Dawn Chapman, Just Moms STL, had listened with surprise and skepticism as the new head of the Environmental Protection Agency vowed to clean up West Lake, the nuclear waste dump that has filled her days and nights with worry.
Read full article.
Tag: Superfund
What a nightmare.
EPA administrator Scott Pruitt promised to restore Superfund and the EPA’ s land and water cleanup efforts “to their rightful place at the center of the agency’s core mission.” He made this announcement in April while visiting a site in Indiana where hundreds of families must relocate because it is unsafe to live there. When I heard the announcement, I was excited. Unfortunately, soon afterwards his action spoke louder. Pruitt is not being honest. But judge for yourself.
On May 12th Susan Bodine was nominated to be assistant administrator for the EPA’s office of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance. Qualified? Well in a way, if she was fighting for the polluters. She represented polluting industries as a partner at Barnes & Thornburg, LLP a law firm. Bodine represented the American Forest and Paper Association (AFPA) from 2011 to 2014. Members of the AFPA have hundreds of EPA enforcement actions against them, including violations of the Clean Water Act and Clean Air Act. She defended these industries against EPA.
This is the classic revolving door appointment. Since the enforcement office handles negotiations between the companies responsible for the pollution and the EPA, Bodine would be able to decide how extensive some cleanups are — and how much polluters have to spend cleaning them. Some of those enforcement action will be against her former clients.
How does she feel about poisoned communities? In testimony before a Senate hearing on Superfund in 2014, Bodine said she didn’t think most problems with the program were due to a lack of funding. Instead she blamed some of the delays in cleanups on community members who block access to sites. “If the agency can’t get access to the site, they can’t do the cleanup,” she said, adding that she believed the agency was doing its best.
Superfund’s progress has slowed to a near standstill in recent years, not due to communities who want the best cleanup possible, after all they live there. No, the problem is due to a lack of funding. A tax on polluting industries originally paid into a fund for the cleanups expired in 1995, leaving regular taxpayers to pick up the tab when the government can’t identify a polluter — or when a polluter doesn’t have enough money to pay.
Since there are fewer clean up actions the number of people exposed to dangerous pollution has climbed. In 2010, there were 75 Superfund sites where the government had yet to bring toxic exposure to humans under control. By last year, that number was up to 121, according to the most recent EPA data.
This week there were two other significant announcements related to Superfund. The budget cuts and a new taskforce. Superfund budget was cut by a third, 330 million dollars. Enforcement efforts will be cut by 40%. How does Pruitt think he’s going to keep his promise to fulfill the program, move it front and center with less money and a lead attorney who has been on the other side of the table for years representing polluters.
Pruitt’s new Superfund Task Force is even more absurd. He chose Albert Kelly to chair the taskforce an Oklahoma banker who has no prior experience with the program or with environmental issues at all, according to his résumé. However, Kelly has donated twice to Pruitt’s campaigns in Oklahoma, has spent the past 33 years working at Spiritbank, served as its chairman, which is headquartered in Tulsa. The “core competencies” listed on his résumé, include motivational speaking, business development, and “political activity.”
Washington D.C. seems to get crazier every passing day. For all of you who care about our environment, public health and fairness, take the time to get involved. Together we need to talk with our representatives at the home offices and demand change. If you don’t think that representative is listening or supporting your core issues than find someone to replace them and work on that person’s campaign. We can’t whine our way through this insanity we must get out and take actions.
As we begin our national conversation about tax reform, why don’t we start with low-hanging fruit – the things we can all agree are right? Why not reinstate the Superfund tax, which used to make polluters pay to clean up their own mess?
By reinstating this “Polluter Pays” tax, American citizens will save literally billions of dollars. There is no need for a new law, big debates or much else. All Congress needs to do is simply reinstate this law, which lapsed at the end of 1995. Everything is already in place, and it’s proven to be an effective way to clean up toxic wastes as well as protect public health and the environment.
I am sometimes called the “Mother of Superfund,” as I led the successful effort to relocate over 800 families, including my own, away from the Love Canal toxic waste dump where we lived in Niagara Falls, NY. We all celebrated in 1980 when President Carter signed the bill to create the Superfund, which forced polluters to take responsibility for their actions.
Then in 1981, President Reagan named Anne Gorsuch to head the Environmental Protection Agency. She quickly moved to dismantle the Superfund law, leaving behind a crippled program. Now the Trump administration is looking to finish the job that the mother of our newest Supreme Court Justice failed to do decades ago.
When the “Polluter Pays” tax expired in 1995, American taxpayers were forced to take on the burden of cleaning up the worst toxic waste sites in the country. These costs have risen to more than $18 billion since then.
During the first thirteen years of Superfund, before the tax sunset, American taxpayers only contributed about $2.8 billion. These fees have been used to clean up the worst toxic waste sites that are abandoned, were created by a company that went out of business, or where the responsible corporation refuses to take responsibility and legal action is needed.
The balance of these funds have come out of the government’s general revenue, or in other words, directly from taxpayers’ pockets. That’s a lot of money that by all rights the corporations that create and use toxic chemicals should be paying, not us.
Clearly, American taxpayers shouldn’t have to foot this bill. The tax is simple: if a corporation makes two million dollars in taxable income, then all profits after that are taxed at the rate of 0.12 percent.
Now I’m sure Exxon-Mobil or Dow Chemical can afford this tax. If they make $10,000 beyond the $2 million threshold, their tax will be equivalent to the cost of a cheese pizza. If their profits are less than two million, they aren’t required to pay a penny. It’s that simple.
Corporations in the manufacturing industrial sector (e.g. chemical and allied products, petroleum and coal products, electrical and electronic equipment) and mining sectors historically paid about 41 percent of this tax. These sectors are responsible for about 43 percent of all Superfund sites.
Taxpayers now pay for all Superfund-led toxic cleanups, spending well over $1 billion annually to protect public health from the irresponsible business practices of polluting industries. As valuable public dollars are spent on these cleanups, polluting industries are enjoying a $4 million per day tax break courtesy of the American taxpayer.
More than 53 million Americans still live within four miles of a Superfund toxic waste site. 18 percent are children and 15 percent live below the poverty level. These toxic sites expose innocent families to dangerous toxic chemicals every day.
The cost to families living around these sites is much more than the price of a pizza. Health costs, the loss of a loved one, missed days at work, devalued property, and loss of the ability to enjoy their homes and communities.
The Crude Oil Tax portion of the program originally put a 9.7 cent-per-barrel tax on the purchase of crude oil by refineries and other industries. But Congress later eliminated most Superfund liability for oil spills. This means Exxon-Mobil is only expected to support the “pizza” level tax. The oil industry is one of the most polluting industries on the planet. Each year, at least 14,000 oil spills occur in America.
Lastly, there is the Chemical Feedstock Tax on the most dangerous chemicals. Corporations could avoid this tax entirely by using safer chemicals in their products. This assessed a fee on the purchase of any of 42 toxic chemicals associated with dangerous substances at Superfund sites.
The amount of this tax ranged from $0.22 to $4.87 per ton, except on xylene, which was taxed at $10.13 per ton. The tax also exempted certain chemicals when used for certain purposes (e.g. methane and butane when used for fuel) or when produced in certain ways (e.g. any listed chemicals derived from coal).
Superfund sites are created when a state is unable to handle the cleanup of a dangerous site due to lack of staff, expertise or resources, and asks for help from the federal government. For this reason, Superfund sites cannot be sent back to the states. Even so, states don’t get a free ride, as they have a responsibility to pay a percentage of the costs.
State and cities across America want these toxic sites cleaned up so they can be redeveloped and no longer have a Superfund site blighting their community.
The Trump Administration, which says it wants to develop our nation’s resources, should be all for the ability to redevelop these sites, which is generally done through the Brownfields program.
However, without the “Polluter Pays” tax, even Trump can’t develop these properties, because too few of them are being cleaned up. The number of completed cleanups decreased from 80 sites annually in 1999 and 2000 to 13 by 2013.
Reinstating the “Polluter Pays” Tax should be the first step in any tax reform. It’s the right thing to do.
Categories
Just Moms St. Louis, MO Closer To Buyout
Missouri senators have passed a buyout program targeting homes near a St. Louis-area Superfund site. Senators voted 30-3 Wednesday to send the measure to the House. It would allow residents to apply for buyouts for homes found uninhabitable due to contamination or within 3 miles of sites with high levels of dissolved radium in groundwater. The measure is aimed at homes near Bridgeton Landfill and adjacent West Lake Landfill, where Cold War-era nuclear waste was buried in the 1970s and adjacent to a burning landfill. Read more.
Anne Gorsuch, the mother of Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch, was my worst nightmare. In 1982, when I first confronted her about toxic contamination in Times Beach, Missouri, she led the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) under Ronald Reagan.
Anne stepped down a few months later after she refused to hand over documents that would have revealed the EPA’s mishandling of the $1.6 billion Superfund for toxic cleanups. She said she would rather go to jail than release these documents. In doing so, she broke the law, and became the first U.S. agency director in history to be cited for contempt of Congress.
When his mother resigned, Neil was a 15-year-old sophomore and star debater at Washington, D.C.’s elite, Jesuit-run Georgetown Prep.
Neil was upset with his mother, she later wrote, saying, “You should never have resigned. You didn’t do anything wrong. You only did what the President ordered. Why are you quitting? You raised me not to be a quitter. Why are you a quitter?”
As a mother of four children, I know how much my actions influence my children’s behavior, values and principles. I can only wonder what impact Anne Gorsuch’s actions had on her son.
Even at age fifteen, Neil Gorsuch should have understood the difference between right and wrong. Why wasn’t his reaction, “Gee mom, at least the people living around landfills will now receive some attention?”
Or “If the President was making you do wrong, you should have stood your ground, and said no to him, and that you’d go to jail before hurting American families?”
Did Neil truly think his mother was above the law, because her boss told her to do something that was wrong? Or that she was right to withhold the truth from the American people?
A deep understanding of right and wrong is fundamental to ruling on cases in any level of court. Anne Gorsuch’s 22-month tenure at the EPA was one of the most scandalous of the early Reagan administration. She was a firm believer that EPA was too big, too wasteful and too restrictive of business, and cut the agency’s budget by 22 percent. She boasted that she reduced the volume of clean-water regulations from six inches to a half-inch.
I was the leader at Love Canal in Niagara Falls, NY, where a toxic waste dump leaked 20,000 tons of chemicals into our neighborhood. As a result, 56 percent of our children were born with birth defects. In 1980, all eight hundred families from Love Canal were evacuated, and the federal Superfund program was established to provide funds to clean up other similar hazardous wastes sites. A polluter’s pay provision was the funding mechanism.
At the EPA, Anne Gorsuch supervised her assistant, Rita Lavelle in administration of the Superfund. Lavelle was later indicted on federal perjury charges after an investigation demonstrated she was involved in the misuse of these funds and in irregularities at the Stringfellow Acid Pits, a major hazardous waste site in Riverside, California. Lavelle was later convicted of lying to Congress and served three months in prison.
As EPA administrator, Anne Gorsuch tried to ignore some of the worst toxic waste disasters in American history including Woburn, Massachusetts, the site of water contamination that caused a childhood leukemia cluster that became the subject of the book and movie A Civil Action. The Stringfellow Acid Pits were a site created by Gorsuch’s former employer, Aerojet-General Corp., which turned out to be even more toxic than Love Canal. Times Beach was contaminated with dioxin, the most toxic chemical known to man. Fortunately for victims, Congress forced Gorsuch to act.
I can’t help but wonder what was going through the mind of Neil, the young debater, as he observed all of this.
Did he think poisoning innocent people was fine? Did he truly believe that his mother didn’t have a legal and moral obligation to act to protect children, women or men from serious and irreversible harm, disease and death?
Was he comfortable when his mother ordered the evacuation of Times Beach from inside a local school with the media and elected representatives, but not a single impacted family? All of the local residents were locked out of the building because she didn’t want to face them and their tears and to see the effects of the toxic poisons eating way at their skin.
Almost daily at that time, national newspapers carried front-page stories about American families that were sick, terrified, and in need of action to reduce pollution in their communities. How did his mother’s role in these events shape Neil Gorsuch’s values as a young man?
For Neil Gorsuch to condone her behavior, saying she did nothing wrong, reveals a real flaw in his character. Would Justice Gorsuch advocate the same in a Supreme Court decision? If someone orders another person to do harm, will Justice Gorsuch somehow justify it because they were just following orders? Would Justice Gorsuch believe that someone’s loyalty to a President places his or her actions above the law?
I was devastated when I first arrived in Washington, 36 years ago, to work with communities faced with toxic pollution that couldn’t use this new Superfund program. My family and neighborhood’s suffering was the impetus for the program. Superfund had so much potential. I planned on using every piece of the program to assist communities to obtain clean water, air and land. Neil Gorsuch’s mother crippled the program, so much so that it has never fully recovered.
It’s clear to me that most children by 15 years of age know right from wrong. Neil Gorsuch watched as his mother allowed the poisoning of innocent American families, and allowed corporate polluters to escape responsibility. Then he condoned, and justified, her actions.
These are not attitudes that we want, or can accept, in a Supreme Court Justice.
Gov. Eric Holcomb signed an executive order declaring a disaster emergency for East Chicago’s USS Lead Superfund site.
The declaration provides for 30 days of enhanced state assistance for the estimated 100 residents who have yet to relocate from the lead contaminated West Calumet Housing Complex, as well as other lead-impacted citizens in the affected area.
Governor Holcomb did what Pence refused to do last year. Residents and community groups heavily criticized Pence last year for not meeting personally with those affected by the lead and arsenic contamination. Read more.
The landfill, which operated from 1964 to 1968, was the subject of constant neighborhood complaints of odors, unsafe conditions and the lack of a fence, according to Niagara County Health Department records.
County health officials allowed the state in 1968 to bury some 80 truck loads of Love Canal waste dug up during the construction of the LaSalle Expressway in Niagara Falls. Today there is no signs, no fence, no warnings as innocent children ride their dirt bikes, play and fish along this area.
Read more.
Congratulations to the San Jacinto River Coalition of Houston, Texas and residents who live near the San Jacinto Waste Pits Superfund Site for convincing the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)that the only acceptable solution to address the dioxin contaminated paper mill sludge waste in the pits was to dig it up and take it out! At the end of September, the EPA agreed after more than 6 years of controversy and analysis, to remove about 202,000 cubic yards of toxic waste from the site at a cost of approximately $97 million. The decision is not yet final as the agency is holding a 60 day comment period.
This site is located on 20 acres of abandoned land along the San Jacinto River that runs just east of the city of Houston. Sludge waste from pulp and paper mill production at nearby International Paper and before them Champion Paper was dumped at this site during the 1960s and has been leaching from the waste pits into the river ever since. A large portion of this property is continually underwater from the San Jacinto River causing dioxin contaminated sediment to come into direct to contact with the river water. Dioxin levels as high as 46,000 parts per trillion (ppt) have been found in the waste pit area. An action level of 1,000 ppt of dioxin in soil was used by the EPA to evacuate the entire town of Times Beach, MO in 1983. Dioxin is one of the most potent carcinogens ever tested and has been associated with a wide range of adverse health problems including reproductive, developmental, immunological, and endocrine effects in both animals and humans.
The San Jacinto River Coalition formed in 2010 to address the contamination coming from the Waste Pits and to push EPA for complete removal of the contamination. EPA was inclined to leave the waste in place which made absolutely no sense to anyone who lived in the area as local residents watched the river routinely submerse the waste completely. A major concern has been dioxin leaching into the river because so many people fish the river and continue to do so even though the state has issued a fish advisory warning people not to eat the fish. For many local residents, fishing in the river is a main source of food.
Jackie Young, director of the San Jacinto River Coalition was elated at the agency’s decision and was quoted in the Houston Press saying: “Leaving the waste in the river is unacceptable…This decision shows that the EPA is taking a firm stand based on the science and engineering and what the community has called for.” Sometimes the little guy does win. For more information, http://www.sanjacintorverwastepits.com/ and https://www.epa.gov/tx/sjrwp
Categories
Funds, cleanups fewer
By Brendan Lyons of the Times Union. The usefulness of the EPA in cleaning up Superfund sites, a creation which often gets credited to Lois Gibbs and is a label for toxic waste removal as a government and corporate responsibility, is severely unfunded. Here’s a look at some of those repercussions.
The 2002 chemical release would haunt the tiny village near Rochester for years. The accidental discharge at the Diaz Chemical plant showered contaminants on the residential neighborhood surrounding the facility, blanketing homes and playgrounds with potentially toxic substances.
A few months later, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, which would declare the plant a federal Superfund site, took over responsibility for relocating the occupants of eight homes who fled and refused to return to their residences. It took another nine years for the EPA to settle on a plan to fully clean up the site. Two weeks ago, workers finally began relocating a public water line that runs through the abandoned factory site in Orleans County.
“Anytime you have a time lag like we experienced, it’s always frustrating,” said John W. Kenney Jr., who was mayor of the village of Holley for 10 years beginning in 2006, and a village trustee for three years before that.
A 75-year-old who has lived in the village for more than 50 years, Kenney said it was frustrating that it took so long for the EPA to mobilize its cleanup plan and arrange for the eventual sale of the abandoned residences, which the EPA last week said is “being worked on in preparation to have the eight homes placed back on the real estate market.”
For the embattled EPA, the arguably slow response times to many environmental disasters — some of which cost hundreds of millions of dollars to clean up — may be tied to dwindling funding rather than a lack of urgency.
A trust fund that was set up when President Jimmy Carter signed the 1980 law establishing the federal Superfund program began to run short of cash in the 1990s. The decline came after Congress — and also President George W. Bush during his two terms — repeatedly declined to support renewing a federal tax previously imposed on petroleum and chemical companies, which are often blamed for the nation’s worst environmental disasters.
The “polluter pays” tax, as it’s sometimes called, expired in 1995 and was never restored despite urgings to Congress from every U.S. president since Carter — except the most recent Bush.
Without the money, many Democratic lawmakers say the EPA has been hobbled and fallen behind in its mission to clean up the nation’s most severely polluted sites. In a report to Congress last year, the U.S. Government Accountability Office said that in 2013 roughly 39 million people — 13 percent of the U.S. population — lived within three miles of a federal Superfund site. The report said more than a third of those living near the sites were either under the age of 18 or were 65 years or older. The EPA’s Region 2, which includes New York, had the largest number of people — 10 million, or about one-third of the region’s population — living within a three-mile radius of a federal Superfund site.
Thanks to Brendan Lyons and the Times Union for sharing this story with us.
If you’d like to read the original article, click here.
So often people believe that the solution to their problem lies in science and technical information. How often have you heard some company spokesperson speak to the need for sound science. At CHEJ, we have have learned many lessons about science and how it is used. Science and technical information is important and has a role in helping to achieve your community goals. Identifying this role and learning how to use scientific and technical information is critical to the success of your group.
The most important lesson is that science and technical information alone will not solve your problem(s). It’s reasonable to think that if you hire the best scientists and engineers and make solid technical arguments, the government will do the right thing. Those of you who have been there know it doesn’t work that way.
When the government discovers a problem, it’s reluctant to determine the full extent of the problem. This is because if the government documents contamination that threatens people’s health, it then has to do something about it—like evacuate people or clean up the contamination. This costs money that government doesn’t have or want to spend. Such action might also set a precedent by establishing cleanup standards or unsafe exposures levels that would mean spending more money at other sites
Deciding what action to take is complicated by the fact that there are few answers to the many scientific questions raised by exposures to toxic chemicals. Scientists actually know little about the adverse health effects that result from exposure to combinations of chemicals at low levels. As a result, when politicians and bureaucrats look for answers, the scientists don’t have them. They have their opinions but no clear answers.
Most scientists however, are reluctant to admit they don’t know the answer to a question. Instead they introduce the concept of “risk” and begin a debate over what’s “acceptable.” This process hides the fact that scientists don’t know what happens to people who are exposed to low levels of a mixture of toxic chemicals. This uncertainty gets lost in the search for what’s “acceptable.”
Because of the lack of scientific clarity, bureaucrats and politicians use science cloaked in uncertainty, not facts, to justify their decisions which at best are based scientific opinion, but more likely driven by the political and economic pressures they face. Whether this is right or not is not a scientific question but an ethical and moral question. It is foolish to think that in this setting, science can be anything but a tool used by politicians and corporations to get what they want.
While science and scientific information have failed to provide clear answers and solutions to the hard questions about the health and environmental impact of the chemicals we use, we cannot abandon science. Science and scientific information can be a powerful tool for community groups, but only if you recognize what it can tell you and what it can’t, and only if you learn how to use the information and not just collect it. The right information used in the right way at the right time can be very powerful. Learning how to use scientific and technical information strategically is an organizing skill. Contact CHEJ to continue this conversation.