FILE - This Feb. 12, 2007 file photo shows a sign that reads "Don't Put Lead In Your Head" is placed... 
(AP)
Fifty of the country's most polluted and hazardous waste sites were selected Wednesday to receive a share of federal stimulus money to continue cleanup operations.
The Environmental Protection Agency announced that $582 million in recently approved economic stimulus money would be used to help clean up the sites in 28 states.
The sites were contaminated years ago by mining waste, lead smelters, landfills, and other sources of chemicals but the companies responsible are no longer around to pay for their cleanup.
At half the sites, cleanups were either stalled last year or were expected to face delays this year because the EPA was running short of funds.
The money announced Wednesday will pay to excavate contaminated soil from hundreds of residential lawns in Evansville, Ind., Minneapolis, Minn., Madison County, Mo. and Omaha, Neb.
Up to $25 million will connect 180 houses in southeastern North Dakota to public drinking water. Their wells were tainted with arsenic from bait applied to control grasshoppers in the '30s and '40s. The people who live there have been supplied with bottled water since their wells were contaminated.
And at New Bedford Harbor, Mass., where the announcement was made by EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson, three times more mud will be dredged from the bottom of the harbor over the next two years than would have occurred without the money.
Jackson talked about the timeline for the project, which was originally thought to take 38 years to complete. "Thirty-eight years is not acceptable to the Obama administration," she said.
Participating by telephone was Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass, who has cut back on public activities while being treated for brain cancer. He said the effort to clean up the New Bedford site and freeing the community of pollution has been "an uphill battle all the way."
The funding announced by Jackson is aimed at creating jobs for cleanup contractors, soil excavation companies, hazardous waste disposal facilities and labs that test samples to detect contamination.
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