We goofed. The ATSDR is more specific than the EPA on the # of NPL sites with trichloroethylene (TCE) contamination. They estimated at least 852 TCE-contaminated NPL sites in their July 2003 ToxFAQs report. To our knowledge, this number has gone up, not down, since then. If you know otherwise, please contact us.

But using this number (852) as our new NPL site count (and adding to it our previous estimate of SAND sites), our low end estimate of currently-TCE-contaminated sites becomes ~1,450. Our upper end estimate remains at about ~1,650 TCE-contaminated sites.

This still leaves nearly 3,000 RCRA sites unaccounted for. Even if the RCRA sites are contaminated with TCE at just 1/3 the rate of the NPL and SAND sites, that would put our number of sites just north of 2K mark. As such, we're withdrawing our previous range (see, the EPA isn't the only one).

We now believe there are at least 2,000 TCE contaminated sites in the U.S. (That's an average of 40 TCE-contaminated hazardous waste sites yet to be fully cleaned - some never even touched for clean-up - in every U.S. state)

This disturbing estimate leads us to at least 2 questions:

1: How's our math?
2: If the four project sponsors (DOD, DOE, EPA, NASA) are also among the greatest remediators of these sites (i.e. they are among the greatest spenders on TCE clean-up), how might this factor into the NAS review project?

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