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The Honorable Solomon P. Ortiz 

 May 10, 1993 

 Page 4 



initiation of an accelerated process for mitigating the contamination. 



d) The initiation of an immediate effort to implement alternative disposal options 

 and a moratorium on ocean disposal permits. 



4. How does the lack of monitoring at the Mud Dump Site impact on EDF's 

 support or opposition to this permit in particular and the permitting process in 

 general? 



The paucity of monitoring at the Mud Dump Site indicates that EPA, the agency 

 responsible for managing the site, is not in a good position to determine to what degree 

 the criteria used to evaluate dredged material is appropriate. After nearly twenty years of 

 dumping dredged material at a federally designated site, EPA still has no comprehensive 

 effort to determine to what degree the standard of the MPRSA, "no unreasonable 

 degradation", has been met or not. 



Essentially, EPA has never defined what constitutes "unreasonable degradation," 

 consequently, no upper limit exists that triggers a change in dredge material management. 

 For comparison purposes, imagine if EPA claimed that air pollution in the United States 

 met the goals of the Clean Air Act by basing that determination on the fact that mobile 

 and stationary sources largely met their state air permits. This is essentially how EPA 

 defends ocean disposal of dredged material; it claims that the program works because the 

 dredged material meets ocean disposal criteria, not because ambient monitoring shows that 

 disposal sites meet any sort of minimum criteria or standards. As described in our March 

 30th testimony, EDF has petitioned EPA based on existing information that enough 

 degradation has occurred that EPA should categorize the Mud Dump Site as "Impact 

 Category I." EDF has yet to hear from EPA regarding this petition. 



EPA's approach to monitoring makes this permit troublesome. EPA claims that all 

 dredged material contaminated with dioxin will be monitored for a period of 12 months to 

 ascertain the appropriateness of the dioxin bioaccumulation criteria. However, there is no 

 pre-set trigger to indicate how such a decision will be made. 



For example, what if 600,000 tons of material is dumped, but only 450,000 can be 

 located on the bottom? Such a "loss" could indicate a serious problem and justify adding 

 more final cap material. But, EPA and the Corps could consider it not serious; they could 

 consider only a "loss" of 250,000 tons to be serious enough to trigger the addition of more 

 cap. Without defining the ground rules as to what conditions must be maintained and to 

 what degree different parameters can allowed to be changed, it is impossible to know what 

 EPA will consider acceptable and how it will conclude whether or not the permit 

 conditions were successful. In fact, this example is close to what occurred recently when 

 it was documented that 92% of approximately 300,000 cuibc yards of material could not be 

 located. EPA, without even hearing the full explanation of this event, determined that it 

 was not important enough to warrant any additional controls on the Port Authority's permit. 



