By Mar-Vic Cagurangan
The U.S. Department of Justice is seeking to require Guam to pay $3.9 million to recover the costs incurred by the federal government for cleaning up toxic discharges from the now-closed Ordot dump.
The DOJ’s proposed consent decree was lodged Jan. 17 with the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, representing the latest in a series of lawsuits and counter-lawsuits—spanning more than two decades— over the old landfill built by the U.S. Navy.
The U.S. government filed a counterclaim after squaring accounts with the government of Guam in October last year. The U.S. paid Guam $48 million, capping a previous consent decree that settled the local government’s 2017 lawsuit under the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act, or CERLA.
The U.S. government's counterclaim under the same law seeks "to recover past costs incurred by the United States in responding to the release of hazardous substances at the site and a declaratory judgment for entitlement to future costs,” the DOJ said in a notice posted on Federal Register.
“The United States' claims for response costs incurred or to be incurred after Aug. 10, 2022 remain to be resolved in the lawsuit,” it added.
Besides the $3.9 million in cost recovery, the U.S. government is also seeking to collect $17,745.53 in accrued interest.
Ordot Dump, marked as a Superfund Site, was the only civilian municipal waste disposal area for Guam from the early 1950s until its shutdown in September 2011 after it grew to become a 280-foot mountain of trash that posed “an ecological hazard.” It has since been replaced by a new landfill in Dandan.
The Ordot closure and the new landfill construction were key components of a previous consent decree sparked by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Clean Water Act lawsuit against Guam in 2002.
The EPA's lawsuit resulted in federal receivership that cost the government of Guam more than $200 million, compelling the territory to borrow on the bond market.
In 2017, the government of Guam filed a counteraction for cost recovery against the U.S. government, arguing that the Ordot dump was the U.S. Navy’s own creation that later exposed the territory to EPA's legal actions.
The local government pointed out that the Navy built the dump during the 1940s and deposited toxic military waste there before turning over control to Guam in 1950.
In May 2021, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of Guam, holding that, “Remaining within the bounds of CERLA is also consistent with the familiar principle that a federal contribution action is virtually always a creature of a specific statutory regime.”
The federal receivership based on the 2010 consent decree ended in 2019.
Situated on a 63-acre property, the Ordot dump had been the sole disposal facility for Guam’s waste since the 1940s. Inspections by the contractor Brown and Caldwell found undocumented materials such as unexploded ordnance and leachate discharge.
The $42-million Ordot dump closure project was completed by Black Construction Co. in 2011.
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