Congressional watchdog to study Superfund site risks posed by disasters, climate change

A top government watchdog group is planning to study the risk that natural disasters and climate change pose to the nation’s Superfund sites.

The Government Accountability Office (GAO), Congress’s watchdog arm, told a group of Democratic senators last month that it would accept their request to do such a study and would start work in about four months. The lawmakers released the letter Friday.

The request came after a historic hurricane season, with major hurricanes, including Harvey, Irma and Maria, hitting the United States. {mosads}

More than a dozen Superfund sites were damaged or flooded when Harvey hit Texas, and one started to leak. People in Puerto Rico drank water from a Superfund site after Maria hit, but the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) later found the water was clean.

Sens. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.), Tom Carper (D-Del.) and others on the Environment and Public Works Committee cited projections about climate change in seeking the GAO investigation into the EPA’s management of the 1,300 or so highly polluted Superfund sites around the country.

“According to the EPA, remediation efforts at contaminated sites may be vulnerable to the impacts of climate change, such as rising sea levels and increased inland flooding due to increased heavy precipitation events,” they wrote.

The Democrats asked that the GAO examine questions like what sites are at risk from disasters, what the environmental and health risks are, what the EPA is doing to manage the risks and how funding decreases impact the issue.

The GAO’s decision to take on the matter was first reported by BuzzFeed.