When a Spill Becomes Illegal Disposal. Part 2

When cancer and birth defects are involved, one walks a very tight line.  As I have stated a zillion times in my posts.  I am a public health guy.  I care about public health.  I have no dog in this hunt.  I do not work for Waste Management nor do I own stock.  I slant towards my profession of Environmental Health and Safety because I know what we do and how hard we work at protecting public health and the environment.  That's a true statement and that sets my bias when I write.

The increase of birth defects noticed in the 34 months prior to the Mother Jones article in July/August 2010 is serious. The folks in Kettleman City are justified in being concerned.  What I am writing about is not whether this concern is valid.  It is.  Period.  I am going to write about how other folks are using this situation to further their agenda and Mother Jones is helping them.

Among the organizers in that case was Bradley Angel, a 56-year-old Long Island-reared Greenpeace activist who went on to run a San Francisco-based environmental nonprofit called Greenaction for Health and Environmental Justice. Angel continued to follow events in Kettleman, and in 2007, after a battle over Waste Management's application to continue storing PCBs at Kettleman Hills, he proposed doing a health survey of the town. Greenaction workers and two local environmental groups devised a 36-question survey and started knocking on doors.

What is that agenda?  Well it is many things, but the big one that drives the action of groups like Greenaction is the 1991 "Principles of Environmental Justice."  Why fight the expansion of Kettleman Hills?  Because of Item number 6:

Environmental Justice demands the cessation of the production of all toxins, hazardous wastes, and radioactive materials, and that all past and current producers be held strictly accountable to the people for detoxification and the containment at the point of production.

Here is what Mother Jones writes about what Greenaction found in their survey:

But by the time volunteers had spoken to about 200 residents, they'd learned that five babies born over a 14-month period had cleft palates and other serious birth defects, and three of those babies had died. Since they'd counted only about 25 births during that period, they believed they had uncovered a stunningly large birth-defect cluster. Angel considered the findings so alarming that in 2008 he called off the survey to focus on publicizing the birth defects.

Okay, so the guy has an agenda and he wants toxics removed from our world. If this is indeed a "stunningly large birth-defect cluster," then his bias matters naught.  So I ask is it?

Dr. Benjamin Hoffman, Waste Management's chief medical officer, told the Hanford Sentinel in July 2009, "I'll make a guess that you'll not find that cluster, that it doesn't exist...There are some birth defects, but I'm going to bet there's no unifying cause." Three months later, Kings County health officer Michael MacLean testified at a county planning commission meeting: "If the United States doesn't know what causes most birth defects, what do you think is the probability that we're going to figure this out in [these] cases? We will only find what might possibly have caused this. We're going to end up with the same thing we started with."

This is taking place in 2009 and 2010.  Mother Jones reports:

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger announced that the state Department of Public Health would investigate the birth defects. Soon afterward, an EPA spokesman said the agency wouldn't approve Waste Management's application "unless we are confident that the facility does not present a health risk to the community."

Because I am writing about this in 2013, based on a Google news feed titled "Calif. regulators recommend controversial toxic waste dump expansion," I am going to assume that the EPA is confident that the facility "does not present a health risk to the community."

Although getting into the nitty-gritty details of the study and its finding sounds fun and interesting, that's not what I want to write about in this series of posts.  Right now I want to write about how Mother Jones is perpetuating the idea that the hazardous waste & PCB landfill that is 3.5 miles away must be the culprit in this increase in birth defects, or at the very lease should not be expanded.

First, there's the use of the word "dump."  That's not what they are, but that's the word the publications decide to use to describe a permitted hazardous waste & PCB landfill.  If you want to read about how these sites are not "dumps" you can check this link out.

What the reporter for Mother Jones had in  2010 was a hazardous waste landfill that wanted to expand and an environmental group demanding that the EPA "deny permits to expand the Chemical Waste Management hazardous waste landfill in Kettleman City due to the chronic violations by the company, the ongoing health crisis including birth defects, miscarriages and childhood cancer."

Mother Jones does try to be balanced by writing:

Even more confounding, clusters—of birth defects, cancers, and other health problems—are not necessarily evidence of environmental harm. Richard Jackson, chairman of the environmental health sciences department at the University of California-Los Angeles and a leader in the creation of California's first birth-defect monitoring program, says "hard-learned experience" has taught him that "clusters are a statistical inevitability...If you throw a bunch of beans on a tile floor, some tiles are going to have five beans, and a bunch of them are going to have none." Kettleman City's accumulation of birth defects could be the result of nothing more than chance—though that possibility dwindles with each new case. Heredity, diet, and lifestyle could also play a part.

And this is where truthiness rears its ugly head.  "Hard-learned experience" does not stand a chance against a hazardous waste landfill with "chronic violations by the company" and birth defects.  Mother Jones writes:

[T]his spring, the probe turned up violations in handling PCBs. In response to the revelations, Waste Management issued a press release asserting that the chemicals were at "very low levels" and that "the health and safety of Kettleman City residents...are our highest priority." (The company says the contamination has since been cleaned up.)

But try telling that to 26-year-old Maura Alatorre, whose second child, Emmanuel, was born in May 2008 with numerous problems, including a cleft lip and an enlarged head.

So there you have it; "chronic violations by the company" and "violations in handling PCBs".  You recall what Mother Jones said about PCBs: "now-banned chemicals linked to cancer and birth defects."  Mother Jones was even nice enough to include a link to the EPA violation letter to Waste Management about their PCB violations.

There it is in black and white:

EPA

Hard to argue for a company that was found in violation of TSCA for the "Improper disposal of PCBs, in violation of 40 CFR §§ 761.50(b)(I) and 60(a);"

Until you look into it a bit more...


Next Post: When a Spill Becomes Illegal Disposal.  Part 3

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