“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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Category: News Archive
“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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“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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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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“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.””
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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Categories
Happy Valentines Day
By Teresa Mills
Today as I opened my Valentines Day card I was immediately transported to a place that I had forgotten existed. It was a small neighborhood where the streets were lined with beautiful majestic trees with leaves just beginning to bud. The sweet smell of spring was in the air.
As I walked along the streets, I did see an occasional patch of dandelions. It was plain to see that the neighborhood children loved these tiny flowers as I found several rings and necklaces made from these golden flowers. As I picked up one of these tiny rings, I noticed that these childhood treasures were the only things discarded on the sidewalks. The lawns seemed natural; I wanted to take off my shoes and run through the yards like I did when I was young.
In this place I found adults sitting on their porches drinking tea out of beautiful handpainted porcelain cups, no throwaways here. (Remember when houses had porches.)
As I passed by a group of neighbors talking about their upcoming neighborhood picnic, I could hear how excited they were, and it arose such a warm feeling in me that took me back to my childhood. Back to the days when teenagers would get so upset because everyone in town knew your business and kids knew they could not get away with anything, ya just knew someone would tell your mom.
When I looked up all I saw was a blue sky with an occasional puffy cloud. I felt I could see forever.
Just as I took a deep breath and closed my eyes, I realized I had broken this wonderful spell I was under. When I opened my eyes I was back to reality. The sweet smells became the all too familiar heavy odorous smells of industry. I once had an elected official tell me that the smells showed the community was prospering. Really?
The so-called perfect manicured lawn I see every day are not natural they are lawns doused with man-made chemicals. Have you ever look at one of those little signs they put in your yard after it has been sprayed?
Have a heart today, wish your neighbor a Happy Valentines day or just a good day. Today people go for months or even years without talking to their neighbors. What a shame.
I tried to open my Valentines Card again to see if it would once again be transported back to my childhood days. But my card turned out to be just a Happy Valentines Day Card from my loving husband. But oh I wish I could go back to those carefree days. Think of your childhood and have a beautiful Valentines Day.
Categories
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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Innocent families live around the 327 Superfund sites at risk of storms and rising seas. Over 2 million moms, dads, children live close enough to one of these toxic sites that likely will be impacted by climate cha
nge and sea level rise. Most families are of modest or low income and don’t have the ability to move. They are the most vulnerable among us.
What is Scott Pruitt, Administrator at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) or Bill Brock, Administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) doing about it? EPA and FEMA are denying climate change, as Trump demanded. Today, denying climate change is like denying your pregnant as your belly swells and the baby kicks. Denial does not negate the problem.
How many innocent people are going to die? How many children will end up getting sick because of exposure to toxic chemical or lack of water and health care. How in the riches country in the world can we as people know this fact and simply ignore the inevitable?
Pruitt said that Superfund sites are his and the agency’s priority. It therefore would make logical sense that these 327 sites be the first place that he takes action. He doesn’t need to say because of climate change he could say they are vulnerable to flooding. If a site is flooded than the toxins spread costing more to clean up and increasing the human health risks significantly.
Instead, Pruitt is prioritizing Superfund sites that either have redevelopment potential or an identified responsible corporation, still in business that can pay for the cleanups. Â So, what does that mean?
We saw through news reports what happened in Puerto after hurricane Maria. By some counts over 1,000 innocent people died. Not from drowning or flying debris but from the lack of infrastructure, water and power or critical medical treatments for people who need dialysis or respirators.
News sources published pictures and reported that families were lined up at toxic waste sites to fill containers with water for their infants who were dehydrating. Depending on what was in that toxic water more deaths are surely in the forecast.
Who is the responsible party for the devastation in Puerto, Houston, New York, New Jersey, Louisiana’s Super Storms? Mother Nature and she has no money.
Where do American families fit into decisions to cleanup sites or create programs that will adequately respond to a natural disaster and especially ones that include toxic chemical waste exposures? Countries and government leaders are measured by how well they protected their people. America is failing in so many ways.
The majority of American families living near these site two million people are working poor, low-income and communities of color. They are the most vulnerable among us. Most live on little surviving day to day but have exactly the same dreams for their children and families as wealthy people. Parents want their children to succeed, go to college and break out of the cycle of poverty and poisonous environments.
From the standpoint of prevention and preparedness, I think understanding the conditions behind the destruction and deaths that occur are extremely important if we are to adequately prepare for the next disaster.
However, instead of prioritizing and preparing for the next super-storm to protect the most vulnerable communities, EPA’s priority Superfund site list is preparing for new development that helps corporations succeed. Â They are ignoring Superfund sites in vulnerable areas, with fragile populations that do not lend themselves to redevelopment.
I have been working in the field of toxic chemicals and impacts on human health for 40 years under both republican and democratic leadership. In that time I have never seen such disregard for human health and American people as this administration. I cried when I saw a father filing his jug with water from a toxic waste site for his infant and when I heard about the eight year old boy who died, suffocated, because he couldn’t get medication for his asthma.
I’m angry. Instead of retiring which was my plan last year, I am working overtime to organize people to stand up, speak out, vote and bring back the America we can all be proud of.
A top manager who supervises the Environmental Protection Agency program responsible for cleaning up the nation’s most contaminated properties and waterways told Congress on Thursday that the government needs to plan for the ongoing threat posed to Superfund sites from climate change.
“We have to respond to climate change, that’s just part of our mission set,” replied Breen, a career official who leads EPA’s Office of Land and Emergency Management. “So we need to design remedies that account for that. We don’t get to pick where Superfund sites are. We deal with the waste where it is.”
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