When a Spill Becomes Illegal Disposal. Part 1

My Google News Feed is set to show news stories with the search term "hazardous waste."  When I checked it Friday, this popped up:

Calif. regulators recommend controversial toxic waste dump expansion.

"Toxic waste dump"?  Oh...they must be taking about Kettleman Hills.  How do I know this? I attended a class a while back with a lady who works for waste management as an EHS professional who told me about the request for an expansion and the push back from environmental groups who were working on behalf of the townsfolk to block it.

I also know about Kettleman Hills because I got my start in hazardous waste management in California and that was one of the facilities we used back in 1984.  Why the fuss over expansion of a facility that has been there for well over 30 years?

California regulators are recommending allowing a major expansion of the largest hazardous waste dump in the Western United States, even though some residents blame the dump for birth defects and have opposed the expansion, officials said on Tuesday.

Birth defects?  From the Kettleman Hills landfill?

Kettleman Hills is over three miles from the city of Kettleman out in the middle of nowhere.  Here is what the EPA has to say about the site:

The Chemical Waste Management (CWM), Kettleman Hills Facility is a commercial hazardous waste treatment, storage, and disposal facility located in Kings County, California, south-west of the intersection of Interstate 5 and Highway 41. The CWM Facility handles polychlorinated biphenyls (PCB) waste, non-PCB hazardous waste, and solid waste.

EPA regulates the handling, storage and disposal of PCB waste at the CWM Facility under a TSCA permit. The State of Cali­fornia, authorized under federal law, regulates the handling, storage and disposal of hazardous waste under a Resource and Recovery Act (RCRA) hazardous waste permit.

What about those birth defects?   I do a Google search and I get this:

Hmmm.  "What's the killing the babies of Kettleman City" seems a good place to start.  Dated July/August 2010, it's from Mother Jones which uses real honest-to-goodness journalists.  Yeah it slants to the left, but at least its got some hope of decent reporting.

Maybe it's the toxic waste dump. Maybe the pesticides, or the diesel fumes, or the arsenic. How a small-town mystery could change the way we look at pollution.

There's that word "dump" again.  These landfills are not dumps, especially a hazardous waste permitted landfill that is also permitted to accept PCBs.  But I digress.  Here is what Mother Jones writes:

There are between 30 and 64 births each year in Kettleman City. In 15 of the 22 years since California's public health department began tracking birth defects, all babies in the town were healthy, and in five other years, only one birth defect occurred. But in the last two years and 10 months, residents say, at least 11 babies have been born with serious birth defects. Three eventually died; another was stillborn. Most have cleft lips or palates, and some have other, graver maladies. "When my child was born," Magdalena says, "I thought she was the only one with a deformity. But when it began happening to other babies, I realized there was something abnormal in my community."

Okay, so in 2010, there was seen 11 babies born with birth defects in a 34 month period.  That's way above the "none" for 15 years and the one each for five years.  What's up with that?

Despite Kettleman City's remote setting amid almond groves and tomato fields, its residents are exposed to a startling array of toxic chemicals. Nearly 100 trucks spewing diesel fumes roll through town daily on Highway 41, and many more come by on Interstate 5. More than half of Kettleman City's labor force consists of farmworkers who are routinely exposed to toxic pesticides, and residents can smell the chemicals sprayed on the fields that border the town on three sides. Kettleman City's two municipal wells are contaminated with naturally occurring arsenic and benzene. And there are projects in the works to build a massive natural gas power plant nearby, as well as to deposit 500,000 tons per year of Los Angeles sewage sludge on farmland a few miles from the town.

Diesel trucks...pesticides...arsenic & benzene in the drinking water...sewage sludge on farmland...

But the biggest environmental villain, in the view of local residents, is Waste Management Inc., which operates a vast hazardous-waste dump three miles from town. Waste Management is the nation's largest waste-disposal company, and the Kettleman Hills landfill is the biggest toxic-waste dump west of Alabama, where another Waste Management facility is located in another poor, minority community. California's two other toxic-waste dumps are also located near Latino farmworker towns.

Well now I know where this article is going. Increase in birth defects, hazardous waste landfill 3.5 miles away from the town, minority community...

Last year the Kettleman site accepted 356,000 tons of hazardous waste, consisting of tens of thousands of chemical compounds including asbestos, pesticides, caustics, petroleum products, and about 11,000 tons of materials contaminated with PCBs—now-banned chemicals linked to cancer and birth defects. Waste Management has been seeking permission since 2006 to increase the dump's size by nearly 50 percent.

Let's see how Mother Jones makes the connection.  Me thinks we have another case of what Stephen Colbert calls "truthiness."

Truthiness is a quality characterizing a "truth" that a person making an argument or assertion claims to know intuitively "from the gut" or because it "feels right" without regard to evidence, logic, intellectual examination, or facts.

So let's look at the case Mother Jones makes for making the Kettleman Hills facility the villain.


Next Post: When a Spill Becomes Illegal Disposal.  Part 2

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