By every significant measure, the pace of the Superfund program's progress and success in cleaning up the nation's worst toxic waste sites has declined in the past six years — and the decline has sparked a heated political debate.

Several former Clinton administration officials, environmental activists and Superfund experts blame the decline on a shrinking Superfund budget and lack of institutional will in the Bush White House to commit resources and energy to the cleanup.

Bush administration officials, industry lawyers, and other experts, however, say the number of sites being cleaned up has dropped because the easy sites have been done, picked off like "low-hanging fruit," by the previous administration. The ones that remain, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, which administers Superfund, are bigger and more complex and will cost more to fix.

In a yearlong investigation of Superfund, the Center for Public Integrity has found:

Scattered across the country, from New Jersey to California, are 114 toxic waste sites where the federal government has determined that the threat to humans from dangerous and sometimes carcinogenic substances is "not under control."

More than 25 million people live within 10 miles of these sites, according to a review of U.S. Census data of the 2000 population and more than 100 schools are located within one mile, a Center for Public Integrity analysis of government records show.According to the Environmental Protection Agency, which oversees cleanup of the sites, hazardous chemicals and toxins there are poisoning the soil, water or air — or all three.

Yet, the EPA has resisted releasing information about cleanup plans or the sites' danger to the public other than offering a list of the sites' locations and a brief description about how people might become exposed — information buried so deep in the EPA's Web site that it is difficult to find.

The sites are considered "not under control" by the EPA because the materials contaminating them could reach and harm people. Exposure to some of these toxins and hazardous chemicals has been linked to various forms of cancer, respiratory disease and heart disease and has stunted mental development in children.The 114 sites are among 1,623 dangerously toxic areas currently or formerly included or proposed for action by Superfund, a law passed in 1980 to identify and supervise the cleanup of America's most toxic and polluted areas.

Information that the EPA has been reluctant to release includes:

For the past eight years, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has assured residents of South Plainfield, N.J., that it is safe to swim in Bound Brook, even though the stream runs alongside a Superfund site — the EPA's designation for the country's worst toxic waste sites.

EPA officials say they weren't surprised that the electrical capacitors were found, and on a subsequent visit to the site they discovered dozens more.In late April of 2007, however, local activists found along its banks two electrical devices, originally built to be used in household appliances, which had been leaking high levels of polychlorinated biphenyls into the muck. PCBs, which were used until 1979 as an insulator in the devices, are a probable cause of cancer.

The Superfund site encompasses several buildings where the Cornell Dubilier electronics company manufactured electronic goods from 1936 to 1962. After the company left the site, several companies operated there until the EPA recently began to demolish the buildings, which the agency said were contaminated with PCB-laced dust.

"The fact that there are PCB capacitors located in and around the site is not shocking to us. That is why it's a Superfund site, and that is why we are cleaning it up," Patricia Carr, an EPA spokeswoman, told the Center for Public Integrity. "We may not have seen it earlier because of recent erosion or heavy rainfall that might have uncovered them, but we are going to continue the cleanup as planned."The EPA speculated that the capacitors most likely were exposed because of recent flooding and erosion.

The Cornell Dubilier site is one of 114 across the country where human exposure to contaminants is not under control, according to the EPA. The site has been on the National Priorities List — the EPA's list of the most hazardous sites in the country — since 1998, but observers say work at the site has been slowed by Superfund's financial problems.

What is a Superfund site?

A Superfund site is a toxic waste site that falls under the Environmental Protection Agency’s Superfund program. After public awareness grew about heavily polluted areas like Love Canal, Congress passed the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (also known as Superfund law) in 1980. Under the law, companies and other parties found responsible for polluting sites are required to clean up the area or pay the costs for cleanup to the EPA.

What is the National Priorities List?

The National Priorities List (NPL) is the EPA’s list of toxic waste sites that the agency has determined present “a significant risk to human health or the environment,” and are eligible for cleanup under the Superfund program.

What is a Potentially Responsible Party?

A “potentially responsible party” or PRP, is a company, organization or individual that the EPA determines possibly played a role in the contamination of a Superfund site. This includes parties involved in generation of the waste, and parties involved in transporting it to the site. PRPs can also include past and present owners of the land or facility, and past and present facility operators. The EPA keeps a database of all PRPs called List 11. About three-fourths of all Superfund sites have at least one PRP listed in this database. There are about 180 sites that have only one company listed as the “potentially responsible party”. EPA’s listing of a PRP does not necessarily mean the entity has any environmental liability at the site. (Much of this study is based on the analysis of an internal list of PRPs created by the EPA.)

Who cleans up Superfund sites?

Either the federal government or a designated PRP cleans up these sites. PRP-led cleanups make up about 70 percent of all cleanups, according to the EPA. The government pays for all “fund-led” cleanups.

The Environmental Protection Agency has diverted $709 million collected from possible Superfund polluters over the past seven years to special accounts, putting hundreds of millions of dollars out of reach of other Superfund sites waiting for cleanup.

Before 2000, all money recovered from companies for site cleanup work performed by the EPA went back to the Superfund trust fund to be spent on cleaning up other sites. But a little-noticed change in agency policy that year allowed cleanup reimbursements reached in settlements to be tucked away into site-specific accounts to be used only for future work at those sites. There are hundreds of these accounts, and the EPA doesn't need Congressional approval to spend the money in them, unlike the Superfund trust fund.

The EPA gave the Center a listing by year of cleanup reimbursements deposited in these site-specific accounts, but declined to provide any supporting documentation. Until the EPA released this information, there were no publicly available documents clearly breaking down cleanup reimbursements, balances in these accounts or how the money is used. The EPA says its internal documents detailing this information can be obtained only through filing a Freedom of Information Act request, which the Center has done.

The EPA Inspector General's office, which has criticized the agency for holding all of these funds in special accounts longer than needed, is currently reviewing how the money is managed. Other federal oversight agencies also are scrutinizing the accounts.

At least three companies linked by the Environmental Protection Agency to hazardous waste sites are being paid by the government to clean up their own sites, according to an investigation by the Center for Public Integrity.

While the EPA did not make all of its procurement records available, the Center found that the agency awarded contracts to Lockheed Martin Corp., Halliburton Company and a subsidiary of Tyco International Ltd. to work on four Superfund sites where at least one company was involved as a "potentially responsible party," according to EPA documents.

The Center sent the firms copies of EPA documents showing the connections, and all three confirmed that each was possibly responsible for pollution at one site, and in one case at two sites. In all cases, other companies also are connected by the EPA to the sites as possible polluters.

The EPA said it is on the lookout for conflicts of interest. "As a regulatory agency, EPA has adopted a very strong position on conflicts of interest and monitors conflict issues both before and during contract performance and takes appropriate action as necessary," Jennifer Wood, an EPA spokeswoman, said in a written response to the Center.

Most regional EPA records not made availableBut environmental watchdogs say that this practice deserves more scrutiny. "It doesn't seem right to allow a company that polluted some site to then secure contracts that would earn them money from the taxpayers to clean up the same mess," said Tyson Slocum, director of the energy program at Public Citizen, a nonprofit public interest group.

Four companies connected by the Environmental Protection Agency to some of America's worst toxic waste sites have escaped more than half a billion dollars in pollution cleanup costs by declaring bankruptcy, potentially passing the tab onto taxpayers.

A Center for Public Integrity analysis of court documents shows that these four companies included on the EPA's list of 100 companies connected to the largest number of Superfund sites could have owed the federal government about $750 million to clean up their sites.

The Center learned of the bankruptcies while profiling the EPA's list of companies connected to the largest number of the 1,623 toxic waste sites ever included in the Superfund program. Superfund was launched in 1980 to identify and supervise the cleanup of America's most toxic and polluted areas.The government, however, apparently received less than $20 million in bankruptcy court.  Another company connected to 30 sites is still in bankruptcy proceedings.  In addition, the government never filed a claim against another company in bankruptcy, although it was linked to 24 Superfund sites, according to EPA data.

The six companies that have filed for bankruptcy are connected to roughly 120 Superfund sites in 28 states, according to a Center study of EPA data.

Through the bankruptcy process, an insolvent individual or corporation can in many cases get a "fresh start," discharging some or all of their previous debts for a fraction of what was owed. Certain types of debt receive priority under the bankruptcy laws, including "secured claims," for which the debtor had mortgaged property or pledged other collateral. Only if there are enough assets to pay those debts in full do general "unsecured creditors" receive any payment.

How we did it

During the summer of 2006, researchers for the Center for Public Integrity obtained a draft document marked “Enforcement Confidential” from the Environmental Protection Agency, titled “Top 100 PRPs Based on Number of Sites At Which They Are Involved.”

The document, dated December 2001, listed many of America’s Global 500 companies and their connections to hundreds of sites identified by the EPA’s Superfund program — a law passed in 1980 requiring the government to find and supervise the clean up of America’s most toxic areas.

In the five years since the list was updated, the number of Superfund sites has changed by less than 5 percent, according to the Center’s analysis — so the companies associated with the majority of them have remained largely the same. Asked why the list had not been updated since 2001, the Center’s source said it was too politically hot to continue work on the project.

The Center picked up where the EPA left off. Because the list contained only the number of sites connected to each company, the Center attempted to identify the specific sites by running thousands of queries through the EPA’s databases and by contacting each of the companies involved. Center researchers were able to draw a more complete picture of the companies that the EPA connects to the most Superfund sites.

The Center also obtained an internal EPA memorandum that discussed improvements needed for the data behind it. One such issue was confusion over parent companies and subsidiaries for the “potentially responsible parties,” or PRPs — the EPA’s term for entities that might be responsible for waste at certain Superfund sites. Another was the challenge posed by the arcane maze of mergers and acquisitions of corporate America — who owns what now and did they own their Superfund liabilities as well.