“… it’s corporate villainy where folks are outsourcing the costs and the burdens of their economic enterprise onto others and privatizing all their profits,” Booker said at Mount Triumph Baptist Church in the heart of southeast Louisiana’s industrial corridor along the Mississippi River. “It is absolutely unacceptable to steal folks’ livelihoods, to steal folks’ health and, literally, drive down the cost of their land.”
Read the full story here: http://www.theadvocate.com/acadiana/article_995ea5f4-5a8e-11e7-b1ab-476028b29dde.html
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Dawn Chapman, Just Moms STL, had listened with surprise and skepticism as the new head of the Environmental Protection Agency vowed to clean up West Lake, the nuclear waste dump that has filled her days and nights with worry.
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NAACP Florida State Conference Joins the NAACP Jackson County Branch to demand the Scott Administration deny the pending deep injection well permit. “The NAACP Jackson County Branch joins hundreds of citizens, community groups and elected officials in opposing a pending Waste Management permit by the Florida Department of Environmental Protection. Environmental injustice has a disproportionate impact on low income and rural communities in Florida and around the world. The ultimate goal for this well is to dispose leachate (garbage juice) into the ground. This technique will have a negative impact on the Florida Aquifer, thus resulting in irreversible damage to the communities’ water and health. Our community has raised too many questions and we won’t sit on the sidelines as we see environmental injustices in North Florida” says Ronstance Pittman, President of NAACP Jackson County Branch.
“The NAACP Florida State Conference is outraged at the Scott Administration’s pending decision after hearing from State Senator Gainer, the Jackson County Commission and local residents. This is yet another example of the egregious pattern of unsafe dumping of waste in low income communities and African American communities. In Jackson County, once again, another African-American community sits in peril, due to the too-often reckless practices of the waste industry,” says Adora Obi Nweze, President of NAACP Florida State Conference and member of the National Board of Directors.
Founded in 1909, the NAACP is the nation’s oldest and largest nonpartisan civil rights organization. Its members throughout the United States and the world are the premier advocates for civil rights in their communities.
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Longtime Dunmore Mayor Ousted
Lackawanna, PA –
“Borough Councilman Timothy Burke defeated Mayor Patrick “Nibs” Loughney in Tuesday’s Democratic primary by a razor-thin three-vote margin…”
One important issue brought to attention during the race was the expansion of Keystone Sanitary Landfill. Burke opposed the expansion and won the election, ousting the incumbent who had been in office for 24 years.
This story highlights the importance of running your own candidate in local elections and how every vote counts.
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OHIO’s 1st Human Rights Tribunal
The first human-rights and environmental-justice hearing ever held in Ohio took place in Athens Saturday. The hearing was part of a tribunal process on impacts of fracking as a human-rights issue.
Sixteen presenters from around Ohio testified to a panel of four citizen judges at the First United Methodist Church in Athens, providing more than six hours of testimony.
The event is part of the Permanent People’s Tribunal on Fracking, which is gathering testimony from around the world to deliver to the Permanent People’s Tribunal and the United Nations.
The Athens hearing, one of two planned for Ohio, was initiated by the Buckeye Environmental Network , and organized with support from Torch Can Do!, the grassroots group founded by residents living in and near Torch in eastern Athens County, and a grant from the Center for Health, Environment, and Justice. Torch is the site of one of the largest fracking-waste injection facilities in Ohio. Read more.
Soon after Erin Card moved to within two miles of the Radford Army Ammunition Plant in Virginia two years ago, she began to notice threads of smoke that occasionally rose above the heavily wooded site. She started asking about the source, and eventually was stunned by what she learned: Toxic explosives were being burned in the open air.
“It just seems crazy to me,” said Card, 36, who lives with her husband and their three young boys.
The open burning and open detonation of hazardous waste explosives is banned in many countries, including Canada, Germany and the Netherlands. Likewise, in this country, private industry long ago was forced to abandon the primitive disposal practice. Read more.
Ohio’s regulators have issued a $430,000 fine against a company building a natural gas pipeline from West Virginia to Michigan. Energy Transfer is the company building the $4.2 billion pipeline. It will carry gas from West Virginia, western Pennsylvania and eastern Ohio. Energy Transfer also worked on the contentious Dakota Access pipeline. Read more.
Born and raised in a family of community activists, mark! Lopez persuaded the state of California to provide comprehensive lead testing and cleanup of East Los Angeles homes contaminated by a battery smelter that had polluted the community for over three decades.
Bordered by the Los Angeles River and crisscrossed by the area’s notoriously congested freeways, LA’s Eastside is home to the densest population of working-class Latino communities in the country. Residents bear the brunt of the region’s pollution, with heavy cargo traffic coming in and out of the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, and industrial plants operating well within breathing distance of homes, schools, and parks.
Among these facilities was an aging battery recycling plant, which had been in operation since 1922 with minimal updates and repairs. Georgia-based Exide took over the smelter in 2000 and ramped up the volume of batteries processed at the plant—and with it, emission levels of dangerous pollutants such as lead and arsenic.
A sampling of dust on rooftops of nearby buildings found lead levels of 52,000 parts per million—where 1,000 parts per million is considered hazardous waste. Lead is a powerful neurotoxin that accumulates in the body over time. It can cause learning disabilities even at very low levels, and as such, there is no safe lead level in children. Read more.
Doctors found the first tumors in Christen Commuso’s ovaries in 2012. Before long, more turned up in her gall bladder, thyroid and adrenal glands. Lesions appeared on her liver. While she was undergoing multiple surgeries, her stepdaughter, then 7, was learning that she could no longer climb stairs without stopping to catch her breath. Eventually, she was diagnosed with asthma. Read more.
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Just Moms St. Louis, MO Closer To Buyout
Missouri senators have passed a buyout program targeting homes near a St. Louis-area Superfund site. Senators voted 30-3 Wednesday to send the measure to the House. It would allow residents to apply for buyouts for homes found uninhabitable due to contamination or within 3 miles of sites with high levels of dissolved radium in groundwater. The measure is aimed at homes near Bridgeton Landfill and adjacent West Lake Landfill, where Cold War-era nuclear waste was buried in the 1970s and adjacent to a burning landfill. Read more.