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What is the road ahead for Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria?

On Wednesday, September 20, Hurricane Maria made a direct hit to Puerto Rico– virtually destroying most of its infrastructure and plunging Puerto Ricans into a humanitarian crisis. About 97% of Puerto Rico’s 3.4 million population is without power, and about half without running water. Let’s not forget that these are American citizens we are talking about.
The Trump Administration’s response has been significantly slower and less effective than the response to Hurricane Harvey and Irma. President Trump tweeted about the situation on Monday, stating that,“Much of the Island was destroyed, with billions of dollars owed to Wall Street and the banks which, sadly, must be dealt with.”
His lack of empathy towards a U.S. territory struggling to survive following a disaster is alarming, even for him. Focusing on the massive debt held by Puerto Rico, whose economy is now even more ravaged than it was before, is just cruel but unacceptable.
Gov. Ricardo Rossell of Puerto Rico urged Congress to approve a commensurate aid package. A week after the hurricane, FEMA put out a statement that they have airplanes and ships loaded with meals, water and generators headed to the island.
In addition to the ongoing crisis, the Guajataca Dam in the island’s northwest corner has suffered a “critical infrastructure failure,” which poses immediate flooding threats to about 70,000 people. While the majority of residents in the potential flood zone have evacuated, efforts are being made to evacuate periphery areas.
The path for Puerto Rico ahead is uncertain. Its power grid is almost entirely wiped out, and has proven to lack resilience. Many experts on disaster response urge for the opportunity to be taken to rebuild Puerto Rico’s power grid from the ground up– a project that would require billions of dollars.
Not to mention, there are 23 Superfund sites on the island that likely have contaminated soil and groundwater. Unexploded bombs, bullets, and projectiles are among the toxic contents of these Superfund sites, specifically on the Puerto Rican island of Vieques which was used by the military as a bomb-test site.
In the southern coastal town of Guayama, a five-story pile of coal ash has been sitting next to a low-income, minority community of 45,000 people. This ash contains heavy metals such as arsenic, mercury, and chromium. The company responsible is Applied Energy Systems (AES), which was ordered to remove the pile prior to the hurricane but whether this was done is unclear. It is highly likely that this toxic ash has contaminated the surrounding land water sources.
At this point, we must continue to urge the U.S. government to provide ongoing aid to our fellow Americans in Puerto Rico. Be sure to check back with CHEJ on the front of environmental justice for Puerto Ricans following this humanitarian disaster.
Click on the below link to see how you can help the victims of Hurricane Maria:
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/can-help-hurricane-victims-puerto-rico/

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What happens when a hurricane hits a toxic waste site?

After Hurricane Harvey hit Texas, the EPA confirmed 13 of Houston’s Superfund sites were flooded or completely underwater. Gibbs says thousands more sites are vulnerable to violent storms, and politics make it unlikely that many of them will be ever be remediated.

“We’ve seen it time and time again, going back to Katrina or Superstorm Sandy. They’re just not being taken care of. The reason is because the responsible parties — the companies that are responsible for these sites — don’t want to pay the money to clean them up.
“And the EPA, our environmental protection agency at the federal level, doesn’t want to push those big corporations around because that’s how people get elected to office here in the U.S.”
Read more

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Who Owns the Sun?

Over the past 5 years rooftop installation of solar panels have seen explosive growth, perhaps as much as 900 percent, over the past six years according to an article in the New York Times. The U.S. solar market had its biggest year ever in 2016, nearly doubling its previous record and adding more electric generating capacity than any other source of energy for the first time ever. “It would be hard to overstate how impressive 2016 was for the solar industry,” said Abigail Ross Hopper, president and CEO of the Solar Energy Industries Association. “Prices dropped to all-time lows, installations expanded in states across the country and job numbers soared. The bottom line is that more people are benefiting from solar now than at any point in the past, and while the market is changing, the broader trend over the next five years is going in one direction – and that’s up.”
Despite this unprecedented growth, new residential installations in 2017 has hit a snag. According to Forbes magazine, rooftop installations in the residential market could slow to as little as 9% this year, down from 16% in 2016, compared to an average growth of 63% over the three preceding years.
Several factors are cited for this decline including saturated markets like California, financial troubles for several top solar panel manufacturers, and lower energy costs primarily due to fracking. Another factor however is a well-funded highly orchestrated lobbying campaign by traditional utilities. According to Forbes magazine, utility companies are pushing back against residential solar in multiple states, citing the higher effective costs of catering to customers with residential installations. In states such as Nevada, residential and small-scale commercial solar users face higher electricity rates, along with reductions in the credits they receive for sending their unused solar generated electricity back to the grid, a practice known as “net metering.” The utilities are growing increasingly uncomfortable with homeowners generating their own energy and even making a profit by selling their unused energy back to the grid.
An outrageous example of how this scenario is playing out is occurring in North Carolina where Duke Energy used its power and influence in the state to attack the green energy efforts of a small environmental advocacy group to build solar projects for non-profits. Just this month, the North Carolina Court of Appeals upheld a $60,000 fine levied against NC WARN of Durham for installing solar panels on the roof of the Faith Community Church in Greensboro, NC and selling the energy to the church. Duke Energy who has a monopoly of the energy use in the state (as well as several other southern states), asked the court to make an example of NC WARN and to heavily penalize them for illegally selling solar electricity. North Carolina is one of only four states where third party sales of energy is thought to be disallowed.
Duke’s position is particularly outrageous because NC WARN had installed the solar panels on the roof of the church as a test case to clarify state policy on third party sales that allow solar companies to sell power directly to customers from systems on those customers’ property. NC WARN and the church’s Rev. Nelson Johnson very publicly announced their reason for installing the solar panels which was also accompanied by a legal request for a declaratory ruling by the NC Utilities Commission.
NC WARN is strongly considering an appeal to the NC Supreme Court. They have no intention to give up their efforts to break Duke Energy’s longstanding monopoly on electricity sales in the state. Energy companies like Duke Energy do not own the sun. They cannot dictate who profits and who does not from taping the sun’s energy to generate electricity. What NC WARN and multiple other nonprofits and solar companies are doing is what we need to do to safely and cleanly generate electricity and create jobs while doing it. Despite the efforts of the utilities to control the sun, the future for solar continues to appear quite bright.
 
 

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Mr. Pruitt Solar Panels are a Redevelopment Option

A Superfund site in Vermont will be redeveloped with solar panels. This is a redevelopment idea we can live with. While the land is being reused we can reduce our dependency on fossil fuels.
Read more.
 

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The Looming Superfund Nightmare

As unprecedented hurricanes assault coastal U.S. communities, residents and experts fear the storms could unleash contamination the EPA has tried to keep at bay.
“The problem is that you could see a lot of waste that was supposedly ‘under control’ getting mobilized into waterways and spreading throughout the community,” Olson said. Working with the NRDC and other environmental groups, local residents did their own water testing and “found widespread contamination around Superfund and RCRA sites.” Read more

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Toxic Wastes Are Everywhere – From Harvey

Bobby Griffin found the clusters of shiny silver mercury globules scattered across his San Jacinto riverfront property on Tuesday, a few hundred yards from the San Jacinto Waste Pits, a Superfund site that was inundated during last week’s storm.
Public health officials are investigating a case of dangerous liquid mercury that appears to have washed or blown ashore here, east of Houston, in the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey. Read more.

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Where is America’s Humanity and Compassion?

Innocent Families in wake of hurricanes Irma and Harvey were given choices: Stay and risk your families lives with the wrath of the hurricanes or face interrogation, detention and deportation.
How inhumane can our government be? I’m shocked and saddened by the uncaring, cruel and downright dangerous behavior of our country’s police. A category five hurricane will hit Florida and people need to find a safe shelter for their families. But the police publicly announced that will be checking people as they arrive to shelters for outstanding warrents.
They need help not threats and more fear of harm.  In Texas, last week it was border patrols checking vehicles leaving via evacuation routes.
Over 50 inches of rain and rushing water flooded Houston and surrounding areas. Innocent people; women, children, and men are homeless, without food, water, health care.  Isn’t a natural disaster, which is predicted to take away everything the families owns and values, enough pain and suffering? Do we also have to harass those trying to escape to higher ground because of the color of their skin or harass those seeking shelter by forcing them to stand in line to prove they are legal or don’t have a warrant out against them.
What ever happened to America’s humanity, compassion and kindness?
Five years ago, when tropical Storm Sandy hit New York City, immigration enforcement announced that the highest priority was promoting “life saving and life promoting activities, the safe evacuation of people who are leaving the impacted area, and the maintenance of public order, not checking immigration status. Neither the New York or New Jersey police were stopping people at shelters to be sure they don’t have an outstanding warrant.
As Hurricane Irma approaches Florida, a sheriff in Poke County, announced on Wednesday that law enforcement authorities would check the identities of people who turn up at shelters and take to jail anyone found to have an active arrest warrant. “If you go to a shelter for Irma and you have a warrant, we’ll gladly escort you to the safe and secure shelter called the Polk County Jail,” announced sheriff Grady Judd, of Polk County.
When Hurricane Harvey was approaching Corpus Christi, TX the Border Patrol kept their check points open: causing extreme traffic, endangering drivers, and potentially making people who need to evacuate decide to stay behind in the storm out of fear of interaction and interrogation.
I’ve worked with communities across Texas, Louisiana and Florida. Families living in Corpus Christi are at the fence line of Refinery Row, miles of petroleum refineries. Every day they live in fear not of deportation or going to jail for a bad deed they did, but fear of cancer, asthma and disease from exposures to air pollution. Where are the police then? The pollution police, at the federal or state levels do almost no enforcement after receiving calls after calls for help because young children and the elderly can’t breathe. Families live there are mostly Latino and African Americans who settled there decades ago because the city would not allow them to live in other neighborhoods.
Corporations get away with the poisoning of innocent families every single day. It’s about time that our racist enforcement agencies start going after the real criminals, corporate polluters. Instead of border patrols for evacuation routes there should be border patrols for air pollution beyond the corporate fence line.
Instead of looking for those individuals at shelters that have an outstanding warrant against them, police should start issuing warrants for CEOs of corporate polluters responsible for harming innocent children’s lungs, neurological systems and their abilities to learn and succeed.
It’s time our country’s police went after the real corporate criminals, they come dressed in suits, carry briefcases and use their private planes to escape danger like we’ve seen in Harvey and Irma.

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‘Dreamers’ Marched Near CHEJ’s Offices

‘Dreamers’ who marched down the street from our offices in Falls Church, Virginia.  Dreamers are undocumented immigrants who were brought to the United States as children. Since the Obama administration began DACA in 2012, 787,580 people have been approved for the program, according to the latest government figures. To be eligible, applicants had to have arrived in the US before age 16 and have lived there since June 15, 2007.
What does DACA do for them?
DACA recipients have been able to come out of the shadows and obtain valid driver’s licenses, enroll in college and legally secure jobs. They also pay income taxes. The program didn’t give them a path to become US citizens or even legal permanent residents — something immigrant rights advocates have criticized.