=======================Electronic Edition========================
RACHEL’S HAZARDOUS WASTE NEWS #182
—May 23, 1990—
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
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CHEMICAL DUMPS MAKE GOOD HOMES FOR
POOR FAMILIES, EPA DECISION INDICATES.
William Reilly, chief of U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
(EPA), last week declared homes bordering the Love Canal chemical
dump in Niagara Falls, NY, safe for families to move back into.
Some 200 families have already taken the bait and are standing in
line to buy the dilapidated, boarded-up buildings abandoned 12
years ago by terrified residents. One of the houses soon to be
reinhabited is the former home of Jon Kenny, a child who died in
1978 at age seven, despite a history of apparent good health,
after he played in heavily-contaminated Black Creek, which
bordered his back yard. Black Creek has since been dredged to
remove the worst contamination, but the house itself stands as it
did 12 years ago, its basement still embedded in the same
contaminated ground, a boarded-up symbol of sickness, death and
unregenerate corporate crime. The door of Jon Kenny’s brick home
will get a shiny coat of paint, and the community in which it
stands will be given an upbeat new name, “Sunrise City.” The 236
homes are being offered at 10% to 15% below market value,
compared to homes not built near chemical dumps. Apparently, the
nation’s housing shortage is so urgent that young families
desperate for a home will settle almost anywhere, even next to
the notorious Love Canal, where the New York State Health
Department found birth defects and miscarriages occurring at
twice the national average 12 years ago. And equally apparently,
the Bush administration is determined to send a message to the
nation that chemical dumps will not be cleaned up, but
nevertheless can still be packaged as useful property because
dumps can be given new names by public relations slicksters, then
can be successfully peddled to the poor and the poorly-educated.
Welcome to environmental protection in the ’90s.
The toxic chemical dump at Love Canal, which drove families out
in 1978, has not been cleaned up. Twenty thousand tons of paint
residues, dyes, epoxy byproducts, solvents, glop, crud, and black
oily goo laced with dioxins, still lie buried in the ground. New
York state environmental officials have covered the chemicals
with a temporary clay cap to try to keep rain out, and have
installed drains and pumps in the ground to divert the flow of
chemicals that would otherwise continue seeping into the
basements of nearby homes. President Bush’s EPA and the New York
State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC)–indeed, all
scientists and engineers who understand the second law of
thermodynamics–agree that these are temporary measures which
will eventually fail, allowing chemicals to flow from the dump as
they have flowed in the past, which is into the basements of the
homes now being sold to families who are being bamboozled and
misled by use of the words ‘habitable’ and ‘safe.’ But these
government burrowcrats evidently judge it more important to send
a message to America–“Chemical Dumps Make Good Homes for Poor
People”–than to protect all Americans equally. It’s a very ’80s
message, begun by the me-me Reagan regime and followed up with
vigor by understudy George Bush, who says he wants to be
remembered as “the environmental President.” He will be
remembered all right.
Would-be residents of Love Canal express two thoughts: an abiding
faith in their government, and resignation that the earth has
been totally contaminated anyway, so Love Canal is no worse than
anywhere else. Philip Palmisano, a retired tavern owner in nearby
North Tonawonda told the New York Times, “I’m no scientist or
chemist, but you have to take someone’s word on it. The
government wouldn’t let us move in there if it weren’t safe,
would they?” He ended with a verbal shrug of the shoulders: “We
live in a contaminated world anyway.”
What of this persistent notion that our government will protect
us? How quickly we forget. There were actually three separate
evacuations of people from homes at Love Canal. After each
evacuation, the government declared the remaining homes “100%
safe” and pigheadedly refused to study the health of the
remaining residents. Residents, who knew they themselves, their
children, and their neighbors were getting sick at unusual rates,
had to find outside experts to do their own health assessments
because government at all levels doggedly refused. When the
residents came forward with maps showing clusters of birth
defects, urinary tract disease, miscarriages and crib deaths, all
suspiciously linked to the chemical dump, New York State Health
Department officials first said they would take the data
seriously, but within hours announced to newspapers that the data
were not worth studying because they were based on interviews
with sick people and not on interviews with doctors treating the
sick people. It was as cynical a manipulation of science and
medicine as has ever been witnessed in America.
Fortunately, the story of Love Canal cannot be completely
rewritten by William Reilly and his smiley-faced public relations
counterfeiters because the true story has been recorded on an
excellent video tape, available for commercial sale or rental.
Bullfrog Films distributes IN OUR OWN BACK YARD: LOVE CANAL,
produced and directed by Lynn Corcoran in 1981. It is the story
of a three-year fight by residents to escape from their
contaminated homes, some of which are about to be sold once again
to gullible families, creating the next Love Canal disaster.
IN OUR OWN BACK YARD records government officials providing
explanations–back in 1978–of why governments tried not to study
the health of residents, and providing forward-looking
explanations of why, a decade later, Love Canal must now be
reinhabited by the poor. The video opens with New York’s attorney
general, Robert Abrams, saying, “Love Canal, tragically, has
become a national symbol of corporate irresponsibility.
Industrial producers and users of chemicals have too often
disposed of highly toxic materials with utter disregard for the
danger which these materials pose to the environment and to
future generations.” U.S. Representative Joseph Tyree explains
why it was important for the federal government not to buy homes
at Love Canal: “Once they set a precedent of giving the money to
buy out these houses, then they’ve got the whole country [to
consider buying out] because these wastes are all over.” These
are still the true meanings of Love Canal and these are the
meanings that George Bush, William Reilly and their public
relations muggers have set out to blur or, better yet, to erase.
Anyone who remained awake through earth day knows that the
smiley-faced new slogan from the Chemical Manufacturers’
Association is “Responsible Care of the Earth” (with the implied
assumption that the earth is theirs, and they get to ‘care’ for
it as they see fit). Although the chemical industry continues to
bury millions of tons of toxic chemicals in the ground each year
with the fawning collaboration of William Reilly’s EPA, their
public relations mercenaries now call this not “poisoning the
planet” but “responsible care.” George Orwell is winking at us
from his grave.
The Bush administration on May 8 issued a major landfill
regulation that guarantees the creation of many more Love Canals
throughout the ’90s. The new regulation cuts the heart out of a
six-year effort, initiated by Congress in 1984, to stem the flow
of raw toxics into underground burial sites. Congress had ordered
EPA to require that wastes be treated with “best available
technology” prior to landfill burial. The May 8 regulation simply
abandons all pretense of complying with Congress’s directive.
“This proposal ensures that the waste management practices of
today will become the Superfund sites of tomorrow,” says a
critique of the regulations issued jointly by Natural Resources
Defense Council (NRDC) and the Hazardous Waste Treatment Council
(HWTC), an incineration industry trade association. Richard
Fortuna of HWTC termed the new Bush-Reilly regulations the
“What–me worry?” approach to hazardous waste management,
pointing out that the new rule–called the “third-third”
rule–allows hazardous wastes to continue to be placed in unlined
and leaking lagoons, and treatment residues (such as ash) can be
placed in unlined, unmonitored, and leaking landfills. It
represents the biggest step backward in 20 years or more.
For our part, we feel relieved that a Bush-Reilly pattern has
finally and unmistakably emerged: poor people, middle-class
people, and the natural environment had better watch out because
the chemical industry and its public relations goons have taken
control in Washington. It’s gloves off time for advocates of
environmental justice. And it’s opportunity time for the
Democrats, who, if they play their cards right, can sweep into
office like crusaders against satan. (If NY Governor Mario Cuomo
isn’t careful, Republican PR bandits will hang Love Canal around
his neck, a toxic mill-stone to drag him down into the ooze of
oblivion. Remember Boston harbor.)
Get: A most valuable video about Love Canal IN OUR OWN BACK YARD
from: Bullfrog Films, Oley, PA; phone (800) 543-3764. $200
purchase, unless you’re a citizen action group, in which case
it’s $75 purchase or $25 rental. We recommend you buy this video
and show it everywhere you can until you just plain wear it out.
For a copy of the “third-third” rule (which has not yet appeared
in the FEDERAL REGISTER though it became effective May 8, 1990),
call the EPA’s RCRA/Superfund hotline at (800) 424-9346. NRDC’s
and HWTC’s critique is available from Jackie Warren (NRDC) at
(212) 727-2700, or from Rich Fortuna (HWTC) at (202) 783-0870.
Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) has also critiqued the rule;
phone Karen Florini at (202) 387-3500.
–Peter Montague, Ph.D.
Descriptor terms: edf; nrdc; hwtc; third third rule; remedial
action; reinhabiting love canal; sunrise city; george bush;
william reilly; niagara falls; health effects; lynn corcoran;
policies;