
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SATURDAY, March 10, 1990                   TAG: 9003102398
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A2   EDITION: STATE 
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: WASHINGTON                                 LENGTH: Medium

EPA'S PROGRAM TO SAVE PARKS' AIR HITS FEW POLLUTERS

The Environmental Protection Agency's program to reduce air pollution over national parks and wilderness areas is so riddled with shortcomings that most polluters escape federal regulation, a congressional study said Friday.

Only about 1 percent of all the pollution sources studied, accounting for about 10 percent of the pollution, are regulated, the General Accounting Office said in a report on pollution of five parks and wilderness areas.

A dozen years after enactment of laws to preserve clean air over national parks and wilderness areas "the federal programs set up to do the job have either failed or have never been tried," said Rep. Mike Synar, D-Okla.

Synar is chairman of the Government Operations subcommittee on environment, energy and natural resources, which asked for the General Accounting Office study and conducted a hearing on it Friday.

William Rosenberg, the EPA's assistant administrator for air and radiation, acknowledged that some national parks have unclean air because of pollution from nearby urban areas or pollution that may originate hundreds of miles away.

The EPA pollution control program for parks and wilderness areas "was never designed or envisioned to affect sources which existed prior to 1977 unless or until they undergo major modification . . . [and] was structured to focus primarily on major sources," Rosenberg said.

The five areas studied were affected by 2,330 stationary sources of pollution, the GAO said, but only 27 sources were regulated.

The rest were exempt either because they were too small to come under the statute or had existed before enactment of the 1977 law, although they accounted for some 90 percent of the pollution over the parks and wilderness grounds.

The five locations examined by the GAO were Shenandoah National Park and the James River Face Wilderness Area in Virginia; Rocky Mountain National Park and the Flat Tops Wilderness Area, in Colorado; and the Cape Romain Wilderness Area in South Carolina.

At Shenandoah, where ozone levels in 1988 exceeded national health standards, 83 percent and 95 percent of two chemicals that create smog came from sources exempt from the regulations, the GAO said.

The GAO recommended that the EPA review air quality programs at more parks and wilderness areas and that if similar situations are found, ask Congress to tighten the provisions so smaller and older sources of pollution are covered by the control requirements.

by CNB