responsible corporate party to pay the bill are languishing. And they will continue to, casualties of the administration’s refusal to fund its most effective environmental program and its decision to ignore the most helpless of America’s poisoned places. Snow sticks to the oak leaves and Butter says he doesn’t think Minden will ever get cleaned up. “They’re not going to do anything,” he says. And chances are, he’s right. Butter still walks the valley every day, looking for evidence of toxics to try to tell the EPA to clean up. “A lot of people can’t care anymore. I probably wouldn’t leave, even if I could. But I got a lot of friends died, a lot who probably will die. So, I’m in it for them.” What Trump and his administration have done to Superfund is not some grand revisioning or even, frankly, a revitalization. It’s a defibrillator shock to a program with a faint pulse, a jerking, uneven effort to clean up only some places. What worked for the first two or three years of this administration won’t work now that the money has run out. The surge in unfunded sites makes it clear that Superfund, financially starved and under strain, cannot possibly handle its vast workload. The administration’s focus on cleanups where corporations can foot the bill, surprising and startling as it may be, has been a lifeline for some Americans and a condemnation for others. Annetta Coffman, 45, and Percy Fruit, 65, just two of the scores of Minden residents who say they have become sick or had family members become sick because of the conditions there. | M. Scott Mahaskey / POLITICO Gibbs has accepted that she’s gotten all she can from her relationship with this administration. “Under Republicans and Democrats, if Superfund had money we could move it,” she says. “But not now.” Trump will never clean up the orphan sites, Gibbs says. Until recently, there wasn’t much reason for optimism from a Democratic administration either. For much of Biden’s campaign, his focus has been on climate. But this summer, the Democratic National Committee’s progressive Council on the Environment and Climate Crisis decided to stake out a claim on Superfund. They want to balloon Superfund’s budget back to 1999 levels—about $2.3 billion—and, even more critically, an official familiar with the council’s workings told me that reinstating polluter pay fees are central to any plans they have for Superfund. The DNC’s 93-page August platform wasn’t so explicit—it mentions Superfund just once—but it did call for holding companies accountable for the environmental damage they wreak. Gibbs is cautiously optimistic about a Biden presidency—or savvy enough not to poison any reservoir of influence she could have with a future administration—and if the Democrats win this November, she’ll push hard for reinstating the polluter pay fees, the tax on polluting corporations that could help fund cleanups at orphan sites like Minden. “I have no bones about embarrassing myself in taking steps outside the ‘professional’ realm,” she says. “I’m tired of the fact that taxpayers have to pay to clean up the mess,” she says, tired that money that could have gone to social services and schools and housing instead went to papering over polluters’ sins, tired that this has all cost “innocent poor communities of color their rights to clean air, water and soil.” Darrell “Butter” Thomas drives by a structure displaying a Trump campaign flag on July 29, 2020 in Minden, West Virginia. | M. Scott Mahaskey / POLITICOWhen she helped midwife Superfund, back in 1980, no one thought it was going to be forever. There has always been an inclination to put an end date on the program. Whether because of optimism or naiveté or malice, people always figured the program would one day wrap up—that we would one day clean up our messes. But 40 years on, there are still 1,339 Superfund sites on the National Priorities List. What was once nightly news is barely local news anymore. “My phone stopped ringing years ago,” says Kate Probst, the Superfund expert. “I am so upset that I won’t be able to do this in my lifetime,” Gibbs says. On the day I left Minden, a refrain I heard again and again during my reporting replayed in my brain: The only people who care about Superfund these days are the folks who live near one. On the drive back to Washington, I marveled at how easy it was for me to leave these sites behind, to drive away and escape their toxicity. Superfund sites rarely look like the disaster zones from the movies; they are the innocuous industrial lots and muddy streams that litter this country, everywhere and nowhere. In Washington, I pulled into a parking lot and stripped off the old tennis shoes Susie Worley-Jenkins had told me to bring to West Virginia. Standing in my socks and taking care not to dislodge any of the caked-on Minden dirt, I tossed them in the garbage and went on my way.
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