Tagged: Superfund cleanup

There’s a major milestone this week in the cleanup of Seattle’s Duwamish River. Excavators are removing toxic sludge from one of the most polluted spots in the city’s industrial core. Completion of this work will allow cleanup on the rest of the river. 

But critics say there are already signs it won’t go far enough.

It’s one of the most polluted waterways in all of the Pacific Northwest. The lower five miles of Seattle’s Duwamish River were listed as a Superfund site a decade ago. This week, cleanup work has begun on one of its most toxic sections. 

Medford, Ore -- The Environmental Protection Agency placed a housing development in Southern Oregon on the superfund list Thursday.

Eighty people, about half of them children, used to live at North Ridge Estates in Klamath Falls. The EPA began cleaning up asbestos there in 2003. The agency removed almost 150 tons of contaminated soil and debris, the remains of army barracks that had once been on the site. But each spring, more asbestos worked its way to the surface.

An environmental clean-up settlement could also be a mini-stimulus for the Inland Northwest economy. A federal judge has approved the Hecla Mining company's $263 million settlement in one of the largest superfund clean-up projects in the country.