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The Gowanus rezoning makes us sick

The battle over the massive Gowanus rezoning plan roiling Brooklyn involves urgent environmental issues that we ignore at our physical and moral peril.

The latest news is the discovery by a longtime Gowanus blogger that lethal coal tar poisoning land next to the canal had, as early as 2005, migrated beyond that land and slithered underneath existing buildings to the north, the canal itself and beyond to the east and Smith St. to the west. Katia Kelly dug into official archives maintained by National Grid, which is responsible for the site cleanup, and found proof of the migration. Neither the utility nor the state Department of Environmental Conservation overseeing the cleanup ever announced it publicly.

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Photo Credit: City of New York

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Plastics plant is a tough sell in Louisiana

The 5th District of Louisiana’s St. James Parish was never exactly a bustling community — but it was still a community.
Then the landmarks began to disappear. Woodrow’s grocery closed down. The St. James sugar co-op ground to a halt. And the cleaners and post office shut their doors for lack of business.
Heavy manufacturing moved in. Duck’s Grocery sold out to a rail-car and crude-oil storage facility. The high school football field was overrun by subsidiaries of a Chinese company and the Koch family’s corporate empire, which teamed up to build a huge petrochemical plant. Buena Vista Baptist Church now worships a couple of thousand feet from a methanol plant and asphalt depot.
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Photo Credit: Camille Lenain/The Washington Post

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CHEMICAL INDUSTRY LOBBYIST IN TRUMP EPA SUPPRESSED EVIDENCE OF CANCER RISK

TRUMP ADMINISTRATION OFFICIALS withheld information about carcinogenic pollution from Illinois communities, according to a report released yesterday by the Environmental Protection Agency’s inspector general. Bill Wehrum, who served as assistant administrator of the office of Air and Radiation until 2019, kept information from residents of Willowbrook, Illinois, about results of air monitoring that showed they had an elevated risk of cancer due to ethylene oxide from a local sterilizing plant, according to the report, “EPA Delayed Risk Communication and Issued Instructions Hindering Region 5’s Ability to Address Ethylene Oxide Emissions,” which was produced in response to a request from Congress.
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Photo Credit: Bill O’Leary/The Washington Post via Getty Images

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Homepage News Archive Superfund News

N.J. has the most Superfund sites. Tax industry to clean them up, top Democrat says.

Rep. Frank Pallone Jr. on Tuesday introduced legislation to renew a federal tax on the oil and chemical industries to fund the cleanup of Superfund sites, of which New Jersey has more than any other state.

“Superfund sites threaten public and environmental health in New Jersey and across the country, and those sites could be cleaned up faster with adequate funding,” said Pallone, D-6th Dist., who outlined his plan during a Zoom press conference.

Pallone, who chairs the House Energy and Commerce Committee with jurisdiction over the issue, said he was proposing the legislation in response to President Joe Biden’s $2 trillion infrastructure proposal.
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Photo Credit: Jersey Journal

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Homepage News Archive Superfund News

Blumenauer Introduces Legislation to Reinstate Superfund Taxes; End 25-Year Polluter Tax Holiday That Slowed Toxic Cleanup

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Today, U.S. Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-OR), a senior member of the House Ways and Means Committee, introduced the Superfund Reinvestment Act to require polluters to pay for the cleanup of toxic and hazardous waste sites throughout the United States.
For nearly three decades, petrochemical industry polluters have enjoyed environmental liability protections without paying into the Superfund Trust Fund, which has depleted the fund, unfairly shifted costs to taxpayers, and brought some Superfund cleanup efforts to a near stop. The legislation introduced by Blumenauer would reinstate this tax, something that President Biden identified as a top priority as part of a major infrastructure package.
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Photo Credit: The Skanner Archives

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Where Are the Lead Pipes? Finding Them May Prove Tough for EPA

Newly appointed Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland has pledged to address the concerns of U.S. communities that have disproportionately suffered from pollution and environmental degradation. In her role as the primary steward of America’s public lands, Haaland promised last week to incorporate diverse perspectives and prioritize environmental justice across the agencies of the Department of the Interior. In a secretarial order announced on Friday, the secretary said that these approaches would be integral to the department’s renewed focus on climate change.
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Photo Credit: Win McNamee/Getty Images

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Homepage News Archive Superfund News

Live Near a ‘Superfund’ Site? Your Life Span Might Be Shorter

MONDAY, April 19, 2021 (HealthDay News) — Living near a Superfund hazardous waste site may shorten your life, new research suggests.

There are thousands of Superfund sites across the United States and they include manufacturing facilities, processing plants, landfills and mines where hazardous waste was dumped, left out in the open or poorly managed, posing a risk to the environment and human health.
In this study, researchers analyzed 2018 U.S. Census data and found that overall, life expectancy for people who live near Superfund sites is about two months shorter than normal.
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Photo Credit: Patrick Bloodgood/US Army
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Homepage News Archive Superfund News

For 25 Years, Taxpayers Picked Up Polluters’ Superfund Bill. That May Finally Change.

For 15 years, the industries responsible for the nation’s worst toxic pollution helped pay into a federal trust for cleaning up waste sites through special taxes on petroleum, chemical components and corporate income. That program became known as “Superfund.”
But in 1995, the Republican-led Congress allowed those taxes to expire. They have never been reinstated, and the money for fixing many of the most noxious public health hazards in the U.S. has come entirely from taxpayers. That funding has dwindled, creating a lengthy cleanup backlog and leaving poor communities and fragile ecosystems exposed to deadly pollutants.
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Photo Credit: The Washington Post via Getty Images
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Homepage News Archive Superfund News

‘There’s No Memory of the Joy.’ Why 40 Years of Superfund Work Hasn’t Saved Tar Creek

One of the first Superfund sites in the United States remains one of the most polluted.
From the late 1800s through the 1960s, miners extracted lead and zinc from the ground beneath the Tar Creek area in northeastern Oklahoma. But 50 years after the mine was shuttered, the region’s toxic legacy still seeps from boreholes into the water and drifts in the wind from tailings piles. Even now, the unstable ground threatens to swallow up homes.
Neighboring residents — including those of the Quapaw Nation and Ottawa County’s other eight tribes — have paid a heavy toll. The mounting environmental and human health threats led the federal government to declare 40 square miles of the area a Superfund site in 1984.
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Photo Credit: Clifton Adcock/The Frontier

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Fossil Fuel Racism

Fossil fuels — coal, oil, and gas — lie at the heart of the crises we face, including public health, racial injustice, and climate change. This report synthesizes existing research and provides new analysis that finds that the fossil fuel industry contributes to public health harms that kill hundreds of thousands of people in the U.S. each year and disproportionately endanger Black, Brown, Indigenous, and poor communities. President Joe Biden and the 117th Congress have a historic opportunity to improve public health, tackle the climate crisis, and confront systemic racism at the same time by phasing out fossil fuel production and use.
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Photo Credit: Les Stone/Greenpeace