Petroleum firm agrees to pay $5.15 billion to clean up waste
http://www.latimes.com/local/la-me-cleanup-20140404,0,5331122.story#ixzz2yuNZD7hJ
Petroleum firm agrees to pay $5.15 billion to clean up waste
In the largest settlement ever for environmental contamination, Anadarko Petroleum Corp. agrees to clean up hazardous substances dumped nationwide.
By Louis Sahagun
April 3, 2014, 9:30 p.m.
The U.S. Justice Department on Thursday announced that Anadarko Petroleum Corp. had agreed to pay $5.15 billion to clean up hazardous substances dumped nationwide including radioactive uranium waste across the Navajo Nation in the largest settlement ever for environmental contamination.
The operations of Kerr-McGee Corp. which was acquired by Anadarko in 2006 also left behind radioactive thorium in Chicago and West Chicago, Ill.; creosote waste in the Northeast, the Midwest and the South; and perchlorate waste in Nevada, according to U.S. Deputy Atty. Gen. James Cole.
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Justice Department officials said $1.1 billion of the total would go to a trust charged with cleaning up two dozen sites, including the Kerr-McGee Superfund site in Columbus, Miss.
Another $1.1 billion will be paid to a trust responsible for cleaning up a former chemical manufacturing site that polluted Nevada's Lake Mead with rocket fuel. Lake Mead feeds into the Colorado River, a major source of drinking water in the Southwest.
About $985 million will go toward the cleanup of roughly 50 abandoned uranium mines in and around the Navajo Nation. In addition, the Navajo Nation will receive more than $43 million to address radioactive waste left at a former uranium mill in Shiprock, N.M.
About $224 million will cover thorium contamination at the Welsbach Superfund site in Gloucester, N.J., and about $217 million will go to the federal Superfund in repayment of costs previously incurred by the Environmental Protection Agency's cleanup of the Federal Creosote Superfund site in Manville, N.J.
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