Flames shot to the surface from the burning fire below from the Bridgeton Superfund site landfill. It was 5:30 in the evening, when people were sitting down to dinner and sirens could be heard throughout the community. Just Moms STL have been fighting to get this site cleaned up and local families relocated for years. The flames shooting into the air was terrifying to local families. What’s in the smoke? Whats in the odors? Recently the Missouri Depart. Of Health released a study that clearly demonstrated that families in the community were exposed to unhealthy levels of chemicals due to the releases from the underground fire. A meeting is planned to discuss their findings on Nov. 15th. Now this.
“We’ve been fighting this issue, now, for six years. We have people who live just a half-mile from this site, right over the hill,” said Nickel. “I don’t want to take any chances. When we got here, the wind was blowing in different directions and we didn’t smell anything,” Nickel said. ” Now it seems the wind is kind of moving around a little bit and we’re getting strong odors.”
“After hitting it, with a lot of water and foam, we were not able to extinguish it. It appears at the time, from my belief, it was a gas-fed fire from the gases generated from the landfill underneath,” Fire departments assistant Chief LaVancy. It took almost over two hours to put the fire out. Black toxic smoke went throughout the community during that time.
The community is still pushing EPA to relocate them. The event alarmed nearby residents, who have been concerned about the underground smoldering fire at the Bridgeton Landfill for several years. The landfill is also adjacent to the West Lake Landfill, a Superfund site that contains World War II-era radioactive waste. To view video from community leaders monitoring the fire click here.
Tag: contamination
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.
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.
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 …
I wonder how many parents, in the excitement of this new school year, were stunned to read this week that there is a good chance that their children’s school drinking water is tainted with lead?
More concerning to me is how many more parents still have no idea whether there is lead in their kids’ school water fountain. Children are more at risk from the danger of lead poisoning than adults and the damage lasts a lifetime. Yet the majority of schools nationally don’t test their water, or if they do, they don’t provide the information to parents.
Despite the danger, there is no national requirement for water in public schools to be tested. In April Scott Pruitt and other high ranking EPA staff told me that they are going back to basics. “Basics” was defined as Superfund and getting lead out of water. EPA created a new website just for lead and water, and hired Dr. Hughes to run the program within EPA.
This raise the question in my mind if they are really serious. If so, wouldn’t public schools be the first place to make a significant impact? In the big splash headlines of their initiative EPA said, “EPA is committed to taking action to address this threat, and improve health outcomes for our nation’s most vulnerable citizens – our children.” Clearly they know what population is at highest risk so where’s the action? Children are the most vulnerable and it’s clear that even a small step toward testing and repairs would go a long way to protect children.
Trump and EPA still have an opportunity to really make a difference by supporting the legislation that has been sitting on the senate floor for months with no movement. Republicans can champion this bill and show the country that EPA meant what they said and are moving to remove lead within the most vulnerable, this country’s children and future leaders.
There is a solution, the “Get the Lead Out of School Act (SB 1401) requires every school in the country to test drinking water for lead. The legislation, sponsored by Sen. Tammy Duckworth, (D-IL) would require school administrators to share the results of the water testing with parents and the community. Unfortunately, the bill has been languishing on the Senate floor for months.
If the lead level is greater than the EPA’s 15 parts per billion standard, then the Get the Lead out of Schools Act also provides funding to solve the problem.
We take clean water for granted, at least until we don’t have it anymore. We also expect that our children will be safe when we send them to school each day. I know I did. As a young parent 40 years ago, I sent my own children to school, never connecting it with their frequent rashes and assorted health issues, or the high rate of birth defects and other health problems in my neighborhood in Niagara Falls, New York, called Love Canal.
My own grandchildren go to school in Texas where a study last year by Environment Texas, showed that 65 percent of the schools there that tested their water for lead found levels that exceeded recommendations b the American Academy of Pediatrics. Still, the state government has refused to pass legislation requiring schools to test drinking water.
It’s not that unusual. Most states don’t require schools to check for lead-tainted drinking water, which makes the national legislation that much more critical if we are serious about protecting our kids.
The EPA assessing the vulnerability of at least 40 toxic waste sites that could be damaged by Hurricane Florence in Virginia, North Carolina and South Carolina. But that review does not include dozens of inland Superfund sites that potentially could be flooded by the storm’s fluctuating path. Read more.
NEWS ADVISORY
September 11, 2018
Contact: Lois Gibbs, Peoples Action/Center for Health, Environment & Justice
Phone: 703-627-9483 Lgibbs@chej.org
“Mother of Superfund,” Lois Gibbs and Local Leaders
Deliver Strong Messages to Congress to Reinstate “Polluter Pay” Fee
Leaders meet with EPA high ranking staff about Superfund Sites
What: Members of grassroots groups are meeting with Congressional representatives asking them to be a Superhero and support the Polluter Pays Fees. This is part of a nationwide action joining other local groups across the country.
Leaders will also be meeting with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency at 2:00 on September 12th. This meeting is part of an on-going commitment by EPA to meet with leaders on a quarterly basis organized by the Center for Health, Environment & Justice.
Who: Lois Gibbs, Peoples Action/Center for Health, Environment & Justice
Charles Powell, PANIC, Birmingham, Alabama – 35th Street Site
Jackie Young, Texas Health & Environment Alliance, Houston, Texas — San Jacinto Waste Pits
Dawn Chapman, Karen Nickel, Just Moms STL, St. Louis, Missouri –West Lake/Bridgeton Site
Linda Robles, EJ Task Force, Tucson, AZ — TARP Superfund site
Larry Davis, People Against Hazardous Waste Landfills, East Chicago, Indiana – East Chicago Superfund Site
When: September 12th at 2:00 PM –
Where: USEPA Headquarter, 1200 Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W., Washington, DC
Details: Groups say that reinstating the “Polluter Pays” fee would stabilize the Superfund Program and accelerate the cleanup of contaminated sites. Center for Health, Environment & Justice claims that a fundamental problem with the Superfund program are due to inadequate funding. Funding for Orphan sites, testing, cleanup, legal action and technical assistance grants for communities at superfund sites.
This year marks the 40th Anniversary of the Love Canal events, which was the impetus of establishing the Superfund Program.
“It’s sending the message to students, parents and employees that we really don’t care about public education in Detroit, that we allow for second-class citizenry in Detroit,” Vitti said then. “And that hurts my heart and it angers me and it frustrates me that I can’t fix it right now.”Nikolai Vitti, is the superintendent of the Detroit Public Schools Community District. Read more.