Administrative Law Judge reversed earlier decision in a coal ash case, ruling that state environmental officials exceeded their authority when they allowed the ash to be disposed in unexcavated areas of the Brickhaven and Colon mines. Blue Ridge Environmental Defense League organizer Therese Vick praised the decision and admonished the agency for issuing the permits. “DEQ knew what they did was wrong, yet they kept trying to defend the indefensible,” Vick wrote in a press statement. “No community should ever have to go through this again.” Read more.
Author: Lois Gibbs
Opinion NYT In Texas and across the country, the E.P.A.’s gutting of the Chemical Disaster Rule is a matter of life or death.
By While families across the country celebrated Thanksgiving with their loved ones, more than 50,000 people in Port Neches, Tex., were forced to evacuate from their homes and spend the holiday in makeshift shelters. The reason? Two explosions at the Texas Petroleum Chemical plant sent flames into the sky, injured eight people, and released plumes of butadiene, a carcinogen, into the air.
The disaster erupted six days after the Trump administration gutted Obama-era regulations meant to improve safety at 12,000 chemical plants around the country.
It’s too soon to say whether these now abandoned rules would have made a difference in Port Neches. But there is no question that the communities that surround these thousands of plants are less safe now.
This regulatory rollback gives chemical plants across the country a free pass, in pursuit of greater profits, to operate in a way that endangers families and workers.
There are over 2,500 chemical facilities in the Houston area. Manchester, the neighborhood where Texas Environmental Justice Advocacy Services works, is among those most affected by this negligence. There are 30 chemical plants and waste sites in the Manchester area that report to the Environmental Protection Agency. When an explosion happens, nearby neighborhoods, mostly Latinx and people of color, are exposed to this toxicity.
And these toxic blasts are not infrequent. The last chemical explosion in Houston to garner national attention was in March at the Intercontinental Terminals Co., a few miles east of Manchester. This explosion led to high benzene levels in the air, school closures and community shelter-in-place orders for days: stay where you are, turn off air conditioning. Some advisories told people to put a plastic tarp over their windows, sealed with duct tape, to prevent air from coming in.
Federal regulations were supposed to protect us. For years, organizations like United Steelworkers, Greenpeace and dozens of other community and environmental organizations pressured the E.P.A. to make chemical disaster prevention a priority.
The turning point happened in 2013 when an explosion at a fertilizer plant in West, Tex., 200 miles northwest of Houston, killed 15 people and injured over 260.
Later that year, President Barack Obama signed an executive order calling on federal agencies to create a task force. What emerged was the Chemical Disaster Rule, a proposal to improve plant safety and protect surrounding communities, which the former E.P.A. administrator Gina McCarthy approved one month before President Trump took office.
Two months later, the Trump administration blocked the regulations from taking effect, and now the E.P.A. has released a final rule that eviscerates the Obama-era requirements. The agency rescinded major accident prevention provisions, including requirements to consider safer technology, audits of accidents by outside parties and “root cause” analyses of accidents.
While Texas has the largest number of chemical facilities in the country, Illinois, California, Iowa and Louisiana are riddled with them, too. As The Houston Chronicle has documented, no state is spared from having at least one facility that could have toxic or flammable chemical accidents with consequences that extend beyond the site.
The E.P.A. calls these communities — areas that could be affected by a release from a chemical accident — “vulnerable zones.” One in three children in America attends a school in a vulnerable zone. This means that over 19 million children are at risk of exposure to the harmful chemicals that these plants use, store and can emit when they produce plastics, pesticides, adhesives and other products.
Our neighborhoods in Houston are a case in point. The oil and gas facilities and chemical plants along the 52-mile Houston Ship Channel have turned the air in Harris County into a public health hazard, significantly increasing the likelihood of residents’ developing cancer and respiratory problems — and shortening the lives of children. Children living near the Houston Ship Channel are 56 percent more likely to develop leukemia than those who live more than 10 miles away.
To me this issue is personal. Yes, explosions from chemical facilities can be deadly. But the long-term impact of exposure to toxic chemicals also kills. In 2016, I was found to have hypersensitivity pneumonitis, a rare autoimmune system disorder that arises from breathing in dust or toxins repeatedly. The doctors blamed indoor air, but I am convinced that exposure to chemicals in Houston led to my condition. In this town, there’s little distinction between the air indoors and what’s outside.
When traveling — I am now at the U.N. Climate talks in Madrid — I bring a portable oxygen machine in case I need it. I am unable to walk long distances, and I move slowly because of my shortness of breath. Public speaking is difficult, as is any exertion. My life expectancy is not long (10 years, one doctor told me). I hope it is more.
In my family, lung diseases are the norm. My diagnosis came the same year that my father, Gregorio V. García, died of lung cancer at 79. He worked in the Asarco Refinery in Corpus Christi, Tex., and was a member of United Steelworkers for 30 years. Workers in these refineries are the first exposed to toxic substances. Many, like him, have died of cancer.
Plants like the nearby Valero facility emit a slew of poisonous chemicals like benzene and hydrogen cyanide into our neighborhoods. Far too often, they fail to meet Clean Air Act requirements.
During Hurricane Harvey in August 2017, I felt what it was like to breathe in a concentrated amount of toxic air. On the day of the worst flooding, my husband and I drove his pickup truck into Manchester to document what was happening at the Valero refinery. We saw water running from Valero into Hartman Park, where children gather to play baseball and soccer, and down the streets we knew well. As we drove, we had to cover our nose and mouth with our hands. My lips turned numb. The odor was so strong that it made me nauseated.
Three days later we found out that we had driven into one of the largest benzene spills. Benzene is clear, colorless and flammable. To date, this spill has not been adequately addressed by the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality.
In Houston, we struggle to get chemical facilities to follow the law. We ask our state to protect us from chemicals that no one should breathe. Now the federal government is ending safeguards that the E.P.A. only a few years ago said the industry needed to protect the lives of workers, emergency medical workers and communities like mine.
My life should not be a pawn for leveraging industry profits. Nor should those of my neighbors and their children. Families and workers in these neighborhoods deserve to be safe.
As disasters continue to happen, we — those most affected, those who breathe and live and play in toxicity — condemn the E.P.A.’s decision to repeal the Chemical Disaster Rule. We are denied basic health protections simply because the industry does not want to invest in our safety.
Families and workers across the country should not have to pay the ultimate cost of this administration’s refusal to do its job: our lives.
Ana Parras is a co-executive director of Texas Environmental Justice Advocacy Services (@tejasbarrios).
The 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals today vacated a permit to build a compressor station for the proposed Atlantic Coast gas pipeline, citing a Virginia state board for inadequately assessing its environmental justice impacts on the largely African American community of Union Hill. Read more.
Cumberland County is the latest to approve spending millions to provide public drinking water to two schools and an area with well contamination caused by the Chemours chemical company. Read more.
The Trump administration has built up the biggest backlog of unfunded toxic Superfund cleanup projects in at least 15 years, nearly triple the number that were stalled for lack of money in the Obama era, according to 2019 figures released by the Environmental Protection Agency over the winter holidays. Read more.
A group of Democratic West Virginia lawmakers announced plans Monday to introduce legislation to regulate a group of toxic, man-made fluorinated chemicals. Del. Hansen said the bill, which is still being drafted, would require facilities that use or produce PFAS chemicals to disclose that information to the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection. Read more.
December 11, 1980 President Jimmy Carter signed legislation creating a $1.6 billion environmental “Superfund” to pay for cleaning up chemical spills and toxic waste dumps. This legislation came out of a grassroots fight in Niagara Falls, NY at Love Canal.
This is not just another anniversary date, it is a reminder of what can be accomplished when people come together, speak with one voice and demand change. Recently the divisions, among people who often want the same things, has been so orchestrated by those who want to keep the status quo. It’s become difficult for everyday people to figure out what’s what. But if you think about what you really want and ignore the other side’s game of what can be done, what’s possible we can win. At Love Canal I was told you will never be evacuated so give it up. But 800 families were evacuated. We were told the Superfund legislation would never pass it was way too costly, but it did.
When you look back at least in our environmental health and justice movement you’ll see how labor and communities came together, even in the belly of the beast in Louisiana, to pass the Right-To-Know legislation. Recycling is now a staple in our society where someone throwing away a can in the garbage is frowned upon. The public came together to use their power as consumers to stop many toxic products from being sold on the market. Young people today are speaking out and speaking loudly about Climate Change and using their power and their votes to move candidates.
Today marks the anniversary of what a grassroots movement can do. Let us celebrate that victory and work to achieve more. Let’s not be influenced by those who want to keep us apart, rather find the ways we can join together to win justice for all living things.
By Teresa Mills
Today the Trump administration finalized its 49th de-regulatory action since he took office. What will be the next human and environmental protection to hit the chopping block?
The administration says this move will make less of a burden on chemical plants by getting rid of “unnecessary regulatory burdens.” The regulation was updated after a fertilizer plant exploded in Texas that killed 15 people, injured 160 and damaged or destroyed 150 buildings. A crater 93-foot-wide was almost all that was left of the plant site.
In January 2017 under the Obama administration and reacting to the explosion in Texas the Risk Management Plan (RMP) rules were update to protect local communities from chemical disasters. However, the Trump administration claims that the Obama update was burdensome and that little data showed that the Obama rule did not reduce accident rates.
Under the new Environmental Protection Agency’s risk management program (RMP), chemical plants will be rid of what the chemical industry says are “unnecessary regulatory burdens,” aligning with the wishes of the chemical industry.
The original plan was developed in 1996, with almost 12,500 facilities falling under the RMP.
EPA’s finalized rule Thursday comes two years after the agency tried to suspend the Obama rule, but in March of 2018 a federal judge reinstated the rule.
Of Course the American Petroleum Institute (API) applauded the Trumps administration gutting of the rule. Welcome to the United States of Petroleum.
While the agency said that from 2007-2016 about 90 percent of the facilities that were required to report, reported no accidents. Well gee do you think that might have been because they were required to clean up their act. The rule was working as it should have. Now however we will have to wait and see if they threw out the baby with the bath water. I pray that someone will be there to catch that baby. Read more.
Looking at the 1,571 Superfund sites at least 945 of them are in areas that scientists have identified as at greater risk of floods, storm surge from major hurricanes, wildfires or sea level rise of 3 feet or more according to the Government Accountability Office (GAO). Click here for full report.
We are All on the Titanic
Editors note: Peter Montague wrote this years ago and thought it was more relevant today than ever.
Environmental injustice arises when people of color and/or people of below-average income are (a) unfairly burdened with bad environments, or (b) unfairly denied good environments, or (c) harmed because vulnerabilities leave them especially prone to injury from “normal” or “average” circumstances.
Having been active in the Environmental Justice (EJ) movement for the last decade (and supplying it with information for the past 30 years), I’ve come to believe that the EJ frame is now too narrow. New information about environmental threats has changed the picture very substantially. We are all on the Titanic and we can see the iceberg ahead. On this voyage there are no lifeboats. A plutocratic oligarchy has seized the bridge and taken command of the wheelhouse. Instead of steering a true course to safety and prosperity for all, they are busily stuffing their pockets while they debate what we can all see looming ahead — isn’t it really just a patch of fog? Is it worth the trouble and expense to try to turn the ship? Shouldn’t we count on the invisible hand to steer us true?
The EJ movement originally demanded to move from steerage up to first class. But 30 years later the situation has changed; we can now see that such a move isn’t going to provide a full measure of justice for anyone. As we draw closer to the iceberg, in the ensuing panic people of color and the poor will be ignored and forgotten — perhaps jettisoned overboard. But justice continues to be the central demand of any strategy that can turn the ship. The EJ perspective is now crucial not only to people of color and of low income — it has become crucial for us all. Our national pledge of allegiance, “…with liberty and justice for all,” now means we must all demand environmental justice for everyone, remove the oligarchs from the wheelhouse, and turn the ship before it is too late.
We must not dilute the demands of people of color or people with low income. But today we can aim to build a broad, inclusive movement for change by recognizing that their legitimate demand for justice pertains now to a majority constituency — all those who are marginalized, disrespected, ignored, abused, hurt, and harmed. In sum, a call for environmental justice can now speak to the vast majority of Americans, whose environmental, social and economic needs are no longer being met. –Peter Montague