West Lake Landfill. (Linda Davidson/The Washington Post)
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About a week after the start of the partial government shutdown last month, Dawn Chapman and Karen Nickel emailed Environmental Protection Agency officials about what the lapse in funding meant for them and other residents of Bridgeton, Mo. who live near a nuclear waste dump.
The pair of activists said they were told they would no longer be able to reach officials they normally spoke with at the EPA’s regional office near Kansas City. They worried about what would happen if there were an accident at the nearby landfill contaminated with radioactive waste dating back to the World War II-era Manhattan Project. Just as recently as November, a surface fire broke out near the nuclear dump.
Steven Cook, a top-level Trump official at the EPA’s Office of Land and Emergency Response, assured them that the agency’s emergency spill line would still be manned throughout the shutdown. But, he added in an email Chapman provided to The Post, “Please be mindful that we may be limited in our ability to provide a substantive response depending on the issue involved.”
Communities living near toxic Superfund sites like West Lake in Missouri feel on edge and in the dark during the shutdown that has paralyzed normal functions at agencies like the EPA.
The shutdown is cramping efforts by Trump officials to revitalize the nearly 40-year-old Superfund program — designed to clean up more than 1,300 hazardous sites around the country — and put many residents waiting years for a federal response at ease.
“It’s so crazy that a site can be listed like ours, and then overnight we lose contact with the federal agency responsible for overseeing it,” Chapman said in an interview. “It’s like they have officially just gone away.”
The shutdown threatens to fray already strained relations between affected communities and the federal government, which residents often see as too sluggish in its cleanup efforts.
“In the world of Superfund, the community relationships with the agency are always a big issue,” said Peter deFur, an environmental consultant working on Superfund issues.
