The Tonawanda Coke plant near Buffalo, NY, closed its doors this past Sunday marking a huge victory for the local residents who have fought for years to shut down the facility. Read more here.
Category: News Archive
Charlie Powell in Birmingham, Alabama has waited since 2005 for action from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Instead he gets the run around. Why? Because like so many other communities that we work with they are poor and African American. They have the wrong complexion for real protection.
Instead of stopping the air emissions of an industrial coke plant or properly cleaning up the contaminated soils throughout the community EPA and health authorities gave each family a piece of paper. It included a list of things they should do, not the polluter, to avoid exposures to chemicals in their air and backyard soils.
“Undress the children at the doorway so any chemical that gets onto their clothes and shoes will not be tracked into the home.” Really. Every teenager wants to strip down to their underclothing at the front door in front of their brother, sister and entire family.
If you are a vulnerable person like a pregnant woman or asthmatic child, the recommendation was, “don’t inevitably breathe the air or come in contact with the soil.” I guess that means hold your breath while outdoors.
EPA’s also concluded that, “past and current exposure to arsenic found in surface soil of some residential yards could harm people’s health. Children are especially at risk.”
Now if this was a white, middle- or high-income neighborhood do you think that the actions or lack of them with such strong health risk conclusions would be treated the same? I don’t.
The site consists of an area of lead, arsenic, and benzo(a)pyrene (BaP)-contaminated soil from multiple possible sources, including nearby facility smoke stack emissions and coke oven battery emissions, as well as from possible flooding along Five Mile Creek. The 35th Avenue site and surrounding area include two coke oven plants, asphalt batch plants, pipe manufacturing facilities, steel producing facilities, quarries, coal gas holder and purification system facility, and the Birmingham-Shuttlesworth International Airport.
Clearly, the North Birmingham community has the wrong complexion for protection.
But they are not alone. In Uniontown, AL a very similar story is playing out.
Uniontown is 30 miles west of Selma, and is home to families that are 84% African American, almost half of whom live under the poverty level. Despite its proximity to a town famous for its civil rights marches, families still feel very much tied to its past. Many residents know which plantations enslaved their great-grandparents, and people as young as 50 remember growing up with sharecropper parents and no running water or toilets. Uniontown’s polluters include a massive landfill next to the historic black cemetery that started accepting coal ash after a spill of the waste in Tennessee. There’s the pungent odor from a cheese plant that has released its waste into a local creek and then there’s the waste water from the catfish processing plant, which contributes to an overwhelmed sewage system that spills fecal matter into local waterways.
People are afraid to drink their water.
A local farmer, Alex Jones, takes people on a tour pointing out the runoff from the cheese factory. “See that, that looks like a lake, it’s runoff.” It’s not only ugly but stinks. A leader of a Riverkeeper group described it as, “one of the worst smells ever. The smell is so putrid you immediately start dry heaving. It makes your body involuntarily try to throw up.”
Again, this would not be the situation in a middle class, higher income area as they have the complexion and income for government’s protection.
When asked why the families don’t move away from Uniontown, Phyllis from the local community group Black Belt Citizens said, “We don’t give up because the end result is to run us off the land and make the entire community a landfill. So what are your choices?”
The American Public Health Journal study published in April found that black people are more burdened by air pollution than any other group, even when taking poverty into account. And the agency has taken years or even decades to respond to all complaints.
EPA has faced criticism on civil rights issues around a number of contaminated sites in the state. Earlier this year, the agency denied Uniontown’s environmental racism complaint.
Today with the hurricanes and associated record rains, innocent families across the south will be in more danger than ever before from widespread contamination from coal ash, industrial run off, pig manure, and yes, even putrid smelling cheese factory waste. Such communities need protection that is equal to that of white and higher income families.
Water doesn’t stay still. Air doesn’t stay still. Nor are the families in contaminated communities willing to stay still. They are fighters as they have everything to lose – their land, their health and the future for their families. I’m proud and honored to stand with them and continue to fight for justice and invite you to join us.
The Civil Rights Movement was about more than voting and lunch counters. It was also about the right of all Americans to live and work in a healthy, safe place. (Voting rights aren’t much good if you can’t walk to the polls because your asthma is bad that day.) That was why Dr. King had moved on to the Poor People’s Campaign at the time of his murder.
There is in Alabama a poisoned place called Uniontown. Its residents are primarily African-American. In no particular order, they have seen dumped on or near their places of abode coal ash, cheese waste, wastewater from a nearby catfish processing plant. All of that overtaxes the place’s antiquated sewage system until it starts giving up its proper contents all over the ground and into the rivers and groundwater. The people who live there know why this is the case, as this study from the Pew Charitable Trusts discovered. Read more.
15 Pueblo-area residents graduated from the EPA’s Superfund Job Training Initiative program on September 27th. Graduates of the program now have the necessary skills to be considered for future jobs with the environmental contractors cleaning up lead and arsenic contamination at the site. Read more.
This is the third coal ash spill that’s been reported since Florence’s historic rainfall caused catastrophic flooding throughout the state. Duke Energy, the country’s largest electric company, has been fighting attempts to force clean-up of these ponds for years. President Donald Trump’s administration has also loosened several regulations on coal ash storage.
In addition to coal ash spills, at least 110 ponds of pig feces have either released their contents into the environment or are at “imminent risk of doing so,” The New York Times reported on Wednesday. Those spills are presenting health concerns, too. “You basically have a toxic soup for people who live in close proximity to those lagoons,” Sacoby Wilson, a professor of public health at the University of Maryland, told Vice News. “All of these contaminants that are in the hog lagoons, like salmonella, giardia, and E-coli, can get into the waterways and infect people trying to get out.”
Read more.
When Christopher Columbus landed on Turtle Island, which we now call North America, he brought with him a goal of making profit—of taking from the land and people to create commerce. Today, approximately 526 years later, that same pillaging continues to drive our planet further into the climate crisis and lead us into ecological collapse. Instead of honoring the violent colonization Columbus represents, we should use this day to call for truth and reconciliation—and honor the Indigenous communities at the forefront of efforts to heal the long-lasting environmental harm Columbus and his ilk have wrought. Read more.
As communities along the Gulf Coast await Hurricane Michael, it’s easy to forget the devastation that Hurricane Florence wrought on North and South Carolina. As described in the news story by Ring of Fire, “It is easy to forget about the plight of the Carolinas with all of the insanity taking place in Washington, D.C., but for the people who were impacted by Hurricane Florence, that’s all that matters right now. And while we weren’t paying attention, the EPA was testing flood waters and found that many areas are being impacted by potentially deadly corporate toxins that have leached into the flood waters, threatening the health of everyone in their way.” Read more …
Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services has determined that past exposure to sulfur-based compounds in the air near the Bridgeton landfill may have harmed the health of area residents and workers. Read more.
Toxic coal ash from Duke Energy’s L.V. Sutton power plant in Wilmington,NC flowed into the Cape Fear River this past week-end when rising floodwaters from Hurricane Florence overwhelmed the storage basin. Read more …
When it comes to environmental reform, the conversation starts around the kitchen table. And while they don’t get the credit or recognition they deserve, women over the years heavily influenced environmental reform.
Dr. Terrianne K. Schulte narrowed it down to four reformers across the 20th century to represent the work done. She spoke Friday during a talk titled, “We Have to Create a National Debate, Community by Community: Women Trailblazers in Environmental Reform.” She spoke of Helen Dortch Longstreet, Rachel Carson, Betty Klaric and Lois Gibbs.
The talk was sponsored by the Daughters of the American Revolution as part of the Orleans County Heritage Festival.
“They often time don’t get the credit — what’s really ironic about the individuals I chose, three out of the four were closely aligned with media,” Schulte said. “So they did receive attention where they were, but when you look across the broad scope of the 20th century, you don’t really see the work a lot of women did.”
Women did most of their work as part of organizations. In this area especially, Housewives to End Pollution was very effective to clean up Lake Erie when it was labeled “dead” after there was a 1,400 mile dead zone due to the eutrophication and detergent phosphates.
The League of Women Voters were also extremely important, not only locally, but nationally, in terms of conservation and environmentalism. Women Strike for Peace during the Kennedy era was important in protesting the nuclear tests. Read more.