The Department of Justice and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced have reached an agreement with more then three dozen companies and government agencies that will result in a $56.4 million cleanup of the “Malone Services Company” Superfund Site in Texas City, Texas. The former waste-disposal site is near the shore of Galveston Bay. The deal avoids costly and time-consuming litigation.
The settlement – subject to a likely court approval – requires a group of 27 companies to clean up the site, pay EPA $900,000 towards past and future costs, and reimburse the state of Texas for $796,726 in past costs. Among the companies doing the clean-up work are BP Products North America Inc., Pharmacia (formerly Monsanto), Marathon Oil Company, Exxon Mobil Corporation and BASF Corporation.
Seventy-six entities, including the United States and the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) are resolving their liability by paying cash to the group of 27. The United States, which shipped 1.62% of the waste, will pay $1,490,029. TCEQ, which shipped 0.00545% of the waste, will contribute $6,766.
EPA previously completed four rounds of administrative settlements with approximately 230 relatively small contributors of waste, so-called “de minimis” parties, collecting approximately $8.4 million. EPA will make at least $4.5 million from these and other recoveries available to the group of 27 companies carrying out the cleanup.
“Cleanup under today’s settlement will address the threat from more than a quarter of a million cubic yards of contamination left behind by the site operators in tanks and in a large unlined earthen basin,” said Robert Dreher, Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General of the Justice Department’s Environment and Natural Resources Division.
“Once approved by the court, this settlement will reinforce the ‘polluter pays’ principle that is central to the Superfund program by obtaining a commitment for funds for cleanup work from the responsible parties at this site,” said EPA Acting Regional Administrator Sam Coleman.
The federal and state natural resource trustees for the site — the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the U.S. Department of the Interior represented by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, TCEQ, the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department and the Texas General Land Office — determined that natural resources associated with upland-woodlands habitat, freshwater-marsh habitat and saltwater-marsh habitat, were injured by contamination.
The parties that shipped waste to the site will pay the trustees a total of $3,109,000 to implement environmental restoration projects, which will be selected in the future by the trustees and described in a restoration plan on which public comment will be solicited.
The Malone Service Company operated a disposal facility for waste oil and waste chemicals between approximately 1964 and 1996. Hundreds of entities sent a total of approximately 481 million gallons of waste to the Site. Approximately 260,000 cubic yards of contaminated oily sludge is present in above-ground storage tanks and a multi-acre earthen impoundment.
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