Nine toxic Superfund sites in Central Florida waiting for EPA help

The new head of the federal Environmental Protection Agency swears he’s going to get lingering environmental disasters called Superfund sites cleaned up for good and off the books.

How cool for Central Florida, which has nine toxic catastrophes, including six of the 1,342 nationwide that are considered the worst. One is slap in the midst of downtown Orlando, and two have been on the list since 1983. That’s no typo. We did say lingering, remember?

Take Tower Chemical, for example, which is due for a fresh five-year cleanup plan in March. For 34 years, the EPA has been fighting Tower’s slew of toxins, mostly forms of the banned pesticide DDT, which today are still polluting groundwater at the site just north of State Road 50 in Clermont. Meanwhile, subdivisions have grown up nearby.