For all of her 62 years, Lois Dorsey has lived five blocks from a mass of petrochemical plants in Baton Rouge. She worries about the health of people in her life: A 15-year-old granddaughter, recovering from bone cancer. A 59-year-old sister, a nonsmoker, felled by lung cancer. Neighbors with asthma and cancer.
She's complained to the government about powerful odors and occasional, window-rattling explosions -- to no avail, she says. Pollution from the plants -- including benzene and nickel, both human carcinogens, and hydrochloric acid, a lung irritant -- continues.
"If anything," said Dorsey, herself a uterine cancer survivor, "it's gotten worse."
Americans might expect the government to protect them from unsafe air. That hasn't happened. Insidious forms of toxic air pollution -- deemed so harmful to human health that a Democratic Congress and a Republican president sought to bring emissions under control more than two decades ago -- persist in hundreds of communities across the United States, an investigation by the Center for Public Integrity's iWatch News and NPR shows.
Congress targeted nearly 200 chemicals in 1990 amendments to the Clean Air Act, which the first Bush administration promised would lead to sharp reductions in cancer, birth defects and other serious ailments. But the agencies that were supposed to protect the public instead have left millions of people from California to Maine exposed to known risks -- sometimes for years.
Records, some previously undisclosed, show the extent to which Washington is aware of the failure of states and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to crack down on localized sources of hazardous airborne chemicals, known as air toxics, even when violations may have continued for years. According to the latest available data, the EPA knows of more than 1,600 "high priority violators" of the Clean Air Act -- sites that regulators believe need urgent attention.
About a quarter of these high priority violators appear on an internal EPA "watch list" that includes serious or chronic polluters that have faced no formal enforcement action for nine months or more. Until now, the list has not been made public. The latest version, dated September 2011, shows the names and locations of 383 industrial, commercial, military and municipal facilities, from oil refineries and steel mills to pharmaceutical manufacturers, incinerators and cement kilns. Many of these facilities bombard communities in Texas, Iowa, New York, Arizona, Oklahoma and other states with solvents that can cause cancer, metals that can cause brain damage, or other contaminants.
"There are still places in the country that are overburdened with toxic pollution," Cynthia Giles, the EPA's assistant administrator for enforcement and compliance assurance, acknowledged in an interview with iWatch News and NPR.
In Houston, the blue-collar, primarily Latino neighborhood of Manchester lies in the bull's eye of benzene emissions from the nation's biggest petrochemical complex. Doctors diagnosed Valentin Marroquin with acute lymphocytic leukemia eight years ago, at age 6. While linking illness to toxic exposure can be difficult, Valentin's mother, Rosario, doubts he got sick by chance. The ailment has been associated with benzene, and researchers have found elevated rates of childhood leukemia in Houston neighborhoods - including Manchester - with high levels of the chemical in the air. Refineries near Manchester have reported emitting hundreds of thousands of pounds of benzene over the last decade.
Origin
Source: Huff
She's complained to the government about powerful odors and occasional, window-rattling explosions -- to no avail, she says. Pollution from the plants -- including benzene and nickel, both human carcinogens, and hydrochloric acid, a lung irritant -- continues.
"If anything," said Dorsey, herself a uterine cancer survivor, "it's gotten worse."
Americans might expect the government to protect them from unsafe air. That hasn't happened. Insidious forms of toxic air pollution -- deemed so harmful to human health that a Democratic Congress and a Republican president sought to bring emissions under control more than two decades ago -- persist in hundreds of communities across the United States, an investigation by the Center for Public Integrity's iWatch News and NPR shows.
Congress targeted nearly 200 chemicals in 1990 amendments to the Clean Air Act, which the first Bush administration promised would lead to sharp reductions in cancer, birth defects and other serious ailments. But the agencies that were supposed to protect the public instead have left millions of people from California to Maine exposed to known risks -- sometimes for years.
Records, some previously undisclosed, show the extent to which Washington is aware of the failure of states and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to crack down on localized sources of hazardous airborne chemicals, known as air toxics, even when violations may have continued for years. According to the latest available data, the EPA knows of more than 1,600 "high priority violators" of the Clean Air Act -- sites that regulators believe need urgent attention.
About a quarter of these high priority violators appear on an internal EPA "watch list" that includes serious or chronic polluters that have faced no formal enforcement action for nine months or more. Until now, the list has not been made public. The latest version, dated September 2011, shows the names and locations of 383 industrial, commercial, military and municipal facilities, from oil refineries and steel mills to pharmaceutical manufacturers, incinerators and cement kilns. Many of these facilities bombard communities in Texas, Iowa, New York, Arizona, Oklahoma and other states with solvents that can cause cancer, metals that can cause brain damage, or other contaminants.
"There are still places in the country that are overburdened with toxic pollution," Cynthia Giles, the EPA's assistant administrator for enforcement and compliance assurance, acknowledged in an interview with iWatch News and NPR.
In Houston, the blue-collar, primarily Latino neighborhood of Manchester lies in the bull's eye of benzene emissions from the nation's biggest petrochemical complex. Doctors diagnosed Valentin Marroquin with acute lymphocytic leukemia eight years ago, at age 6. While linking illness to toxic exposure can be difficult, Valentin's mother, Rosario, doubts he got sick by chance. The ailment has been associated with benzene, and researchers have found elevated rates of childhood leukemia in Houston neighborhoods - including Manchester - with high levels of the chemical in the air. Refineries near Manchester have reported emitting hundreds of thousands of pounds of benzene over the last decade.
Origin
Source: Huff
No comments:
Post a Comment