|
Toxics Cleanup
> American Recovery and Reinvestment Act
American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA)
Overview of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and Leaking Underground
Storage Tank Sites in Washington State.
The Washington State Department of Ecology (Ecology) submitted a
grant application to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for
federal money available through the American Recovery and Reinvestment
Act (Recovery Act). The grant application is for a total of
$3,427,000. This Recovery Act money will be used to address
various Leaking Underground Storage Tank (LUST) sites around the state
to protect human health and the environment. It also will help to
stimulate the economy by creating or saving jobs. Ecology expects
to be notified soon of that grant award. After the grant award is
made, Ecology will begin to contact LUST site owners of our intention to
spend Recovery Act dollars at their sites.
Ecology proposes to use grant money to conduct about 30 site assessments
and 10 cleanups. Site assessments include additional sampling to
better characterize the extent of existing soil and groundwater
contamination and sampling soil and or groundwater to assess earlier
cleanup work to see if the cleanup is complete. The cleanup work
may include activities to define the extent and magnitude of the
problem; evaluation of cleanup alternatives; development of cleanup
action plans, and actual cleanup. Cleanup may involve removal of
the underground storage tank systems (tanks, piping and dispensers),
excavation of contaminated soil for disposal or treatment, and/or
groundwater treatment.
Until Ecology contacts these LUST site owners and successfully
negotiated agreements for site access to conduct the above mentioned
work, a list of sites will not be available. The Recovery Act
requires Ecology to try to recover all or some of the spent money from
the site owners, unless they can show that they don’t have the ability
to pay. Much of the work that Ecology proposes is at LUST sites
where we believe the owners can’t afford the cost of the needed
investigation and cleanup. Once agreements are reached, Ecology
will either issue work assignments to its on-call environmental
consultants or announce this work for competitive bids.
News Releases
|
Copyright © Washington State Department of Ecology. See http://www.ecy.wa.gov/copyright.html.
