Residents told EPA about a long-standing lack of job training in New Bedford for racial minorities, including jobs doing EPA-run Superfund work. Other large Superfund sites around the country have job training for local residents, but New Bedford does not. Read more.
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NEW LIFE FOR TOXIC LAND
Pritchard Park, WA is just one illustration of efforts across the U.S. to put contaminated sites back to use for communities — as parks, playing fields, workplaces, homes, shopping centers, even renewable energy projects.
When Charles Schmid first moved to Bainbridge Island, Washington, in 1970, the Wyckoff Company was still stripping bark from timber and treating the logs with creosote, an oily liquid processed from coal tar. The waterfront factory had used similar wood-preservation methods dating back to the early 1900s, when it began producing materials for some of the world’s largest infrastructure projects, including the Panama Canal, Great Northern Railroad and San Francisco’s wharfs.
In fact, Schmid used to pick up free bark from Wyckoff. “Everything seemed fine,” he recalls. But by the 1980s, he began to learn about contamination at and around the site — pools of creosote, fish with lesions, shellfish too toxic to eat. The emerging news spurred him and other members of this island community, a short ferry ride from Seattle, to push for cleanup.
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.
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.
Millions of Puerto Ricans are still without water, food, electricity and shelter, four weeks after Hurricane Maria destroyed the island. With waterborne illnesses on the rise, a full-blown humanitarian crisis is on the horizon.
“Raw sewage continues to be released into waterways and is expected to continue until repairs can be made and power is restored,” the EPA warns in a memo.
When the agency issued this statement, eighty-four percent of Puerto Rico was without electricity, and sixty percent of water treatment plants out of service.
“Water contaminated with livestock waste, human sewage, chemicals, and other contaminants can lead to illness when used for drinking, bathing, and other hygiene activities,” the EPA says.
To make matters worse, Puerto Rico is home to 21 Superfund sites – the nation’s most deadly depositories of toxic chemicals. The island also has a five-story-high coal ash dump in Guayama that was hit by the storm.
Floodwaters have already mixed deadly toxins from these sites into nearby waterways, which residents are forced to use to bathe and drink. In a desperate attempt to save their own lives, some Puerto Ricans are drinking highly contaminated water from wells that were once sealed to avoid exposure to deadly toxins.
Families who have lost everything now must contend with the possibility that their groundwater is tainted with poison.
The Complexion for Protection
On the same day the EPA issued its warning, President Trump took to Twitter to complain, “We cannot keep FEMA, the Military & the First Responders… in P.R. forever!”
First, Mr. President, a reality check. The devastation caused by major storms takes years, not weeks, to repair. FEMA is still at work in New Orleans, twelve years after Hurricane Katrina, and in New Jersey and New York five years after Hurricane Sandy. EPA cleanup of contaminated sites takes even longer.
Second, a political check. Puerto Ricans are American citizens, and have been for more than a century. They serve in our Armed Forces and pay taxes, even if they weren’t allowed to vote for you – or any candidate – for President, and have no representation in Congress.
As Puerto Rico’s Governor, Roberto Roselló, wrote in his response to Trump’s Twitter tantrum, “The U.S. citizens in Puerto Rico are requesting the support that any of our fellow citizens would receive across our Nation.”
This is discrimination, plain and simple. When President Trump visited San Juan, he threw paper towels at a crowd of suffering people and scolded them for busting his budget. They weren’t amused by his theatrics.
They, like the Houston residents who live near waterways fouled by toxins from the San Jacinto Superfund site, are people of color – apparently not the right complexion for protection.
Dismissing the Victims
Dismissing victims is not unusual for this administration and for the EPA. The agency’s new chief, Scott Pruitt, spends his time on the road meeting privately with corporate CEOs responsible for these toxic waste sites. He then takes their wish-lists back to Washington so he can draft new ways to roll back the environmental protections they loathe.
But local community leaders, with few exceptions, have not been given the opportunity to talk with Pruitt.
Congress passed legislation in 1986 directing EPA to pursue permanent remedies or cleanups that conform to stringent standards. Although permanent cleanups cost more at the front end, they save money over the long term, as evident by the disruption of buried waste from storms like Harvey, Irma, Katrina and Sandy.
So, why won’t the EPA enforce the permanent cleanup of these sites to avoid future cleanup costs as well as protect the community?
Because the people who live around most Superfund sites are poor and of color and are considered not worth the investment.
This is even more the case in in Puerto Rico, since lawmakers in D.C. feel no accountability to the island’s citizens, who are separated from the mainland and denied the right to vote.
The EPA Told Me So
How do I know this? An EPA regional representative recently told me they were not going to spend millions to clean up a site when the surrounding houses are worth $60,000. It doesn’t make cost-effective sense, he said; we’ll just try to contain the waste.
Yet these houses are people’s homes; inside are human beings raising their families, having backyard picnics and celebrating birthdays. The homes are their American Dream. How dare these government officials devalue their neighborhoods because they are not wealthy!
These families pay taxes, contribute to society and deserve every protection available from our government, regardless of their wealth, language or the color of their skin.
I fear that families that have already lost so much in this summer’s severe hurricanes will suffer even more in coming months because of the color of their skin and the level of their income.
And as they try to clean up the mud and debris and rebuild their lives, families must also worry about how much chemical residue is in the mud they and their children have been exposed to.
They Don’t Care, So We Must
There is no question in my mind that the Trump Administration does not care for victims, whether in Houston, Miami or San Juan. So we have to take responsibility to compel the administration to act and hold them accountable.
We have to force the government to protect people living near Superfund sites by permanently cleaning them up, and to give Puerto Rico’s people the equal treatment they deserve.
On Wednesday, September 20, Hurricane Maria made a direct hit to Puerto Rico– virtually destroying most of its infrastructure and plunging Puerto Ricans into a humanitarian crisis. About 97% of Puerto Rico’s 3.4 million population is without power, and about half without running water. Let’s not forget that these are American citizens we are talking about.
The Trump Administration’s response has been significantly slower and less effective than the response to Hurricane Harvey and Irma. President Trump tweeted about the situation on Monday, stating that,“Much of the Island was destroyed, with billions of dollars owed to Wall Street and the banks which, sadly, must be dealt with.”
His lack of empathy towards a U.S. territory struggling to survive following a disaster is alarming, even for him. Focusing on the massive debt held by Puerto Rico, whose economy is now even more ravaged than it was before, is just cruel but unacceptable.
Gov. Ricardo Rossell of Puerto Rico urged Congress to approve a commensurate aid package. A week after the hurricane, FEMA put out a statement that they have airplanes and ships loaded with meals, water and generators headed to the island.
In addition to the ongoing crisis, the Guajataca Dam in the island’s northwest corner has suffered a “critical infrastructure failure,” which poses immediate flooding threats to about 70,000 people. While the majority of residents in the potential flood zone have evacuated, efforts are being made to evacuate periphery areas.
The path for Puerto Rico ahead is uncertain. Its power grid is almost entirely wiped out, and has proven to lack resilience. Many experts on disaster response urge for the opportunity to be taken to rebuild Puerto Rico’s power grid from the ground up– a project that would require billions of dollars.
Not to mention, there are 23 Superfund sites on the island that likely have contaminated soil and groundwater. Unexploded bombs, bullets, and projectiles are among the toxic contents of these Superfund sites, specifically on the Puerto Rican island of Vieques which was used by the military as a bomb-test site.
In the southern coastal town of Guayama, a five-story pile of coal ash has been sitting next to a low-income, minority community of 45,000 people. This ash contains heavy metals such as arsenic, mercury, and chromium. The company responsible is Applied Energy Systems (AES), which was ordered to remove the pile prior to the hurricane but whether this was done is unclear. It is highly likely that this toxic ash has contaminated the surrounding land water sources.
At this point, we must continue to urge the U.S. government to provide ongoing aid to our fellow Americans in Puerto Rico. Be sure to check back with CHEJ on the front of environmental justice for Puerto Ricans following this humanitarian disaster.
Click on the below link to see how you can help the victims of Hurricane Maria:
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/can-help-hurricane-victims-puerto-rico/
A Superfund site in Vermont will be redeveloped with solar panels. This is a redevelopment idea we can live with. While the land is being reused we can reduce our dependency on fossil fuels.
Read more.
Bobby Griffin found the clusters of shiny silver mercury globules scattered across his San Jacinto riverfront property on Tuesday, a few hundred yards from the San Jacinto Waste Pits, a Superfund site that was inundated during last week’s storm.
Public health officials are investigating a case of dangerous liquid mercury that appears to have washed or blown ashore here, east of Houston, in the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey. Read more.
It has been almost 40 years since the nation heard the cries for help from Love Canal, a school and neighborhood in Niagara Falls, New York built on a toxic dump filled with 21,000 tons of chemical waste. Children were sick, parents were scared and families lost their homes.
I know, because my children, my family and my home were among them.
The Love Canal crisis created a public awareness and scientific understanding that the chemicals people are exposed to in their everyday environment can cause serious harm to their health, especially to pregnant women and young children.
This understanding of the serious risk of living near pollution was the impetus to creating the Superfund program in 1980. The program gives communities power to hold corporations responsible for cleaning up contamination.
The cornerstone of the program is the “polluter pays” principle.
President Jimmy Carter signed the Superfund bill knowing that other sites similar to Love Canal would have immediate resources to reduce and eliminate people’s exposure to toxic chemicals. And it worked well for 20 years, including under presidents Reagan, G.H.W. Bush, and Clinton, who all supported the program and the tax that funded it.
Then, in 1995, Congress allowed the tax to expire and by 2003, the entire financial burden of paying to clean up the worst orphan toxic sites fell to the taxpayers. As a result, the number of toxic sites cleaned up went from an average of 85 a year down to as few as eight a year now.
The recently appointed head of the Environmental Protection Agency, Scott Pruitt, says Superfund is his priority. As the “mother of Superfund,” as I am often called, I should be thrilled. Instead, I’m terrified.
How can Pruitt call Superfund a priority if he’s proposing cutting the program’s budget by $330 million without advocating for the polluters’ tax to be reinstated?
There are 1,300 sites on the Superfund list. Of those, 121 sites don’t have human exposure under control. Contaminant levels at these sites are unsafe and people are at risk. There are another187 sites where groundwater migration of waste isn’t under control.
Nearly 53 million people live within three miles of a Superfund site, 46 percent are people of color and 15 percent live below the poverty line.
Pruitt is forming a special task force to improve Superfund, but his directive sounds eerily like a plan to expand the Superfund Alternatives program, and that would be a disaster.
Under Superfund Alternatives, responsible parties agree to clean up a site to avoid the stigma of being listed on the National Priority List. The program benefits the polluter while punishing the victims. It gives power to corporations, takes it away from communities harmed by the toxic sites, and weakens EPA oversight.
Superfund Alternatives removes mandatory citizen participation and access to information and resources provided by Superfund. Under the program, technical assistance grants that allow citizens to hire their own experts to review data and plans are awarded by the polluter rather than the EPA.
The alternative approach also allows a company to avoid flagging a National Priority List site as a liability in its financial papers. This can have a significant impact, especially if the company is being sold.
If the polluter is cleaning up the site under Pruitt’s watch, it doesn’t take a crystal ball to see that the cleanup will be as minimal as possible. The result will be partially cleaned-up sites being used for other purposes – and on a path back to where we started 40 years ago.
Institutional controls are supposed to prevent land that is too contaminated for residential use from ever being used for homes and schools. At Love Canal, those institutional controls failed in the 1950s to stop construction of the 99th Street School.
Under Pruitt’s direction, families like those recently evacuated from contaminated public housing in East Chicago, Indiana, might still be there, getting sicker.
If Pruitt truly wants to protect people around Superfund sites, then his first steps should be to advocate for reinstating the “polluter pays” tax to provide funds to adequately clean up sites.
He should hold polluters, not taxpayers, responsible for cleanup costs and collect triple damages from polluters who force EPA to go to court. He should also continue the technical assistance grants that provide communities with the information they need to understand their cleanup options.
Pruitt must protect the power of communities to hold polluters responsible, because after 40 years, it is painfully clear that we can’t count on corporations.
We in the wealthiest country in the world should feel ashamed. America takes our most vulnerable families – poor or working poor – and houses them next to polluting industries, poisons their children and now wants to take away their access to health care.
This vicious cycle of poison and poverty leads young men and women to end up sick, dead or in prisons.
Polluters Don’t Pay, We Do
Many low-income families only find housing near polluting facilities or on contaminated lands. There are many reasons for this: for many years, African Americans and Latinos were only allowed to live in certain sections of a city or town because of their race. Polluting facilities were often built near these vulnerable communities of color, creating a poisonous environment for innocent families.
As a result, children become sick, poisoned by lead and toxic chemicals in the air and soil. Too many of these children miss too many days from school, which leads them to fall behind or develop learning disabilities. This creates a situation in which they cannot succeed in school.
Polluting industries often find ways to avoid contributing to their local tax base, which funds public schools. As a result, these schools are unable to hire enough special education teachers to help vulnerable children succeed. Students become frustrated and drop out of school, ending up on the streets and getting in trouble.
Remember Freddie
Let’s remember Freddie Gray, who was killed in police custody in Baltimore in 2015. In court, the officers charged with his death justified their recklessness by claiming they could not prevent his fatal injuries because he became combative after arrest.
Gray’s aggressive behavior – if it even happened – could have been a result of toxic poisoning. In 2008, he and his two sisters were found to have damaging levels of lead in their blood, the result of living for years in a rented house where lead paint flaked off walls and windowsills in the rooms where they slept.
From Paint to Prison
There are hundreds of conclusive studies that confirm lead exposure is a cause of aggressive behavior. Freddie Gray needlessly lost his life at 25 years of age. Far too many young people and children like him are poisoned by environmental chemicals, then end up dead or in prison.
Prison isn’t free of chemicals either, adding an additional burden to these young victims. At least 589 federal and state prisons are located within three miles of a Superfund cleanup site, which are the most environmentally dangerous sites in the country. 134 of those prisons are within one mile of a Superfund site. Furthermore, it is common practice to build prisons directly on former industrial sites that conceal a myriad of health hazards.
Poverty keeps families from living in safe, unpolluted environments. America builds “affordable housing” often on top of poisoned soil. Today, the state of Indiana is trying to find housing for hundreds of families in East Calumet because the land is so contaminated with lead and other chemicals that no one can live there. Yet families have lived there for years, with young children playing on that contaminated soil.
We Share The Same Dreams
Today, our lawmakers want to deepen these violations of the most vulnerable among us by taking away what little health care they have. Children in poisoned communities can’t breathe because of contaminated air; now they want to take away their asthma medication. In some communities, there are clusters of childhood cancers with victims who need extensive medical attention. Regular access to clinics for infants and blood testing for lead are not a choice: parents must be able to secure that medical screening and care.
These parents have the same dreams of success for their children as those who are wealthy. But their children have little chance of achieving those dreams because they are poisoned, without their knowledge or consent, and failed by our educational system.
If the Trump administration has their way, they will let the poor and communities of color be poisoned with no ability to seek medical attention. Young people already poisoned will end up in prison or dead on the streets.
Today, all parents with dreams for their children must fight back to break this cycle of poison and poverty. If we join together we can win justice for all, not just the privileged.