By Bulletin Staff
Congress is weighing increasing the budget for the cleanup of toxic zombie waste sites, a part of the Superfund program aimed at mitigating the legacy and impacts of locations where undead waste was improperly disposed of or stored.
The Superfund program, run by the Environmental Protection Agency, lists about 1,300 hazardous material sites across the nation where cleanup activities are still ongoing or incomplete. That number has barely moved over the past four years, according to the agency.
Currently the EPA’s Undead Impacts Mitigation office lists 137 so-called “Superdead” sites across the country where zombie husks were previously collected and stored with inadequate provision for protecting the surrounding communities or the environment.
According to the agency, more than half these sites date back to the early to mid-20th century, before the government began regulating the storage, handling and disposal of zombie husks. In that bygone era, the living dead were frequently discarded alongside ordinary household waste in municipal dumps.
That all began to change in 1974 with the publication of Dead Spring, the landmark book that detailed the human and environmental damage caused by the improper disposal of the undead.
Written by Erin Irving, a disciple of renowned conservationist Rachel Carson, Dead Spring set off a public firestorm with its revelations of numerous zombie outbreaks – totaling thousands of casualties – caused by what Irving called “undead zones.”
On the heels of the controversy over Dead Spring, in 1980, when Congress passed the legislation that led to the creation of the Superfund Program, one section of the legislation carved out funding for the Undead Impacts Mitigation office and charged the bureau with establishing and managing the “Superdead Program.”
To date the program is credited with cleaning up more than 50 toxic zombie waste sites around the country, digging up and properly disposing of thousands of husks of the undead that were left to rot in city dumps, stored and forgotten at abandoned industrial sites, or buried in the mass disposal sites that would typically spring up in the wake of outbreaks prior to the 1950s.
The cleanup work is painstaking, slow and often hazardous. Aside from the obvious dangers of working with undead tissues and bodily fluid, it turns out that not all of the undead were completely dead when they were buried or put into storage decades ago. The EPA has documented at least 37 zombie-related deaths among its staff and contractors involved in Superdead cleanup projects.
The agency’s budget for the entire Superfund program, at about $1 billion, has remained flat for the past decade, as has the much smaller budget for the Superdead program at about $55 million per year. At that rate of spending, the EPA has estimated it will take another 35 years to fully dispose of all the toxic zombie waste littering the land.
Now Congress is considering increasing funding for the zombie-mitigation program to accelerate the cleanup, with a goal of completing the decades-long project by 2035. A bipartisan group of senators has joined with representatives from both parties in the House to advance legislation that would effectively triple the program’s budget, beginning in 2025.
Alan DeMoro, vice president of field research at the Romero Institute for Zombie Studies, said that the recent move to ramp up the program stems from several recent smaller outbreaks traced to Superdead sites that have been pending cleanup for more than a decade.
“Over the past five years, we’ve seen incidents in Biloxi, Flagstaff, Twin Falls and Sioux City where zombie waste contamination led to outbreaks that, while only resulting in dozens of casualties each, could have been much worse. Washington has finally realized that the cost of cleaning up these Superdead sites will ultimately be lower than the cost of having to clean up a whole town or city gone to the undead,” DeMoro said.
DeMoro added that the proposed legislation would also help to address longstanding criticisms of the Superdead program that it has underfunded efforts to clean up sites located in or near historically disadvantaged, low-income communities, which often are the communities that have been most harmed by exposure to toxic zombie waste.
Said DeMoro: “The concepts of equity and social justice were not built into the original legislation for the Superdead Program. But the new legislation goes a long way to ensuring that all Americans can feel assured that the ground underneath their feet isn’t hiding a toxic zombie menace.”
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