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.
Category: News Archive
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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The story of Minden, WV is yet another example of how toxic pollution harms the poorest and vulnerable communities the most. Read about the horrifying story here.
“Mister, stop being so mean and give me my sandwich wrapped in paper,” said a young man in 1990. He was part of CHEJ’s McToxic’s campaign primarily run by young school children.
McDonald’s refused to eliminate their use of Styrofoam in their packaging of sandwiches. Young people across the country took it upon themselves to organize their friends and protest at their local McDonalds restaurants. They asked for food wrapped in paper but because of the franchise license the restaurant couldn’t change the packaging.
The win was big. McDonald agreed on November 1, 1990 to stop using Styrofoam in all of their sandwich packing.
Sadly, McDonalds did not credit the children who lead this campaign and were very active. Instead McDonald’s gave the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) all the credit including a center photo in People’s Magazine. Young people were angry that EDF did not share the credit and as one young person said, “We did all the work, but no one takes us seriously because were kids . . . that’s wrong.”
CHEJ had an exciting time working with all the kids that made signs and challenged a multinational corporation. Not only did they get Styrofoam out of the sandwich wraps they also removed foam from the school cafeterias, houses of faith and community centers across the nation. They know that young voices matter and were proud of their win.
Today, As You Sow, a shareholder advocacy group convinced McDonald’s Corp. to end use of harmful polystyrene foam packaging globally by the end of this year. A big win for the health of world oceans.
Rarely recycled, expanded polystyrene foam used in beverage cups and takeout containers is a frequent component of beach litter, breaking down into indigestible pellets, which marine animals mistake for food, resulting in deaths of marine animals.
A shareholder proposal filed by urging the company to phase out of polystyrene was supported by 32% of shares voted (share value $26 billion) in May 2017. McDonald’s phased out foam cups for hot beverages in the United States after engagement with As You Sow in 2012, but continued to use them in foreign markets like Hong Kong and the Philippines identified as having high levels of plastics deposition into waterways. It also continued to use foam for cold beverages and food trays in some U.S. markets.
McDonald’s has posted a statement on its corporate website that it plans to eliminate foam packaging from its global system by the end of 2018.
Nine countries and more than 100 U.S. cities or counties have banned or restricted foam packaging. 15 major brands including Coca-Cola Co, Danone, Dow Chemical, L’Oreal, Marks & Spencer, Mars, PepsiCo, Procter & Gamble, and Unilever recommended replacement of polystyrene foam as a packaging material in a report released in 2017 by the New Plastics Economy Project of the Ellen MacArthur Foundation.
Polystyrene has been widely used for single-use containers across the world for decades, but in recent years its negative environmental and health profile have led major companies to drop it. Its hazardous constituent chemicals have been shown to accumulate water borne toxins in a short time frame, and the International Agency for Research on Cancer has determined that styrene, used in the production of polystyrene, is a possible human carcinogen.
“A new body of emerging research shows that people are dying prematurely from breathing the air even in places where air pollution levels were deemed “safe” by the US.”
“We found that the mortality rate increases almost linearly as air pollution increases,” Francesca Dominici, professor of biostatistics at Harvard’s school of public health, and a senior author on the paper, said in a statement.
Though the study focuses on the US, its basic conclusion applies broadly: the “safe” levels laid out by national health agencies everywhere are inherently far from safe. “Any level of air pollution, no matter how low, is harmful to human health,” Dominici said.
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“There’s really no way around it: This was an awful year for climate change. And much—but not all—of that is due to Donald Trump. In his first year as president, Trump staffed his administration with climate deniers and fossil fuel allies, began the process of repealing the Clean Power Plan, pulled the US out of the Paris climate agreement, and basically did everything possible to halt progress at a time when it desperately needs to be accelerated. As if that isn’t enough, a report in November showed that global emissions grew in 2017 after several years of modest decline, thanks in part to a bump in coal use in China. So yeah, it was a pretty terrible 12 months overall.
But as bad as all these things are, they only tell part of a larger story.
Buried in the avalanche of depressing news this year were legitimate reasons for hope. The nine trends and events listed below are not just excuses for wishful thinking: Any of these on their own is a major step forward for fixing climate change. And taken together, they show we might not be as screwed as the year’s headlines suggest. ”
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“CHARLESTON, WEST VIRGINIA — Jacqui Patterson, director of the environmental and climate justice program at the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), began her testimony at the Environmental Protection Agency’s public hearing on Wednesday with a story about her father.
Years ago, Patterson said, her father developed a cough that slowly but steadily worsened to the point where he needed to be on a constant stream of oxygen. A doctor diagnosed him with pulmonary fibrosis — a chronic and progressive lung condition normally associated with smoking. Patterson’s father had never smoked a day in his life, but he did live within 10 miles of a coal-fired power plant. Patterson’s father eventually died from his illness; a few years later, her mother died from a rare form of cancer possibly also tied to environmental pollution.
“How many more people do we have to bury before we as communities of color are granted equal protection under the law?” Patterson asked during her testimony.”
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Life in Cancer Alley—
“‘You can’t eat nothing off the ground anymore’ explained one local resident, who like many in this area, has seen the local ecology slowly degenerate over the years. Residents spoke about sludge-like residue that hangs around the bottom of trees, and of plants flowering out of season, or not at all. Others described fruit not ripening, leaves changing color, and verdant trees that were planted by their grandparents suddenly dying. ‘The trees grow at different times…’ described one resident, as we walked around her garden, ‘…They come out, then they go back in, they come out and then go back in’, she recalled. Just as Rachel Carson described in her 1962 book Silent Spring, the Freetown community has been forced to ‘live so intimately with these chemicals’. Part of this enforced chemical-intimacy has meant witnessing the seasonal rhythms of natural life become upended, interrupted and replaced by uncertainty.”
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“One of the new White House appointees to a critical environmental panel once said that the air these days is just too clean to promote good health. Robert Phalen, an air pollution researcher at the Irvine campus of the University of California, said in 2012 that children need to breathe irritants so that their bodies learn how to ward them off. “Modern air,” he told the American Association for the Advancement of Science, “is a little too clean for optimum health.””
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Meet the Moms Waging War on Scott Pruitt
“Dawn told me about the illegally dumped nuclear waste, that there had been instances where it had gone off-site, which were documented, that when West Lake was unregulated it had received all kinds of toxic chemicals, including paint and jet fuel,” says Ferdman. “I told her, ‘No offense, but I’m going to be fact-based and objective. If 25 percent of what you’ve told me is true, we have a big problem.’ And unfortunately it all turned out to be true.”