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Testimony: McCrory called toxicologist Ken Rudo to his office to discuss do-not-drink letters for well owners near coal ash pits

Gov. Pat McCrory summoned state toxicologist Ken Rudo to his office in early 2015 for a meeting during which a McCrory staff member challenged the advisory Rudo had helped draft telling well owners near coal ash pits owned by Duke Energy not to drink their water, according to recent testimony given in a deposition by Rudo.
The do-not-drink advisory, issued in spring 2015, has received a lot of attention, particularly after state health and environmental administrators overrode the advisory in March by telling well owners that their water is fine to drink.

It isn’t fine, according to Rudo.
Requested in early 2016 by Dr. Randall Williams, health director of the N.C. Department of Health and Human Services, and backed by Tom Reeder, the assistant secretary for the N.C. Department of Environmental Quality, the reversal of the do-not-drink advisory was “highly unethical” and “possibly illegal,” Rudo said in the deposition, excerpts of which were available to the public Tuesday.
Until now, the extent of McCrory’s involvement has been unclear.
Excerpts from Rudo’s deposition, part of coal ash litigation brought by clean-water watchdog organizations against Duke Energy, show that McCrory, a former Duke Energy employee for decades, was deeply involved with his administration’s attempts to challenge the scientifically backed advisory that Rudo and other state health experts had drafted.
Rudo had left his office when he received a call from state epidemiologist Megan Davies “telling me to turn around — I was almost at Chapel Hill — to go back, that the Governor wanted to discuss this. … So I went down to that big old building in downtown Raleigh, and the Governor wasn’t there.
“He participated for a couple of minutes by phone.
“So I met with — was it Josh Ellis? Is that his name? I am not sure. I think it is him. And he had an assistant,” Rudo said in the deposition, referring to McCrory’s communications director. The other person at the meeting was Kendra Gerlach, the director of communications at the N.C. Department of Health and Human Services, he said.
“And they wanted to talk about what we were putting on these forms. And the Governor called for about, I guess, five minutes or so to sort of — he was in the middle of some other issues. And I am not exactly sure, even from my notes, because it was — the guidance — whether he had given Mr. Ellis the guidance what to talk to us about before we arrived. But he essentially, you know, was saying, ‘Okay. We need to discuss the language on the forms.’ And then he left it to Mr. Ellis to do that,” Rudo said.
Later in the deposition, Rudo said Ellis had concerns about the do-not-drink advisory.
“Once again, I don’t know whether this was from Mr. Ellis or from the Governor, because the Governor never actually specifically said what, you know, his concerns were.
“But he had a concern about what we were telling these folks on the forms.
“Thier (sic) concern was initially telling people not to drink the water.
“He felt that was a pretty strong thing to do,” Rudo said.
Late Tuesday, Thomas Stith, McCrory’s chief of staff, denied Rudo’s allegations.
“We don’t know why Ken Rudo lied under oath, but the governor absolutely did not take part in or request this call or meeting as he suggests,” Stith said. “The fact is that the state sent homeowners near coal ash ponds all facts and safety information about their drinking water and thanks to the McCrory administration’s efforts, well owners are being hooked up to municipal water supplies at Duke Energy’s expense.”
Gerlach disputed some of Rudo’s statements.
“I was at that meeting,” Gerlach said in an email.
“The Governor did not participate in that meeting,” she said,”nor did he summon Ken Rudo.”
“I was the one calling our public health officials, including Rudo. During my call with Rudo, he volunteered to come by and I said yes. He then joined Josh Ellis and me in person to answer some of the questions being discussed,” Gerlach said.

High stakes

At stake during that conversation at the governor’s office was the health of hundreds of well owners and their families, particularly those whose wells contained hexavalent chromium, a carcinogen associated with coal ash pits. Until last year, there had been no screening level for hexavalent chromium, no threshold by which to gauge its potential cancer-causing effect.
Rudo and other health experts in the DHHS and the DEQ helped calculate the threshold. They based it on peer-reviewed studies and the calculations were confirmed by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry.
They calculated the health-screening threshold because it was one of the requirements under the state Coal Ash Management Act, a bill passed in 2014 as state legislators responded to the dangers of coal ash, after a pipe under a Duke Energy coal ash pond near Eden collapsed and spewed coal ash into the Dan River.
As a result, state regulators were required to check for a host of contaminants, including hexavalent chromium.
In setting the threshold for hexavalent chromium, state health experts such as Rudo also stuck to a state groundwater rule that requires a threshold that would put North Carolinians at a lifetime cancer risk of no more than 1 in 1 million.
For hexavalent chromium, that threshold is 0.07 parts per billion, or ppb.
The threshold the McCrory administration sought to promote was one connected with a federal standard that regulates public water systems but which the state health experts said was “unacceptable,” as the Winston-Salem Journal has reported.
Hexavalent chromium is not a regulated contaminant.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has been collecting data on hexavalent chromium for years from public water systems in an effort to figure out how to regulate it. Meanwhile, there is a decades-old threshold for total chromium — one that assumes that it could be made up entirely of hexavalent chromium.
That federal threshold for total chromium, set at 100 ppb under the federal Safe Drinking Water Act, is the one that state health experts say is unacceptable.
The federal threshold comes with a lifetime cancer risk of 1 in 700, according to state health experts such as Rudo. In North Carolina, a large majority of public water systems show concentrations of hexavalent chromium below the threshold of 0.07 ppb, according to a Journal review of EPA data.

Safety questions

To a certain extent, the issue of safe drinking water for well owners near coal ash pits has been displaced by actions taken by the General Assembly. State legislators passed a bill — signed by McCrory — requiring Duke Energy to provide either permanent water supplies or a filtration system to eligible well owners within a half-mile of coal ash pits by October 2018.
Plans must be submitted by Dec. 15, according to the bill.
Still, Rudo’s testimony makes clear that the McCrory administration had pushed for the federal threshold — making decisions on public health that ran counter to those backed by its own state health experts. The testimony is also supported by emails obtained through public-records requests by the Blue Ridge Environmental Defense League and provided to the Journal.
Before Rudo was summoned to McCrory’s office, Donald van Der Vaart, one of McCrory’s Cabinet members, was pushing for the federal standard as secretary of the state DEQ. In an email written in early 2015 by state epidemiologist Megan Davies to colleagues, including Rudo, she said that Tom Reeder, the DEQ’s assistant secretary, would provide the message.
“Secretary Van der Vaart requested of (former Health) Secretary Wos that DHHS DPH (Division of Public Health) include additional explanation in our letter to local health directors about the plans for private well testing within 1000 feet of coal ash ponds.
“As you will see below, I spoke with Tom Reeder, and he will send me some suggested language for us to work on.
“The additional language will explain that the IMAC (threshold set by state health experts) for hexavalent chromium being used in these well evaluations does not apply to public water supplies, where the MCL (threshold) of 100 micrograms per liter of total chromium applies.
DEQ spokesman Mike Rusher on Tuesday tried to back the department’s continued support for the federal standard.
“The Safe Drinking Water Act is the only regulatory standard for drinking water in North Carolina,” Rusher said in an email. “The state environmental department had concerns about treating residents near coal ash ponds differently than the millions of North Carolinians who get their drinking water from municipal water supplies.”
In 2015, a statement about well water being fine under the federal standard found its way into the do-not-drink advisory as it was being sent to well owners, after the meeting at the governor’s office and against Rudo’s recommendations.
“There isn’t a standard for — there is no criteria specifically for — in the Federal Safe Drinking Water Act for hexavalent chromium. So it is a true statement, because there isn’t one. But it is also misleading and sort of — it is not cool to do that. It is just not a — this is not the kind of information we should be giving people, because it is misleading,” Rudo said in the deposition.
Later, he continued: “And we still objected, you know, from within our group.
“We have e-mails with our very, you know, strong objections. But, I mean, you know, when we are told to do something, we are told to do something. You know, there are lines that we can’t cross, both morally and ethically, which is why I removed my name from this at this point. But, you know, orders are orders.”

Protective order

Duke Energy had tried to seal Rudo’s testimony, saying in its request for a protective order that the testimony was not finished and that some of it is based on hearsay.
Portions of the deposition became available to the public Tuesday because it was part of the response filed by the Southern Environmental Law Center.
Gerlach, the health department communications director, said the department “stands by its decision to allow residents near coal ash ponds to return to drinking their well water, in keeping with safe drinking water practices across the country.” And she said that the release of Rudo’s excerpted deposition is “clearly a politically motivated attempt to manipulate and mislead the public by trial lawyers from an extreme left-wing environmental group.”
In the same email, Gerlach said Rudo “wanted the state to use a standard in the health risk evaluations (HREs) that was 143 times more stringent than California’s regulatory standard considered safe for drinking.”
However, the 0.07 ppb standard Rudo and other North Carolina health experts helped calculate — in accordance with the state groundwater rule allowing no more than a 1 in 1 million lifetime risk of cancer — was actually less stringent than the one that California state health experts had proposed in 2011 as their public health goal — 0.02 ppb. That threshold was ultimately increased to 10 ppb after state officials took into account non-health factors, such as the technical feasibility of enforcing the threshold and the associated costs.
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SUPERFUND: A Philadelphia suburb’s asbestos nightmare

By George Cahlink, an E&E reporter, of E&E Publishing LLC. Here’s a look at the history, successes, and ultimate failure to clean up and maintain one Superfund site, located in Ambler, PA. Because of Ambler’s history of being the asbestos capital of the world, the recent passage of the Toxic Substance Control Act raises some hopes that this long battle for clean up may be over soon.
AMBLER, Pa. — U.S. EPA’s Greg Voigt opens a chain-link gate, pushes aside waist-high weeds and scrambles to the highest point in this Philadelphia suburb: a 100-foot pile of industrial waste.
“Check out the million-dollar view,” Voigt jokes as he looks out from a gravel plateau covering asbestos mounds he monitors for EPA’s Superfund program.
Welcome to the “White Mountains of Ambler.” Less than 20 miles from this week’s Democratic National Convention, the tree-shrouded toxic landmark is a reminder of this town’s past as the asbestos manufacturing capital of the world.
Asbestos — building insulation material largely banned by EPA since the 1970s because of its link to mesothelioma, a lung cancer — made Ambler a thriving blue-collar hamlet for three-quarters of a century EPA has spent the past 30 years cleaning up and monitoring its two Superfund sites, which take up more than 50 acres here.
EPA’s 35-year-old Superfund program has just over 1,300 contaminated properties. The agency spends a little over $1 billion annually on Superfund work.
Once closed in the mid 1980s, the playground has reopened adjacent to the asbestos piles, which lie on the other side of the fence. EPA has said there is no longer a risk at the playground of ingesting airborne asbestos. Photo courtesy of George Cahlink.
Dozens of dumps are in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, which rank first and third, respectively, in Superfund projects. New Jersey has 116 sites, Pennsylvania 95. The region holds the lethal leftovers from chemical, pharmaceutical and other industrial manufacturers from the later part of the 19th century through much of the 20th century before modern environmental regulations were established.
But Superfund talk is unlikely at the Democratic convention, where environmental protection is likely to focus on slowing climate change. Toxic waste cleanup no longer seems a priority for green activists who held a massive rally here Sunday focused on banning hydraulic fracturing.
Lenny Siegel, the executive director of the Center for Public Environmental Oversight, who’s attending the convention as a delegate for Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders (I), said one of the reasons is Superfund activists are aging and younger environmentalists are more focused on climate change.
“They aren’t wrong,” Siegel said. “It’s a huge issue.”
Siegel, whose group focuses on fostering public participation in environmental cleanups, added, “They assume they have had [fusion_builder_container hundred_percent=”yes” overflow=”visible”][fusion_builder_row][fusion_builder_column type=”1_1″ background_position=”left top” background_color=”” border_size=”” border_color=”” border_style=”solid” spacing=”yes” background_image=”” background_repeat=”no-repeat” padding=”” margin_top=”0px” margin_bottom=”0px” class=”” id=”” animation_type=”” animation_speed=”0.3″ animation_direction=”left” hide_on_mobile=”no” center_content=”no” min_height=”none”][the Superfund] sites for so long that they must have been taken care of.”
Lois Gibbs, who founded the Center for Health, Environment and Justice, said shifting interests are part of the problem and so is a lack of money for Superfund. “Without money, we have no hammers,” Gibbs said. Too few dollars, she added, make it harder not only to carry out cleanups but also to try to force polluters to take responsibility for them.
Indeed, congressional Republicans, who eliminated an energy tax that provided dedicated funding for Superfund projects in the mid-1990s, are pushing for even deeper cuts in EPA spending. The GOP favors the agency’s brownfields program, which provides grants to states, local communities and other stakeholders willing to make their own investments to help clean up and then redevelop less-contaminated properties.
But Ambler shows that even long after Superfund cleanups and remediation plans are first drawn up, there’s a role for EPA in ongoing monitoring efforts, and new sites can always emerge.
Ambler’s rise, fall and rebirth offer lessons for other communities, EPA and lawmakers as they continue to come to grips with asbestos and other detritus of America’s industrial heritage.

Danger for hunters, teenagers — and groundhogs

Every three months, EPA’s Voigt walks the White Mountain site.
“The overall purpose is to ensure that the cleanup remedies we selected for the site are fully operational and functioning,” he said.
Today, it’s hard to imagine the mounds with their steep sides and thick with trees and vegetation are hiding 1.5 million cubic yards of asbestos — enough to fill 150,000 dumpsters. They are the product of a still-controversial calculation made by EPA in the mid-1980s.
When EPA added the Ambler site to its Superfund list in 1986, it decided removing the asbestos was unrealistic. It would require years of round-the-clock truck runs through Ambler and would poise health risks by kicking up asbestos dust as the debris was removed.
Instead, EPA capped the piles with at least 6 inches of soil and seeded them with native trees and vegetation. A few lagoons within the piles were filled and erosion controls and drainage systems installed. The entire site was fenced, and warnings were posted about the danger of inhaling asbestos.
“We’ll always see one or two areas when we go out for our inspections where the fence was cut,” Voigt said. Among the trespassers are deer hunters, bird-watchers and curious teenagers.
Burrowing animals are one of the bigger challenges. In only a few minutes, a groundhog can dig through the site’s vegetation and soil layers and be into the asbestos waste. When inspections find holes, they are filled in and the material is tested to determine whether the animal made it into the asbestos layer.
“There have been areas where we have put the dirt in and when we go back the next week and the dirt is right back out again,” Voigt said. “They are pretty insistent when they want to be.”
Voigt estimates about $6 million has been spent to date on the site, including both the initial capping and continued monitoring.
EPA tries to fine parties that contaminated the site to pay for its cleanup. In this case, two asbestos manufacturers, CertainTeed and Federal-Mogul, are footing the bill.
The agency officially removed Ambler from its Superfund list in 1996, and subsequent reviews every five years have found no worrisome levels of airborne asbestos, which when inhaled causes mesothelioma. The latest review will be finished by the end of the year.
Critics, however, have questioned whether the soil cover is deep enough, noting an uprooted tree or a burrowing animal can easily kick up asbestos.
They also worry some of the piles are only a few hundred yards from the Wissahickon Creek, which feeds the Schuylkill River, which flows through Center City Philadelphia. They note EPA doesn’t test the site for groundwater contamination.
“I don’t think they have been as good as they should be,” said Arthur Frank, an environmental health expert at Drexel University who has studied the Ambler waste sites for community groups. He said snow and ice can expose the piles.
But Voigt said the string of successful five-year reviews since the site cleanup was finished in 1996 is “validation” that EPA’s efforts are working.
“There’s always going to be a certain contingent [that does not like EPA’s approach], and we’ll have to agree to disagree on certain issues,” said Voigt, noting the agency holds community meetings every two months in Ambler about the asbestos sites.
Ideas have been floated for turning the piles into a solar farm or even a paintball facility. But, Voigt said, it will be tough to do anything on the steep grade without disturbing the waste, and he expects EPA will be monitoring the piles for many years to come.
“It’s job security for me,” he said with a chuckle.

Second asbestos dump

Ambler resident Sharon McCormick was surprised and concerned when a petitioner knocked on her door more than a decade ago to ask for help in fighting a proposed 17-story high-rise.
She was even more surprised when she learned the development site was a former asbestos dumping ground.
The BoRit site, named for one of its more recent owners, Bob Rittenhouse, is about a half-mile from the larger Ambler piles.
The 33-acre parcel had its own 25-foot asbestos pile covered in vegetation and a 10-acre reservoir fortified by asbestos debris. The land had been largely dormant since a park on part of the parcel closed in the mid-1980s amid heightened concerns about asbestos.
“We went kicking and screaming over it,” said McCormick, who formed Citizens for a Better Ambler to oppose the high-rise. Their opposition forced the developer to drop the plans and led EPA to take a fresh look at the site.
EPA investigators didn’t find unhealthy levels of airborne asbestos, but they did discover enough old asbestos pipes, shingles and other materials scattered around the site that they worried it could kick up dust. They also were concerned about what waste might be at the bottom of the reservoir and the debris in three streams running across the site and into the Wissahickon.
By 2009, BoRit became Ambler’s second asbestos-related Superfund site.
“Each of the spaces [on BoRit] has different challenges,” said Eduardo Rovira, who has been EPA’s on-site manager for BoRit since the cleanup began seven years ago.
Indeed, hundreds of trees were removed to make it easier to lay a geo-textile fabric cap down that was then covered with dirt and seeded with native plant species on large portions of the site. Thirty-seven million gallons of potentially contaminated water was drained from the reservoir and treated before disposal. The streams were cleaned up, some banks were reinforced and flood controls were put in place.
EPA has spent about $25 million at the site, using federal money because the agency has yet to determine who is responsible for the dumping.
Later this year, the agency will release its long-term plan for the site.
“It all depends on feedback from the community,” said Jill Lowe, EPA’s site remediation manager, who is working on the options for the site once the cleanup is finished. She said the state of Pennsylvania would oversee the long-term monitoring at BoRit in collaboration with EPA.
Already it’s expected that the reservoir, owned by the nonprofit Wissahickon Waterfowl Preserve, will continue as a bird sanctuary.
“We are hoping it will again be attractive to waterfowl,” said David Froehlich, who said the reservoir still needs to be restocked with fish. But, he said, he’s already seen some of the 73 species spotted at the site before the cleanup back again, including bald eagles, herons, and various ducks and geese.
But McCormick, who rode her success in fighting the BoRit development to a seat on the Town Council, still leads a local band of critics who say EPA can only remediate the site by hauling away all the material.
“I think this is a huge EPA screw-up,” McCormick said. “If they are not thinking of removing the asbestos, then why are they even thinking about reusing it?”

Research and questions

Ambler is also attracting the attention of researchers.
The University of Pennsylvania is in the middle of a four-year, $10 million federal grant, funded by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, to study medical issues raised by the manufacturing and disposal of asbestos in Ambler.
Ian Blair, a Penn pharmacology professor who oversees the work, said project researchers will try to map the entire population of the town in 1930 using old censuses, tax records and historical documents to find out what every resident eventually died of, including those who moved away.
With the latency period for mesothelioma lasting up to 40 years, there’s a belief that asbestos-related deaths in Ambler have been undercounted.
Research has shown already that Ambler had a mesothelioma rate from 1992 to 2008 more than three times what is typical for a town its size. A 2008 state study suggested asbestos was the likely cause of those high rates.
Other emerging data suggest a mesothelioma cluster for females in Ambler. Not many women worked inside the factories, but researchers are exploring whether they may have breathed in deadly asbestos fibers when washing the clothes of their husbands who worked in them.
Other Penn efforts will focus on developing a blood test for determining whether someone has been exposed to asbestos and researching whether asbestos can move through soil.
“If it can, is this something we should be concerned about in terms of ingesting asbestos through the drinking water rather than how everyone thinks of it as entirely coming from the air?” said Blair, who said initial work shows asbestos can move through soil.
Linda Reinstein, who founded the advocacy group the Asbestos Disease Awareness Organization after her husband was diagnosed with mesothelioma that he likely contracted from working in shipyards, believes Ambler has overlooked other asbestos.
During a visit last fall, Reinstein said, she was amazed that old, crumbling asbestos factories remained in the town and were not part of either EPA site. Reuse plans for those sites, which would include some private-sector cleanup of asbestos, remain in legal limbo.
Asbestos will draw more scrutiny as EPA begins implementing the recently passed update of the Toxic Substances Control Act. That law — the first substantial change to chemical safety regulation in 40 years — will allow EPA to fully ban as many as 10 of the most unsafe chemicals. Asbestos, already restricted, is widely expected to be on the list (Greenwire, July 25).
Reinstein is pleased that TSCA is expected to permanently ban asbestos, but she also remains concerned about the estimated 31 million tons of asbestos used domestically since 1900, a large portion of it made in Ambler.
She wonders, “If Ambler was the asbestos capital of the world, where did all the products go?”
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Nuclear Energy: Sucking America Dry or Filling Our Pockets with Energy?

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Photo credit to Inhabitat New York City. Photo of Indian Point Nuclear Site on the Hudson River. Indian Point has been leaking radioactive material into the Hudson for several months and has had many operating issues in recent years. Located 24 miles north of New York City.

The struggle for natural gas and oil continue each day. While we deplete our oil resources we look for new ways of finding oil such as fracking and importing more oil, but this oil flow is slowly, but surely drying up too. Our nation is looking to divest our energy production in other facets such as green energy, wind, water and solar and even nuclear energy, that uses uranium rods as a fuel source.
Nuclear energy has been used for decades and over that time we have seen many catastrophes and accidents such as Three Mile Island Nuclear Plant, in Pennsylvania or Fukushima Nagasaki Power Plant explosions in Japan, where residents are still threatened by toxic pollution and mass amounts of radiation. Not to mention, possibly the most famous disaster, Chernobyl Nuclear Site which is still abandoned and must be constantly monitored. Regardless of these disasters governments around the world claim nuclear is still very safe and good option to divest money away from natural gas.
In the US many states have chosen to renew expiring nuclear plant licenses and will continue to operate under federal standards. However, some are choosing to close their doors. In New Jersey, Oyster Creek Nuclear Facility has faced several difficulties and has determined the cost of updating safety standards and fixing operating issues would be more costly than just to end their licenses and permits early and close by 2019. In other states such as New York more and more nuclear power sites are feeling the same pressures. Exelon said the R. E. Ginna and Nine Mile Point nuclear plants will need to be shut down unless it receives financial help from NY state.  Entergy, another nuclear power company, said that it would close the James A. FitzPatrick plant, which neighbors Nine Mile Point on the shore of Lake Ontario in Oswego County, by early next year. The costs are too high to remain open, but could cost the state and nation more if an accident happens or operating standards cannot be met. 
The subsidies needed to keep these pants open will be immense and large in monetary value as well as impact. If these sites were to close the state will need to bring more energy from oil, coal and natural gas energy. Thus adding to the release of carbon emissions and pollution. Cuomo is all for these subsidies and bailouts in order to keep our energy consumption of oil and gas low. He even praised this work saying, “This Clean Energy Standard shows you can generate the power necessary for supporting the modern economy while combating climate change.”
So, the question stands, is nuclear power sucking America dry or is it filling our pockets with energy? You be the judge.
To find out more about current subsidies for New York nuclear plants click here: and to stay up to date with more environmental justice issues make sure to continue reading Backyard Talk- CHEJ’s Blog. [/fusion_builder_column][/fusion_builder_row][/fusion_builder_container]

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Poll Results: What do you want to see from the next EPA?

Last week, we asked you on Twitter, Facebook, and through an e-mail to add your voice to an important discussion: what do you want to see from the next EPA administration? The results are in!

  • Focus on environmental justice: 58 votes
  • More direct efforts to make impactful resolutions: 32 votes
  • Responsive leadership: 27 votes
  • Transparent decision making: 26 votes

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103 people participated in the survey. As you can see, some people put more than one answer– we should expect a lot from the EPA!
The most popular choice was a focus on environmental justice, with about 40% of the vote. It’s clear that the participants in this poll aren’t happy with the approach the EPA is taking towards environmental justice. The next EPA administration must adopt an mode of operation that protects everyone, especially those who need it most.
We’ve seen environmental injustice exemplified in Flint, where the EPA stayed silent, failing the people there who need clean water. It’s time for a new EPA to speak up. As this infographic from The Nation shows, “environmental racism is nothing new.”
 
Environmental racism
 
More direct efforts to make impactful resolutions, responsive leadership, and transparent decision making all came in at about 20%. All of these qualities are the next EPA administrator must have, and that current administrator Gina McCarthy has often failed to exhibit.
With elections looming, it’s time for politicians– and for all of us– to know what we need from the new EPA for it to be effective in protecting our environment and the people in it. Let’s hold our candidates responsible for their power of appointing the new EPA administrator.
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Lead: Slowly Poisoning Our Country

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Photo: Leaded water in one of the many lead positive Chicago Public School’s bottled from the school’s water fountain.

With news about flint’s water crisis still fresh in our minds, we continue to hear concerns from other communities about their water supplies. Recently, more than 72 Chicago public schools were found to have high levels of lead, well above EPA standards, in their water fountains and/or sinks. Nearly an additional 75 Chicago schools tested positive for lead in the water, but the levels were deemed “safe,” by EPA standard. This means these schools did test positive for lead, but the lead was less than 15 parts per billion, so students were allowed to continue school and be exposed to lead in the water. Out of all 500+ schools only 50 were lead free.
As we know lead has no safe level of exposure for children or adults alike. Lead is dangerous and can be fatal for the human body. Lead poisoning can damage one’s brain and nervous system, leading to issues with body function and control as well as mental illness. Issues with the stomach and the kidneys are common. Lead can also cause high blood pressure. However, little is being done to combat the leaded pipes and the illnesses linked to children who have been repeatedly exposed to leaded water. Several children have explained that they have been drinking from these highly contaminated sources multiple times each day during the school week leaving them especially vulnerable to lead leaching.
Since the Flint water crisis has come to the forefront, communities have started to take notice. With more and more cities doing more routine water testing, it is likely that more townships and school districts will find themselves in the same position wondering what to do to save their water and most importantly protect their children. As parents and educators fight for the health of the students blame alone will not be enough to combat the lead crisis. The EPA is approaching these issues slowly and ineffectively. The response to the communities is unjust and has left the people helpless. Especially parents of children from the 75+ affected Chicago public schools who are forced to continue sending their children to these schools each day where they are constantly exposed.
The EPA National Drinking Water Advisory Committee Working Group has recommended removal of all lead service lines as a public health priority, however this is a monumental project. One that will not be accomplished promptly or with enough time to truly make a difference. There is also the enormous cost burden which these communities cannot afford.  Areas like Chicago and Flint still need help and they need it now. By shining light on all the affected communities across our country we can help grow support and action pushing the government to act fast and change its practices on removing lead from our waterways.
To keep a watchful eye on these topics and their progress head to CHEJ’S Facebook page, website, or to learn more click here.[/fusion_builder_column][/fusion_builder_row][/fusion_builder_container]

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Fracking’s Methane Problem

imagesIt doesn’t take too long to scroll through the CHEJ blog roll to find multiple examples of the negative health impacts of hydraulic fracturing, otherwise known as fracking. But, even if fracking could be done in a manner that did not pollute and negatively impact the lives of some of America’s most vulnerable citizens, there is another very important reason why fracking may not be the energy solution that many of our leaders believe it is.
First, let’s take a step back and quickly discuss a major reason why fracking has been a focal point in our energy strategy over the last decade, climate change. Because hydraulic fracturing allows energy producers to access natural gas sources, mostly made up of methane, natural gas has the capacity to mitigate climate change. This is due to the fact that, when burned as a fuel, natural gas produces about half as much carbon dioxide (CO2) as coal. This has led many, including Obama, to adopt the strategy of using natural gas as a “bridge fuel” to replace the most carbon-intense sources, such as coal, while renewable technology, such as wind and solar become cheap enough to use on a grand scale.
Even if we ignore the poor record of pollution and injustice associated with fracking, there is another huge hurdle in this “bridge fuel” plan. There is a significant portion of fracked natural gas that is not being burned as fuel and is being released directly into the atmosphere as methane, a greenhouse gas that is over 25 times more potent than carbon dioxide. This methane is often leaked into the atmosphere during the extraction process. Even with a minimal leakage rate, there is the potential that methane emissions are offsetting the climate benefits of natural gas and using the fuel could actually be worse for the climate than coal. This is particularly troubling, as it would mean a total failure of America’s climate change mitigation strategy over the last eight years.
Currently, the EPA reports very small leakage rates that are based on industry data. With this data, fracking might still pass this very important test. The only problem is that multiple studies have been produced just in the last five years that report much higher leakage rates and spell disaster for our climate as a result. A recent study by Harvard researchers reports leakage rates much higher than EPA numbers, and a 30 percent increase in methane emissions from 2002-2014.
Considering this troubling data about methane emission, not to mention the public health impacts of fracking, maybe it is time to give up this bridge fuel plan and start utilizing renewables on a grand scale now. At the very least, let’s stop using the argument that fracking is good for climate change and have a more honest dialogue about our energy future.
Find out more about fracking’s methane problem.

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Homepage News Archive

Funds, cleanups fewer

By Brendan Lyons of the Times Union. The usefulness of the EPA in cleaning up Superfund sites, a creation which often gets credited to Lois Gibbs and is a label for toxic waste removal as a government and corporate responsibility, is severely unfunded. Here’s a look at some of those repercussions. 
The 2002 chemical release would haunt the tiny village near Rochester for years. The accidental discharge at the Diaz Chemical plant showered contaminants on the residential neighborhood surrounding the facility, blanketing homes and playgrounds with potentially toxic substances.
A few months later, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, which would declare the plant a federal Superfund site, took over responsibility for relocating the occupants of eight homes who fled and refused to return to their residences. It took another nine years for the EPA to settle on a plan to fully clean up the site. Two weeks ago, workers finally began relocating a public water line that runs through the abandoned factory site in Orleans County.
“Anytime you have a time lag like we experienced, it’s always frustrating,” said John W. Kenney Jr., who was mayor of the village of Holley for 10 years beginning in 2006, and a village trustee for three years before that.
A 75-year-old who has lived in the village for more than 50 years, Kenney said it was frustrating that it took so long for the EPA to mobilize its cleanup plan and arrange for the eventual sale of the abandoned residences, which the EPA last week said is “being worked on in preparation to have the eight homes placed back on the real estate market.”
For the embattled EPA, the arguably slow response times to many environmental disasters — some of which cost hundreds of millions of dollars to clean up — may be tied to dwindling funding rather than a lack of urgency.

A trust fund that was set up when President Jimmy Carter signed the 1980 law establishing the federal Superfund program began to run short of cash in the 1990s. The decline came after Congress — and also President George W. Bush during his two terms — repeatedly declined to support renewing a federal tax previously imposed on petroleum and chemical companies, which are often blamed for the nation’s worst environmental disasters.
The “polluter pays” tax, as it’s sometimes called, expired in 1995 and was never restored despite urgings to Congress from every U.S. president since Carter — except the most recent Bush.
Without the money, many Democratic lawmakers say the EPA has been hobbled and fallen behind in its mission to clean up the nation’s most severely polluted sites. In a report to Congress last year, the U.S. Government Accountability Office said that in 2013 roughly 39 million people — 13 percent of the U.S. population — lived within three miles of a federal Superfund site. The report said more than a third of those living near the sites were either under the age of 18 or were 65 years or older. The EPA’s Region 2, which includes New York, had the largest number of people — 10 million, or about one-third of the region’s population — living within a three-mile radius of a federal Superfund site.
Thanks to Brendan Lyons and the Times Union for sharing this story with us. 
If you’d like to read the original article, click here.
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Backyard Talk

Our White House Call In: An Empowering Success

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I don’t know if you noticed, but over the past week and a half, we at CHEJ have been repeatedly asking you, and by extension, your friends, your family, your colleagues, and everyone else you know to call in to the White House and ask for the EPA to ‘Get Out of The Way!’ I’m sure if you’ve called, whether it was once, or every day like myself, you discovered that it was the easiest and most polite call exchange with a government agency that you’ve ever had in your entire life. From my perspective at least, the phone call went something like this:
“Hi, this is the White House Comment Line. All our lines are busy right now, but if you’d like to stay on the line, someone will accept your call and record a quick comment….”
…Music plays while I’m put on hold for less than ten seconds…
Which is kind of boring and bureaucratic-sounding, right? Until a sweet old lady answers your call and sincerely listens to whatever it is you’re trying to say!
“Hello?”

“Hi! My name is Zoe Hall and I am a citizen of St. Louis calling on behalf of the citizens of Bridgeton, Missouri. I think the EPA needs to get out of the way and push for the FUSRAP to pass so the Army Corps of Engineers can clean up the West Lake Landfill. I would also like the president to see what he can do about relocation for the citizens within a mile of the landfill. This is a really pressing issue and I hope you see to it the president finds out how concerned I am.”
Eventually, by the last Tuesday of our push for calls, the conversation ended like this:
“Sure sweetie, are you referring to HR-4100?”  
Which is the House of Representatives bill 4100 pushing for FURSAP. The instant recognition of the exact issue we are pushing for indicates that the White House Comment Line has gotten such an influx of calls concerning West Lake that they have to have a code for it to easily identify and tally up all of our voices united in our outrage. This is a huge deal –– this list of codes and top concerns of the nation gets forwarded to the White House Staff in order to keep our president updated on the issues we as his constituents are focused on. That means our president has in his possession a lengthy list of people’s names and outcries for change. What he does next is out of our hands, but at least, now aware of our concern, he is accountable for whatever that may be! In itself, I consider this a victory.
Whether or not you participated in the call in, everyone can learn from the power this provided to the citizens at West Lake and anyone who wants to organize a simple, empowering action that is not only easy to do (it takes five minutes!) but is also one that gets results. Remain persistent and focused, keep your goals clear, and use the power given to we the people to raise your voice as loud as possible, so that one of the most powerful people in the world might hear.  

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Backyard Talk

New EPA Document’s release details what agency knew about West Lake for Three years

The EPA’s National Remedy and Review Board released a document last Thursday that called removal of toxic waste at West Lake Landfill “feasible.” It gave a summary of its recommendations for the area, many of which were in direct opposition to what the EPA has been saying about the site for years. Just Moms STL, Missouri Coalition for the Environment, and other groups have requested the document over the past three years under the Freedom of Information Act, but the EPA has denied them the document.
Now, as the document is released, it’s more clear why the EPA was so resistant to these groups seeing it in the first place. Since 2008, the EPA’s plan has been to put a cap on the site, containing the waste but not providing a long-term solution. The EPA and landfill owner Republic Services had cited that the cap would cost ten times less than removing the waste, and that the waste couldn’t be removed safely for workers or the community. The report, however, completely discredits those statements. It says that removal would be safe for workers and provide a long-term solution for the community, and that EPA region 7 overestimated the costs of removal on several fronts.
Just Moms STL have been advocating for removal for years. They recognized that a safe and permanent solution was the best way to protect the community now and in the long-term, especially given the history of the area. Some of the victims of West Lake are former victims of Coldwater creek, a nearby nuclear toxic dump site. Now that the National Review Board document has been released saying that removal is feasible after all, the community is angry. They should have had this information years ago.
If the EPA has known for three years that removal of the waste is the best option, why haven’t they done anything to start that process? It’s time for the EPA to recognize their failure on West Lake, and to abandon the plan to cap the landfill.

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Backyard Talk

Exxon and Climate Misinformation

Recently, it seems that every month or so there is a new story that shows another way that ExxonMobil has worked to hide the truth behind the highly destructive effects of climate change. This past month was no different, as the Guardian released a report that links Exxon to the elimination of an important congressional lecture series on climate science in 2001, just days after the inauguration of George W. Bush.
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While this story is troubling, as it prevented members of Congress from hearing about the emerging science of climate change at a very important time, it is just one incident that has come to light in recent months showing how Exxon has sheltered the truth behind climate change decades earlier. According to an investigation by InsideClimate News, the oil company has known that the burning of fossil fuels results in a rise in the temperature of Earth’s atmosphere as early as 1977, which is over a decade before climate change ever became a public issue. The company actually played active role in discovering the phenomenon by employing top scientists to develop climate models based off of original research. Exxon’s top scientist even delivered a speech to executives introducing the science and warning that “present thinking holds that man has a time window of five to 10 years before hard decisions regarding changes in energy strategies might become critical.” Yet, almost 40 years later, humans are beginning to experience the effects of climate change and still very little has been done, thanks to Exxon’s sheltering of the truth.
Not only has Exxon prevented the public from discovering the potentially catastrophic future that climate change poses, but they have also contributed to spreading of skepticism of climate science among the general public. Much like the tobacco industry promoted misinformation regarding the health risks of smoking, Exxon has spent more than $30 million on organizations promoting climate denial. They have even utilized the same consultants that worked with the tobacco industry decades earlier to develop a communications strategy. A memo from the fossil fuel industry, found by the Union of Concerned Scientists, sums up the intentions of their campaign perfectly when it stated, “Victory will be achieved when the average person is uncertain about climate science.”
It is sad that Exxon could not act on the troubling evidence provided to them by its own scientists in the 1970s. We would’ve had a chance to get ahead of climate change and start taking the steps necessary to mitigate catastrophic levels of temperature rise. But, it is easy to see why Exxon would hide the truth and promote skepticism of climate science, as any logical response to widespread acceptance of the science by the public and our policymakers would involve major government intervention to slow the burning of fossil fuels, which would most certainly hurt Exxon’s profit. Now that it is clear that Exxon prevented action on mitigating climate change, it is time that they pay their share of the costs that climate change is already inflicting across the world.