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designations of virtually all of the original sites with a few others 
thrown in for good measure. 
A lawsuit that we filed in February of 1980 led to a court-ap- 
proved settlement agreement, later embodied in an EPA regula- 
tion, requiring completion of site designation studies and support- 
ing site designation and environmental impact statements in ac- 
cordance with a specified compliance schedule for the 22 most ac- 
tively used ocean dumpsites. 
Despite EPA representations to this committee last spring and to 
House and Senate appropriations committees that it needed more 
ocean dumping funding to permit compliance with the NWF court 
order, once the funding was obtained, EPA scaled down its site des- 
ignation plans. Considerable splippage has already occurred in the 
site study schedules to which EPA is legally obliged to adhere. As 
of last May, the site designation work for only 1 of the 22 sites cov- 
ered in the settlement agreement was proceeding on schedule. 
With respect to the other 21 sites, the estimated dates for final des- 
ignation were anywhere from 4 months to 16 months behind sched- 
ule. There has undoubtedly been further slippage since last May. 
All told, EPA’s site study and designation program has yielded 
only 11 sites out of 144, a meager 7.6 percent that have been for- 
mally studied and designated by EPA. In the meantime, the dump- 
ing proceeds unabated at five or six dozen dumpsites each year. In 
short, little has changed in connection with dumpsite designation 
since the advent of the ocean dumping law except that EPA is now 
operating in violation of an act of Congress, an international 
treaty, a court order, and its own regulations. 
In our view, the only thing that will give EPA the incentive to 
take its site study and designation responsibilities seriously is a 
firm statutory prohibition against continued dumping at any site 
that has not been formally studied and designated. We, therefore, 
enthusiastically support the draft site designation amendment as a 
much-needed reaffirmation of existing mandates of the ocean 
dumping law and the Ocean Dumping Convention. 
Finally, the third major issue is dredge spoils. Dredged material 
accounts for 90 percent of all U.S. ocean dumping and implicates a 
like percentage of interim-approved ocean dumpsites. A small but 
significant percentage of dredged material, particularly in heavily 
utilized and industrialized port areas, is significantly contaminated 
with persistent toxic chemicals, sewage, and microorganisms. De- 
spite what may seem a significant potential for conflict between 
the London Dumping Convention, which absolutely prohibits dump- 
ing of wastes, including dredge materials, when they contain cer- 
tain black-listed constituents as other than trace contaminants, 
and the needs of navigational dredging, in only two instances in 
the entire 10-year history of implementation of the act has permis- 
sion to ocean dump dredge material been withheld even temporar- 
ily on the basis of excessive contamination. 
The thrust and intent of the proposals involving the dredged ma- 
terial provisions of section 103 in the draft amendments, as we un- 
derstand them, is to retain both the structure and the existing par- 
allelism between the environmental effects evaluations of dredged 
and nondredged waste. Degrading and even unreasonably degrad- 
ing dredged material could continue to be approved for ocean 
