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.
Category: Backyard Talk
CHEJ Blog
The Trump Administration and newly-appointed EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt claim to desire to return Superfund cleanups “to their rightful place at the center of the EPA’s core mission”1, however their actions speak differently: their proposed budget includes a 30% cut in funding to the Superfund. In April, Pruitt assembled a Task Force to provide recommendations for the future of Superfund, chaired by Albert Kelly, a prior bank chairman with no environmental experience. On June 22nd, the report was released and the recommendations it contains raise major concerns decreasing cleanup oversight, privileging corporate interests over public health, and a lack of community involvement.
In response, CHEJ has prepared a point-by-point rebuttal of the key recommendations of Pruitt’s report. We intend to share this document with members of our coalition to serve as a guide in the on-going process of organizing together in the pursuit of Superfund reform and Environmental Justice.
Read our response to Pruitt’s plan for Superfund here:
Response to the EPA Superfund Task Force Report (1)
Don’t drink the water. That’s something you’d expect to hear when you travel to a developing country. But that’s what people are saying in Wilmington, a historic beach, tourist and retiree destination and the eighth-largest city in this state. It also happens to be one of my favorite places to go when I need a reprieve from the heat and humidity of central North Carolina. With its charming historic riverfront, shops, delicious restaurants, parks, water sports and beautiful beaches, it’s a great place to relax and unwind. The last thing one should have to worry about is the safety of the local drinking water.
Over the past couple of months, Wilmington residents have learned that DuPont and its spinoff company Chemours have been dumping unregulated chemicals into the Cape Fear River for decades and only recently stopped at the request of the governor. The result: Disturbing levels of chemicals like 1,4-dioxane, GenX and PFOA have been found in the drinking water of residents in Wilmington, Brunswick and the surrounding area.
These types of of chemicals, called fluorinated compounds, have been linked to cancer, thyroid disease and obesity. GenX and other fluorinated compounds are used in the making of Teflon, Scotchgard and other stain-resistant and water-repellant products. They are designed so that they are water- and oil-repellant, which means that they are extremely difficult to treat in water-treatment plants before they hit our taps.
While GenX has received a lot of the attention, the chemical 1,4-dioxane – which is much more well-studied – has been found in some places to be in excess of 35 parts per billion, a level at which, when consumed regularly over the course of a lifetime, cancer risk becomes two orders of magnitude higher than that at generally acceptable levels. Many Wilmington residents have been drinking this water their whole lives. Now they must worry about the risks to their and their children’s health.
Wilmington has asked the EPA to start looking into GenX and investigating the safety of its water. But with asbestos denier Scott Pruitt and chemical industry representative Nancy Beck overseeing EPA’s program in charge of regulating these chemicals, I don’t have much faith in their investigation. Now, the Trump Administration has nominated Michael Dourson to lead the entire toxics program at the EPA. Will Mr. Dourson provide hope for Wilmington?
A look at his background also leaves me skeptical. In 2002, DuPont hand-picked Dourson’s firm Toxicology Excellence for Risk Assessment (TERA) to advise West Virginia’s Department of Environmental Quality on setting health levels for PFOA, one of the same chemicals now found in Wilmington’s water. His firm came up with a level that was thousands of times less protective than a later EPA assessment. 1,4-dioxane is currently under review by the very office that Mr. Dourson has been nominated to lead. Yet he also published research on that chemical paid for entirely by PPG, a company responsible for discharging this chemical and contaminating Ohio’s waterways.
Saturday, I went to a Rally for Clean Water in Wilmington to talk with residents about their concerns. They want what we all want – to know that when they open up the tap, they can drink the water without worrying about toxic chemicals. And they deserve better: corporate polluters that are held accountable for egregious pollution and government officials who will protect their health and safety at the local and the national level.
By Ansje Miller resides in Hillsborough and is the director of policy and partnerships for the Center for Environmental Health.
It has been almost 40 years since the nation heard the cries for help from Love Canal, a school and neighborhood in Niagara Falls, New York built on a toxic dump filled with 21,000 tons of chemical waste. Children were sick, parents were scared and families lost their homes.
I know, because my children, my family and my home were among them.
The Love Canal crisis created a public awareness and scientific understanding that the chemicals people are exposed to in their everyday environment can cause serious harm to their health, especially to pregnant women and young children.
This understanding of the serious risk of living near pollution was the impetus to creating the Superfund program in 1980. The program gives communities power to hold corporations responsible for cleaning up contamination.
The cornerstone of the program is the “polluter pays” principle.
President Jimmy Carter signed the Superfund bill knowing that other sites similar to Love Canal would have immediate resources to reduce and eliminate people’s exposure to toxic chemicals. And it worked well for 20 years, including under presidents Reagan, G.H.W. Bush, and Clinton, who all supported the program and the tax that funded it.
Then, in 1995, Congress allowed the tax to expire and by 2003, the entire financial burden of paying to clean up the worst orphan toxic sites fell to the taxpayers. As a result, the number of toxic sites cleaned up went from an average of 85 a year down to as few as eight a year now.
The recently appointed head of the Environmental Protection Agency, Scott Pruitt, says Superfund is his priority. As the “mother of Superfund,” as I am often called, I should be thrilled. Instead, I’m terrified.
How can Pruitt call Superfund a priority if he’s proposing cutting the program’s budget by $330 million without advocating for the polluters’ tax to be reinstated?
There are 1,300 sites on the Superfund list. Of those, 121 sites don’t have human exposure under control. Contaminant levels at these sites are unsafe and people are at risk. There are another187 sites where groundwater migration of waste isn’t under control.
Nearly 53 million people live within three miles of a Superfund site, 46 percent are people of color and 15 percent live below the poverty line.
Pruitt is forming a special task force to improve Superfund, but his directive sounds eerily like a plan to expand the Superfund Alternatives program, and that would be a disaster.
Under Superfund Alternatives, responsible parties agree to clean up a site to avoid the stigma of being listed on the National Priority List. The program benefits the polluter while punishing the victims. It gives power to corporations, takes it away from communities harmed by the toxic sites, and weakens EPA oversight.
Superfund Alternatives removes mandatory citizen participation and access to information and resources provided by Superfund. Under the program, technical assistance grants that allow citizens to hire their own experts to review data and plans are awarded by the polluter rather than the EPA.
The alternative approach also allows a company to avoid flagging a National Priority List site as a liability in its financial papers. This can have a significant impact, especially if the company is being sold.
If the polluter is cleaning up the site under Pruitt’s watch, it doesn’t take a crystal ball to see that the cleanup will be as minimal as possible. The result will be partially cleaned-up sites being used for other purposes – and on a path back to where we started 40 years ago.
Institutional controls are supposed to prevent land that is too contaminated for residential use from ever being used for homes and schools. At Love Canal, those institutional controls failed in the 1950s to stop construction of the 99th Street School.
Under Pruitt’s direction, families like those recently evacuated from contaminated public housing in East Chicago, Indiana, might still be there, getting sicker.
If Pruitt truly wants to protect people around Superfund sites, then his first steps should be to advocate for reinstating the “polluter pays” tax to provide funds to adequately clean up sites.
He should hold polluters, not taxpayers, responsible for cleanup costs and collect triple damages from polluters who force EPA to go to court. He should also continue the technical assistance grants that provide communities with the information they need to understand their cleanup options.
Pruitt must protect the power of communities to hold polluters responsible, because after 40 years, it is painfully clear that we can’t count on corporations.
We in the wealthiest country in the world should feel ashamed. America takes our most vulnerable families – poor or working poor – and houses them next to polluting industries, poisons their children and now wants to take away their access to health care.
This vicious cycle of poison and poverty leads young men and women to end up sick, dead or in prisons.
Polluters Don’t Pay, We Do
Many low-income families only find housing near polluting facilities or on contaminated lands. There are many reasons for this: for many years, African Americans and Latinos were only allowed to live in certain sections of a city or town because of their race. Polluting facilities were often built near these vulnerable communities of color, creating a poisonous environment for innocent families.
As a result, children become sick, poisoned by lead and toxic chemicals in the air and soil. Too many of these children miss too many days from school, which leads them to fall behind or develop learning disabilities. This creates a situation in which they cannot succeed in school.
Polluting industries often find ways to avoid contributing to their local tax base, which funds public schools. As a result, these schools are unable to hire enough special education teachers to help vulnerable children succeed. Students become frustrated and drop out of school, ending up on the streets and getting in trouble.
Remember Freddie
Let’s remember Freddie Gray, who was killed in police custody in Baltimore in 2015. In court, the officers charged with his death justified their recklessness by claiming they could not prevent his fatal injuries because he became combative after arrest.
Gray’s aggressive behavior – if it even happened – could have been a result of toxic poisoning. In 2008, he and his two sisters were found to have damaging levels of lead in their blood, the result of living for years in a rented house where lead paint flaked off walls and windowsills in the rooms where they slept.
From Paint to Prison
There are hundreds of conclusive studies that confirm lead exposure is a cause of aggressive behavior. Freddie Gray needlessly lost his life at 25 years of age. Far too many young people and children like him are poisoned by environmental chemicals, then end up dead or in prison.
Prison isn’t free of chemicals either, adding an additional burden to these young victims. At least 589 federal and state prisons are located within three miles of a Superfund cleanup site, which are the most environmentally dangerous sites in the country. 134 of those prisons are within one mile of a Superfund site. Furthermore, it is common practice to build prisons directly on former industrial sites that conceal a myriad of health hazards.
Poverty keeps families from living in safe, unpolluted environments. America builds “affordable housing” often on top of poisoned soil. Today, the state of Indiana is trying to find housing for hundreds of families in East Calumet because the land is so contaminated with lead and other chemicals that no one can live there. Yet families have lived there for years, with young children playing on that contaminated soil.
We Share The Same Dreams
Today, our lawmakers want to deepen these violations of the most vulnerable among us by taking away what little health care they have. Children in poisoned communities can’t breathe because of contaminated air; now they want to take away their asthma medication. In some communities, there are clusters of childhood cancers with victims who need extensive medical attention. Regular access to clinics for infants and blood testing for lead are not a choice: parents must be able to secure that medical screening and care.
These parents have the same dreams of success for their children as those who are wealthy. But their children have little chance of achieving those dreams because they are poisoned, without their knowledge or consent, and failed by our educational system.
If the Trump administration has their way, they will let the poor and communities of color be poisoned with no ability to seek medical attention. Young people already poisoned will end up in prison or dead on the streets.
Today, all parents with dreams for their children must fight back to break this cycle of poison and poverty. If we join together we can win justice for all, not just the privileged.
Environmental Justice is a system of thought which asserts that all people have a right to equal environmental hazard protection and access to the decision-making process upon which their welfare hinges. Moreover, this paradigm recognizes that marginalized groups are, by far, the most affected by environmental harms. Environmental Justice and Incarceration my not seem to have much in common at first glance, however, over a thousand prisons across America are home to shocking toxic hazards.
Independent cartographer Paige Williams claims that at least 589 federal and state prisons are located within three miles of a Superfund cleanup site on the National Priorities List, with 134 of those prisons located within just one mile. Furthermore, it is common practice to build prisons on former industrial cites which are hosts to a myriad of health hazards.
Paul Wright, Executive Director of the Human Rights Defense Fund, explains that “one of the patterns that we see is where corporations have come in, they pillage the environment, be it by mining, forestry or whatever, and then when everything has been exhausted, when trees have been cut down, every last grain of ore has been ripped from the soil, and everything has been contaminated and poisoned in the process, the final solution is, okay now we’re going to build a prison here.”
SCI Fayette is one of many such prisons, located on the corner of an abandoned coal preparation plant which has become a dumpsite, containing 45 million tons of coal refuse. Coal ash exposure can lead to a host of conditions, including respiratory problems, hypertension, heart problems, brain and nervous system damage, liver damage, stomach and intestinal ulcers, and many forms of cancer, including skin, stomach, lung, urinary tract and kidney. A 2014 review found that 81 percent of the 75 prisoners who responded to a health survey claimed to suffer from respiratory, throat and sinus conditions; 68 percent experienced gastrointestinal problems; 52 percent reported adverse skin conditions; and 12 percent said they were diagnosed with a thyroid disorder. The report also noted 11 of the 17 prisoners who died at SCI Fayette between 2010 and 2013 had died of cancer.
Kenneth Hartman, who nearly died from contracting a fungal infection in a California State prison, asserts that “prisons found to be a serious health risk need to be closed. The changes made [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”][to address valley fever] are about managing risk and trying to avoid lawsuits, not about fixing the problems of a massively dysfunctional prison system.” He alludes to a larger issue with the public mindset: “the problem is, the intersection of environmental justice and mass incarceration runs right into the teeth of prisoners not being considered worthy of justice. If we complain about dirty water, or poor ventilation systems, or inadequate medical care, there is a collective societal shrug: You should have thought about that before you committed crime.”
Mass incarceration traps thousands of Americans in areas of life-threatening toxic exposure. We cannot go on turning a blind eye to this sickening abuse of human rights.
Action Resources:
Join the Prison Ecology Project Campaign: http://nationinside.org/campaign/prison-ecology/
Citations:
http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/40756-america-s-toxic-prisons-the-environmental-injustices-of-mass-incarceration
https://www.prisonlegalnews.org/news/2016/jun/3/ncarceration-justice-and-planet-how-fight-against-toxic-prisons-may-shape-future-environmentalism/[/fusion_builder_column][/fusion_builder_row][/fusion_builder_container]
Last week, President Trump pulled the United States out of the Paris Climate Agreement. Here’s what Pittsburgh had to say about it:
“Mr. President, when you took our country out of the global agreement to stop climate change, you said you “represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris.” As a proud native of western Pennsylvania, I strongly disagree.
You do not represent Pittsburgh. Our people overwhelmingly rejected you at the ballot box, and we have seen your brand of charlatanism before.
For generations, glorified highwaymen like you have come to exploit the people and land of western Pennsylvania, and gorged themselves on their spoils. These salesmen claimed gold would rain down on us, if only we let them dump toxins in our rivers. We didn’t buy it then, and we don’t buy it now…
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Rights for workers and protections for our land and water are victories that had to be fought for and won by the people of western Pennsylvania from highwaymen like you…
Mr. President, Pittsburgh is not your punch line. Your speechwriters probably chose us from a Google search of “cities that start with P,” but we are indeed on the front lines of climate change, and we will bear the cost of your bad choices.
If we stay the course you have set and do nothing to halt climate change, both Pittsburgh and Washington, DC will be coastal cities as New York and Boston sink below the rising tide of warming oceans.
Mr. President, Pittsburgh is proudly part of the planet we share. The people of Pittsburgh breathe the same air as the people of Paris and Poland and Palau. You represent profits for the few, not the People of Pittsburgh.”
Read the entire letter written by Daniel Doubet of Keystone Progress on OurFuture.org[/fusion_builder_column][/fusion_builder_row][/fusion_builder_container]
Climate scientists are fighting back. They had heard enough when EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt claimed in written Senate comments following his confirmation hearing as administrator of EPA that “over the past two decades satellite data indicates there has been a leveling off of warming.” They decided to respond, not with reactionary rhetoric, but with science, with facts.
A team of scientists led by researchers at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, CA and from MIT in Cambridge, MA examined temperature data from three satellite data sets going back to 1979 and calculated temperature trends for each 20-year period, and then determined whether the observed trends were significantly larger than the 20-year trends arising from natural processes internal to the climate system. The researchers concluded that the scientific data “do not support the recent claim of a ‘leveling off of warming’ over the past two decades.” The analysis was published in the scientific journal Nature. The conclusion directly refutes the statement on climate change made by EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt.
The researchers led by Benjamin Santer, a world renown climate scientist, were clear that the reason they did the research was to refute the statement made by Pruitt. Santer told the Washington Post in an interview, “In my opinion, when incorrect science is elevated to the level of formal congressional testimony and makes its way into the official congressional record, climate scientists have some responsibility to test specific claims that were made, determine whether those claims are correct or not, and publish the results.”
The statement made by Pruitt has been echoed by other climate doubters. The main argument has been that temperature data collected at higher altitudes in the atmosphere show different trends than temperature data collected at the surface. Climate doubters argue that temperature data collected at higher altitudes (troposphere) show no global warming trend or that warming has slowed down in recent years in contrast to temperature trend data collected at the surface which show a clear warming trend.
While climate doubters will continue to cherry pick data to make their points, a growing number of scientists, whether in climate research or not, are standing up to the false statements and lies being perpetuated by this presidential administration. Scientists will continue to use hard data and a scientific approach to provide the best data and analysis available to draw conclusions.
What a nightmare.
EPA administrator Scott Pruitt promised to restore Superfund and the EPA’ s land and water cleanup efforts “to their rightful place at the center of the agency’s core mission.” He made this announcement in April while visiting a site in Indiana where hundreds of families must relocate because it is unsafe to live there. When I heard the announcement, I was excited. Unfortunately, soon afterwards his action spoke louder. Pruitt is not being honest. But judge for yourself.
On May 12th Susan Bodine was nominated to be assistant administrator for the EPA’s office of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance. Qualified? Well in a way, if she was fighting for the polluters. She represented polluting industries as a partner at Barnes & Thornburg, LLP a law firm. Bodine represented the American Forest and Paper Association (AFPA) from 2011 to 2014. Members of the AFPA have hundreds of EPA enforcement actions against them, including violations of the Clean Water Act and Clean Air Act. She defended these industries against EPA.
This is the classic revolving door appointment. Since the enforcement office handles negotiations between the companies responsible for the pollution and the EPA, Bodine would be able to decide how extensive some cleanups are — and how much polluters have to spend cleaning them. Some of those enforcement action will be against her former clients.
How does she feel about poisoned communities? In testimony before a Senate hearing on Superfund in 2014, Bodine said she didn’t think most problems with the program were due to a lack of funding. Instead she blamed some of the delays in cleanups on community members who block access to sites. “If the agency can’t get access to the site, they can’t do the cleanup,” she said, adding that she believed the agency was doing its best.
Superfund’s progress has slowed to a near standstill in recent years, not due to communities who want the best cleanup possible, after all they live there. No, the problem is due to a lack of funding. A tax on polluting industries originally paid into a fund for the cleanups expired in 1995, leaving regular taxpayers to pick up the tab when the government can’t identify a polluter — or when a polluter doesn’t have enough money to pay.
Since there are fewer clean up actions the number of people exposed to dangerous pollution has climbed. In 2010, there were 75 Superfund sites where the government had yet to bring toxic exposure to humans under control. By last year, that number was up to 121, according to the most recent EPA data.
This week there were two other significant announcements related to Superfund. The budget cuts and a new taskforce. Superfund budget was cut by a third, 330 million dollars. Enforcement efforts will be cut by 40%. How does Pruitt think he’s going to keep his promise to fulfill the program, move it front and center with less money and a lead attorney who has been on the other side of the table for years representing polluters.
Pruitt’s new Superfund Task Force is even more absurd. He chose Albert Kelly to chair the taskforce an Oklahoma banker who has no prior experience with the program or with environmental issues at all, according to his résumé. However, Kelly has donated twice to Pruitt’s campaigns in Oklahoma, has spent the past 33 years working at Spiritbank, served as its chairman, which is headquartered in Tulsa. The “core competencies” listed on his résumé, include motivational speaking, business development, and “political activity.”
Washington D.C. seems to get crazier every passing day. For all of you who care about our environment, public health and fairness, take the time to get involved. Together we need to talk with our representatives at the home offices and demand change. If you don’t think that representative is listening or supporting your core issues than find someone to replace them and work on that person’s campaign. We can’t whine our way through this insanity we must get out and take actions.
The Bill:
“Elise Herring has been fighting for decades against the industrial hog farm that moved in beside her family’s Eastern North Carolina property in 1986 and began spraying the fecal material of +2,000 hogs onto the field that ends eight feet outside her kitchen window.
But last Friday, when the state’s newly elected Democratic Governor Roy Cooper vetoed a bill that would protect the hog industry from lawsuits like the one Herring and about 500 others have filed against a subsidiary of Smithfield Foods, she breathed a sigh of relief- at least for the moment…
The North Carolina legislature, in which the Republicans hold a supermajority in both houses (35-15 in the Senate; 74-46 in the House), could override the veto with a 3/5ths majority vote if they take up the issue again. The House would need 72 votes to override the veto, and the Senate would need 30; during each chamber’s last vote on the bill, 74 representatives and 30 senators supported it.”
The Problem:
“In North Carolina, 6,500 industrial hog farms, known as concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs), house more than 9.5 million animals in the flat, hot eastern stretches of the state.
Together, the pigs produce 10 billion gallons of feces and urine each year, which the operations store in large, open-air pits, euphemistically referred to as “lagoons.” To make sure the pits do not overflow, the operations periodically lower their levels by shooting the fecal mixture over “sprayfields” of feed crops with high-pressure sprinklers.
Scientific studies confirm that discharging animal waste into the air damages human health in the surrounding areas. The foul-smelling chemicals the CAFOs release – namely ammonia and hydrogen sulfide – are associated with breathing problems, blood pressure spikes, increased stress and anxiety, and decreased quality of life, studies have found.”
Read the entire story about the North Carolina House Bill 467 and CAFOs here