A federal indictment filed last month in Asheville’s U.S. District Court names only Brevard Public Works Director David S. Lutz in the mishandling of lead-laden soil from the city’s abandoned Police Department firing range.
He is singled out for ignoring a consultant’s warning that the soil’s lead concentration was 129 milligrams per liter — more than 25 times higher than the federal hazardous waste threshold. He’s the one who faces federal charges for ordering workers in May 2016 to transport 20 truckloads of the toxic dirt, without the legally required documents, to a city public works operations center not permitted to receive or store such material, the indictment said.
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Photo credit: Frank Taylor / Carolina Public Press
Day: October 6, 2020
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has granted the state of Oklahoma regulatory control over environmental issues on nearly all tribal lands there, TYT has learned. This strips from 38 tribes in Oklahoma their sovereignty over environmental issues. It also establishes a legal and administrative pathway to potential environmental abuses on tribal land, including dumping hazardous chemicals like carcinogenic PCBs and petroleum spills, with no legal recourse by the tribes, according to a former high-level official of the EPA.
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Photo credit: Pool photo by Al Drago via Getty Images
In the early 1990s, the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality held a series of public hearings to consider whether or not to grant a permit to the Genesee Power Station, a wood-burning facility that was to be built in a low-income, predominantly Black neighborhood in Flint. The hearings were supposed to be an opportunity for the community to weigh in on the effects that the resulting pollution would have on their neighborhood, but the agency held the hearings 65 miles away, had armed guards present when speakers testified, and prioritized white attendees over Black attendees. The permit was approved, and pollution from the facility later led to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) classifying it as a “significant violator” of environmental rules.
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Photo credit: Andrew Lichtenstein / Corbis via Getty Images