=======================Electronic Edition========================
RACHEL’S HAZARDOUS WASTE NEWS #311
—November 12, 1992—
News and resources for environmental justice.
——
Environmental Research Foundation
P.O. Box 5036, Annapolis, MD 21403
Fax (410) 263-8944; Internet: erf@igc.apc.org
==========
The Back issues and Index
are available
here.
The official RACHEL archive is here.
It’s updated constantly.
To subscribe, send E-mail to rachel-
weekly-
request@world.std.com
with the single word SUBSCRIBE in the message. It’s free.
===Previous Issue==========================================Next Issue===
JACKSONVILLE
On Tuesday, October 27, one week before his election as President
of the United States, Governor Bill Clinton of Arkansas gave the
final order to start burning dioxin in an incinerator in a
residential area of Jacksonville, Arkansas, a community of 29,000
people 15 miles northeast of Little Rock. The incinerator was
built in the residential neighborhood with state funds for the
purpose of burning 30,000 barrels of mixed hazardous wastes
abandoned in Jacksonville by a company called Vertac Chemical,
which manufactured pesticides and herbicides there from 1948 to
1986.
The NEW YORK TIMES (Nov. 2, 1992, pg. B11) reported that the
Governor made the decision himself to start the burn: “Mr.
Clinton, who has overseen the investigation and cleanup at Vertac
most of the last 13 years, gave final approval on Tuesday to a
plan to burn the chemical wastes in an incinerator….” The TIMES
said (Oct. 28, 1992, pg. A14), “No other environmental issue in
Arkansas has so dominated the public debate during Gov. Bill
Clinton’s 12 years in the Governor’s Mansion as the chemical
contamination in Jacksonville and what to do about it.”
Over the years the Vertac site was used for manufacture of DDT,
aldrin, dieldrin, toxaphene and the chemical warfare defoliants
2,4-D, Silvex, 2,4,5-T, and Agent Orange. In 1979 state and
federal investigators discovered dioxin on the Vertac property
and in the soil and water several hundred yards from the site.
Official surveys subsequently found dioxin from the plant in
Jacksonville’s central city park, making its once-popular
swimming and fishing lake off limits to the public.
Almost immediately, citizens began pressing for a thorough, safe
cleanup of the Vertac site. In what has now become a familiar
story, state and federal authorities delayed cleanup. According
to the NEW YORK TIMES, “Since 1979… Vertac’s toxic wastes and
what to do about them have been the source of considerable strife
in the community and have dominated the attention of Gov. Bill
Clinton and his environmental advisers.” (Oct. 30, 1992, pg. A16.)
In 1986, Vertac declared bankruptcy and willed its 93-acre site
to the people of Arkansas. Vertac’s executives abruptly left town
and have never been successfully traced. The NEW YORK TIMES said,
“Vertac abandoned the plant leaving behind roughly 30,000 barrels
of chemical wastes, along with acres of contaminated soil, tanks
filled with toxic materials, and miles of poisonous piping. The
EPA [U.S. Environmental Protection Agency] considers the site one
of the country’s worst hazardous waste sites, not only because of
[the] extent of the contamination but also because the plant is
only a few blocks from a day care center, a hospital, and
hundreds of houses.” (Oct. 28, 1992, pg. A14.)
By 1989 state and federal officials had made firm plans to build
an incinerator in a residential neighborhood of Jacksonville to
burn some 22 million pounds of Vertac’s dioxin-laced wastes.
On at least two occasions a majority of the citizens of
Jacksonville expressed, through referendums and public meetings,
that they did not want the incinerator built. Many local people
considered it a dirty, dangerous way to “get rid of” the wastes.
They pointed out that cleanup teams had already packed the 30,000
barrels in special drums, which were not an immediate threat. The
real threat was the wastes already released into the community,
the ground and the groundwater. Incinerating the 30,000 barrels
would be a cosmetic gesture that did not address the residual
problems. State and federal officials ignored these expressions
of sentiment and forged ahead with their plan to burn the visible
evidence, to make Jacksonville look clean again. The real cleanup
of soil and water would have to wait for a later time.
In 1990, Marco Kaltofen, a chemical engineer with the National
Toxics Campaign presented Governor Clinton with a White Paper
outlining alternatives to incineration, including chemical
destruction (dechlorination), and above-ground storage in
steel-reinforced concrete buildings.[1] Subsequently in 1991 the
U.S. Office of Technology Assessment (an arm of Congress)
released a report called DIOXIN TREATMENT TECHNOLOGIES, in which
they reported the successful destruction of dioxin-containing
wastes by chemical dechlorination processes. Chemical
dechlorination occurs inside a closed container, releasing
nothing to the surrounding environment. Jacksonville has two
other Superfund dumps besides the Vertac site, and OTA reported
that a chemical dechlorination technology called BCD had been
shown to successfully detoxify soils from these other sites.
“Test results confirmed that BCD is a candidate technology for
the cleanup of halo-carbon-contaminated liquids and soils in an
environmentally acceptable manner (closed system),” OTA said.[2]
The term “halo-carbon” in this case referred specifically to
2,4,-D, Silvex, 2,4,5-T, and dioxins, which were successfully
destroyed by the BCD process. The U.S. Navy has selected BCD
technology to clean up its contaminated sites, and has built a
BCD decontamination machine which is in use now to clean up
PCB-contaminated soils in Stockton, California. State and federal
officials in Arkansas turned a blind eye to these alternative
technologies.
At public meetings throughout 1989 and 1990 –some of which we
attended–state and federal environmental officials insisted
repeatedly that the Vertac site incinerator would emit zero
dioxin into the surrounding community.
A trial burn was conducted during October, 1991. State and
federal officials examined the data and declared the incinerator
a resounding success. But Greenpeace chemist Pat Costner analyzed
the trial burn data and published her own analysis, showing that
the incinerator had not achieved the required 99.9999%
destruction of the wastes, but had in fact achieved only 99.96%
destruction. This meant that the incinerator was releasing 400
times as much dioxin as the regulations intended.
State and federal officials studied Costner’s analysis and
subsequently admitted that she was right. Costner then calculated
that the incinerator would release somewhere between 150 and 800
grams of dioxin into the community during the two-year burn. Is
this a lot of dioxin? EPA has established a “safe” level of
dioxin as 0.000001 micrograms of dioxin per kilogram of body
weight per day. If you ate this much dioxin every day for a
lifetime and retained it all in your body, you would accumulate a
body burden of 1.79 micrograms of dioxin. (A microgram is a
millionth of a gram, and there are 28 grams in an ounce.) So
we’ll call 1.79 micrograms an “EPA safe” dose.
If we say, somewhat arbitrarily, that 10 times this amount
represents an “EPA unsafe” dose, we can calculate that the Vertac
incinerator will emit somewhere between 8 million and 45 million
“EPA unsafe” doses of dioxin into the community of Jacksonville
during the two-year burn. State and federal officials say the
proposed burn does not violate any state or federal laws and thus
should be allowed to proceed. One Arkansas health department
official excused the dumping of 150 to 800 grams of dioxin into
the community saying, “You have to appreciate how much dioxin
there is in this community already.” Pat Costner points out that
this will be the largest intentional release of dioxin that has
ever been executed.
Officials of the Arkansas Health Department say they had nothing
to do with choosing incineration to get rid of the Vertac wastes.
However, they have made careful plans to take advantage of the
experiment by gathering data about dioxin levels in human tissues
in Jacksonville residents before and after the burn. The pre-burn
study of dioxin in blood and urine of Jacksonville residents will
be released some time during the next month or so. After the
experimental burn is over, new samples will be taken and
comparisons will be made to see what levels of toxins (if any)
have lodged in the tissues of the human subjects of the
Jacksonville dioxin experiment. “I can say without fear of
contradiction, we will have the best database on [dioxin in
tissues of] the general population of the U.S. that has ever been
developed,” Dr. Morris Kranmer, principal investigator of the
study, told us. No long-term followup of health effects in the
community has been planned.
Despite massive pressure from national environmental groups and
local community organizations, one week before the election, Bill
Clinton gave the final order to begin the Jacksonville dioxin
burn experiment. The NEW YORK TIMES noted, “Unfavorable publicity
about the Vertac project contributed to Mr. Clinton’s reputation
as a leader with a less than sterling environmental record, his
aides said. ‘He’s been beaten up pretty badly over this,’ said
Kenneth L. Smith, Mr. Clinton’s top environmental advisor.” (Nov.
2, 1992, pg. B11.)
The TIMES went on: “The Vertac project has become typical of
toxic waste cleanups around the country in which costs escalate
amid interminable delays caused by Federal rules aimed at gaining
public trust. Mr. Smith said the Governor believed that unless
changes were made in the rules and the public began to accept
some degree of risk, fewer toxic-waste cleanup projects could
proceed or ever larger sums of money would be siphoned from the
Government’s budget for all environmental programs.”
No sooner had the Governor given the go-ahead than a coalition of
five organizations–including the Washington-based Government
Accountability Project–sued in court to stop the experiment.
Judge Stephen M. Reasoner ruled October 29 that the experimental
burn could go ahead for three days, during which the state must
test the incinerator’s ability to destroy dioxin with 99.9999%
efficiency. If anything less than 99.9999% is achieved, “the
Court orders that the burning be stopped immediately,” said Judge
Stephen M. Reasoner.
The experimental burn occurred over the weekend, but by that time
Governor Clinton’s attention had been swept up by other matters,
namely a nation to which he has solemnly promised that things
will now be different.
–Peter Montague, Ph.D.
Descriptor terms: jacksonville; ar; hazardous waste
incineration; dioxin; alternative treatment technologies;
president clinton; ota; hazardous waste treatment technologies;
hazardous waste disposal technologies; incineration; vertac
chemical; pesticides; herbicides; chemical weapons; agent orange;
superfund; remedial action; ntcf;