The citizens’ committee which for years has urged removal of nuclear waste from a federally owned Lewiston site issued a statement Thursday thanking Assistant Secretary of the Army R.D. James for moving ahead with the project.
James’ signature on the plan late Monday “was like manna from heaven,” said Amy H. Witryol, secretary of the Lake Ontario Ordnance Works Restoration Advisory Board.
James’ action came after complaints last week from the board and the Niagara County Legislature about a 39-month wait for approval of the $490 million Corps of Engineers plan to clean up the Niagara Falls Storage Site on Pletcher Road. It has been the repository of waste from the World War II atomic bomb project. Congress, however, may not appropriate the funding until 2025, a Corps official said.
Read the press release from the Lake Ontario Ordnance Works Restoration Advisory Board here.
Tag: toxic chemicals
CHEJ was involved in three of the United States field Tribunals in Athens and Youngstown, Ohio and in Charlottesville, VA. Lois Marie Gibbs served as a Juror in all three field Tribunals. These field hearings provided the basic information for the large Tribunal held in Oregon. This is an incredible victory which provides yet a new tool in the tool box for communities to fight back against Fracking.
The Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal released its Advisory Opinion, recommending a worldwide ban on hydraulic fracturing, the extreme oil and gas extraction technique known as ‘fracking.’ The Tribunal found that the materials, and infrastructure of fracking inherently and necessarily violate human rights. The specific rights violated include the rights to life, to water, to full information and participation, and especially the rights of indigenous people, women and children. Governments have an affirmative obligation to protect the rights of their citizens, according to internationally recognized human-rights Covenants and Declarations. When governments fail to adequately regulate harmful oil and gas industry practices, they fail to meet their human rights obligations. And when governments fail to take measures to prevent the advance of climate change and its impacts on the rights to life, liberty, and security, they are failing to meet their internationally recognized human-rights obligations. Widespread government failures have created a global “axis of betrayal,” according to the international court, in which governments and fossil-fuel industries collude – at great cost to people and the planet – in human-rights violations to their mutual profit.
The Special Session was conducted for five days in May of 2018. Four Preliminary tribunals had been conducted in the months prior to the Plenary hearings. The Pre-tribunals included rich oral testimony from Australia, the US states of Ohio and Virginia, and other places, supporting documentation, and findings from those Pre-tribunal’s local judges. All materials and reports from those Pre-tribunal hearings, all the Plenary session’s oral testimony and arguments, all Plenary session reports, amicus curiae briefs and full documentation are available, in both video and text formats, on the website for the Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal Session on Human Rights, Fracking and Climate Change. The full text of the Opinion is attached. It is also available on the website for the PPT Session on Human Rights, Fracking and Climate Change and on the Jurisprudence page of the Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal website at their headquarters in Rome.
Deep gratitude to all who have taken this long journey with us to get this opinion finalized, and contributed in big and small ways along the way! Now the work of getting these important findings out to the world begins….
Peace and Blessings,
~Simona
Simona L. Perry, PhD
Cell 240 599 6655
Google Phone USA +1 912 289 1158
For years, Diane Wilson has tried to get Formosa Plastics Corp. to stop discharging plastic pellets from its sprawling petrochemical complex on the Central Texas coast. This week, she’s getting her day in court. Read more ...
Harris County has sued Intercontinental Terminals Co. for failing to prevent a massive chemical fire that burned for more than 60 hours last week and spewed an unknown volume of hazardous chemicals into the air and nearby waterways. Read more …
Pollution, much like wealth, is not distributed equally in the United States. Read more
A massive fire at a fuels storage company along the Houston Ship Channel may burn for two more days, an official said on Monday as the blaze spread a plume of black smoke across the city, shutting schools in two nearby communities. Read more
An examination of monitoring data available for the first time concludes that 91 percent of U.S. coal-fired power plants with monitoring data are contaminating groundwater with unsafe levels of toxic pollutants. Read more here
After years of wrangling over who should pay to clean up a Superfund site on the Southern Branch of the Elizabeth River, a proposed settlement would reimburse Virginia and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency nearly $64 million. Virginia Attorney General Mark R. Herring calls the consent decree a “significant agreement that will ensure accountability and sustained environmental improvements along an important Hampton Roads waterway.”
The decree must still undergo a 30-day public comment period, however, and be approved by the court. Read more.
State and federal officials have known about the shipments from the Netherlands to Fayetteville for at least a year but never told the public. Read more here
Last week the EPA announced its “Action Plan” for a group of chemicals referred to as per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances or PFAS chemicals. In its news release, the agency described this effort as “historic” and as the “most comprehensive cross-agency plan to address an emerging chemical of concern ever undertaken by EPA.” However, environmental advocates and people who live in communities contaminated by PFAS chemicals were not impressed by the agency’s plan. Group after group released news statements blasting the plan as inadequate and lacking action, lamenting the agency’s failure to create a standard to regulate PFAS chemicals in drinking water.
In response to questions from reporters, EPA expressed the need to set a standard that would be defensible in court and promised that the agency will develop a standard “according to where the science directs us.” While this might make a good sound bite, it falls far short of what environmental advocates and people who live in communities contaminated by PFAS chemicals had hoped for.
The National PFAS Contamination Coalition, a network of communities impacted by PFAS contamination described the agency’s plan as “woefully inadequate for those who have been suffering from exposure to contamination for decades” and that “it fails to prevent current and future exposure to PFAS in the environment.”
The EPA’s failure to set a health standard for PFAS chemicals is nothing new for the agency. They have not issued a new standard for drinking water in over 22 years since the Safe Drinking Water Act was passed in 1996. Andrew Wheeler, Acting Administrator of EPA, described setting a standard for PFAS chemicals as “charting new territory” at the agency’s press conference. Really? Has it been so long that the agency no longer recalls what it needs to do to issue a new standard?
Not having a health standard is huge. Without a standard, there is no clear legal handle that the agency can use to force a polluter to clean up contaminated water to the standard or to require that a water company to provide water that does not have PFAS at the level of the standard. With only a health advisory, the agency has no standing to force a polluter to take the necessary steps to clean up contaminated water or require a water company to provide water that does not have PFAS at the level of the advisory. They can ask. They can recommend. But that cannot require. At least not legally.
More study and analysis as called for in the EPA “Action” plan, will not change this scenario. The agency needs to stop stalling, recall its roots and issue a health standard for PFAS chemicals. The communities that have been contaminated by PFAS chemicals and the American people deserve nothing less.