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This Young Environmental Activist Lives 500 Feet From A Drilling Site

““This is personal,” says 25-year-old organizer Ashley Hernandez. “This is my home, this is my family, this is my health.”
Hernandez’s parents, immigrants who fled El Salvador’s civil war, had worked diligently to save for their own home in Wilmington by working as a truck dispatcher and a housekeeper. But their home was just 500 feet from a drilling site. As a child, Hernandez was plagued with headaches and nightly nosebleeds so intense the blood would soak through her pillow. Soot would fall in their yard, tremors shook their home, and toxic air burned their eyes.

“There really is no escaping it,” said Hernandez, who is now 25 and still lives in the same home. “I couldn’t go out or have clear air. I felt like a prisoner in my own home. I felt like I couldn’t do anything, really.” ”
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EPA Ruled Improperly Delayed Racial Bias Probes

EPA Racial Bias
It has been ruled that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) improperly delayed investigating pollution-spewing dumps and power plants that disproportionately impact minority communities.
This follows a July 2015 suit against the EPA, where Californians for Renewable Energy and four other groups claimed that the agency ignored a decade’s worth of complaints about environmental racism under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act.
Communities surrounding sites such as ‘The Stone’s Throw’ Landfill in Tallassee, Alabama are among the minority populations citing civil rights complaints against the EPA.
Read more at: https://www.courthousenews.com/judge-rules-epa-improperly-delayed-racial-bias-probes/

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The Superfund Sites of Silicon Valley

Federica Armstrong discovered when she moved to Palo Alto, Calif., that Silicon Valley is not what it seems.

The world’s capital of tech innovation prefers to keep its superlatives, good and bad, under wraps. Along its Prius-choked roads, it looks like Anywhere, U.S.A.: single-family-home suburbs south of San Francisco, bordered by chain stores, auto dealerships and corporate parks — lots of beige, boxy corporate parks.

Inside these plain vanilla buildings, where C.E.O.s in hoodies and jeans stockpile more money than the G.D.P. of developing countries, newly minted techies complain that “S.V.,” the world’s largest wealth generator, is too expensive and that its exhausting work culture is toxic.

So, too, is the land beneath their feet.

From its origins as a manufacturer of silicon chips and semiconductors, Santa Clara County is riddled with 23 toxic Superfund sites, more than any county in the country. This was news to Ms. Armstrong, who lives a mile from one of the sites. Ms. Armstrong, a freelance photographer, moved to Silicon Valley eight years ago not because of tech but in spite of it — she and her husband had followed his career in agribusiness from Malaysia to the Netherlands and Japan. She could ignore the world of start-ups — until she couldn’t.

“Most people I talked to in the community seemed unaware of their presence,” she said. “Often, even the notion of Superfund sites is foreign to many people. We are used to taking for granted the safety of the environment we inhabit. I feel the need to pay more attention to it.””

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A once thriving coal town has turned toxic, and citizens are desperate for help

“West Virginia is one of the most beautiful places in the world. And people are tired of being collateral damage and they’re tired of living in a toxic waste dump,” Paula Jean Swearengin, a West Virginia native, told ThinkProgress.
“We’re just wondering if we do get on the NPL [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”][National Priority List], will any of this happen fast enough to actually help the people in Minden?” Brandon Richardson of Headwaters Defense said. “If you wait 10 years to relocate people and come up with the money to do it, you may as well spend that relocation money on burial plots and tombstones because I don’t know if they’re going to have anyone to relocate.”
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After Decades Of Air Pollution, A Louisiana Town Rebels Against A Chemical Giant

“Robert Taylor isn’t sure why he’s alive.
“My mother succumbed to bone cancer. My brother had lung cancer,” he ticks them off on his fingers. “My sister, I think it was cervical cancer. My nephew lung cancer.” A favorite cousin. That cousin’s son. Both neighbors on one side, one neighbor on the other. “And here I am. I don’t understand how it decides who to take.”
For decades, Taylor and his neighbors wondered if emissions from the plant were making people in the community sick, but most people thought that challenging a chemical giant was a lost cause. The company was rich, the people were poor.

“People say, ‘What’s wrong with y’all? Ya’ll trying to fight DuPont?'” Taylor remembers. “‘Y’all crazy? You can’t win fighting DuPont!'””
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Trump nominates Dow Chemicals lawyer to oversee EPA toxic waste program

 
“Donald Trump on Friday nominated a Dow Chemicals lawyer to head-up an Environmental Protection Agency unit that oversees hazardous waste disposal and chemical spills from toxic“Superfund” sites.
Dow Chemicals facilities are involved in dozens of Superfund projects.
Dow had accrued $219 million in accrued obligations for remediating Superfund sites, according to the company’s fourth quarter 2017 10-K filing.

Overall, Dow had accrued $1.3 billion in“probable environmental remediation and restoration costs,” according to the 10-K.”
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Cleaning products damage women’s lungs as badly as a 20-a-day cigarette habit

Scientists at Norway’s University of Bergen found that lung function decline in women regularly using cleaning products was equivalent over the period to those with a 20 cigarettes a day smoking habit.
“When you think of inhaling small particles from cleaning agents that are meant for cleaning the floor and not your lungs, maybe it is not so surprising after all,” said Øistein Svanes , a doctoral student who led the study.
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Did Flint’s Water Crisis Damage Kids’ Brains?

“Detroit Free Press columnist Rochelle Riley recently noticed a startling fact about kids in the lead-poisoned city of Flint, Michigan: They have become increasingly bad at reading since the water crisis began in 2014. A state government report showed that, from the year 2014 to the year 2017, third-grade reading proficiency in the city dropped from 41.8 percent to 10.7 percent. “That’s nearly a three-quarters drop in third-grade reading proficiency among children whose lives were affected by lead poisoned water during the Flint water crisis,” she wrote.

The Center for American Progress declared that Flint’s water crisis “has lead to a reading proficiency crisis,” while HuffPost reporter Alanna Vagianos tweeted that lead exposure in Flint was “having a significant developmental effect on children.” Their worry is grounded in the fact that, according to the CDC, lead exposure to children “can cause learning disabilities, behavioral problems, and, at very high levels, seizures, coma, and even death.””

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Air pollution: black, Hispanic and poor students most at risk from toxins – study

New researching documenting disproportionate danger to students of color and poor students from air pollution at school.
“Pollution exposure is also drawn along racial lines. While black children make up 16% of all US public school students, more than a quarter of them attend the schools worst affected by air pollution. By contrast, white children comprise 52% of the public school system but only 28% of those attend the highest risk schools. This disparity remains even when the urban-rural divide is accounted for.”
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A Toxic Tour Through Underground Ohio

The small white and maroon trucks that deliver the waste often come at night, she says. They contain what regulatory agencies innocently refer to as produced water, or brine, a slurry generated during fracking operations that can contain more than 1,100 chemicals and which is carcinogenic, flammable, and radioactive. Garman says she and her son occasionally smell, “a sweet odor in the air, almost like antifreeze.” One night last winter an alarm went off. “There was a red light and a real low siren,” she says, “and no one to call to see what was going on.”
In the morning, before heading off to work, Garman is back on her porch with a coffee, staring at a series of tanks, where the waste is temporarily held before being shot down the injection well. “The biggest thing,” she sighs, “is the worrying. What am I not hearing? What am I not seeing? What is being released into the air? The water? The soil? What does this mean for our health years down the road? That is the stuff that really eats away at me constantly.”
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