Hanford Sentinel Op/Ed

March 18, 2007

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Guest Commentary: EPA missed point on toxic dump

By Maricela Mares Alatorre

The People for Clean Air and Water

As a Kettleman City resident, I was looking forward to reading the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Draft Environmental Justice Assessment for the Chemical Waste Management toxic waste landfill in Kettleman City. I was disappointed to find that they had completely missed the point.
The EPA claims that they could find no evidence that Kettleman City and Avenal residents experienced any ill-effects of living near a toxic waste landfill. We think they didn’t look very hard.

For example, instead of basing their conclusion on data coming primarily from Kettleman City and Avenal, they use data too broad to draw specific conclusions on our communities, and even use the self-serving data provided by Chem Waste as alleged proof that there is no problem living near one of the largest toxic waste facilities in the country.

So instead of using this Environmental Justice Assessment as an opportunity to investigate the health and quality of life reality Kettleman City and Avenal residents actually experience, they use mostly broad-ranged, incomplete, and some biased data to draw conclusions about our lives and our health that are painfully inaccurate.

I am glad the U.S. EPA is starting to think about environmental justice. The term environmental justice is in response to what is known as environmental racism. Environmental racism describes a real condition in our society in which people because of their race are more likely to live near a polluting facility and in highly polluted environments.

Environmental racism is well studied and documented. If you are Latino, African-American, Native American or Asian, you are much more likely to live near a landfill, toxic dump, incinerator, sewage treatment plant than someone who is white. In California, all three licensed hazardous waste landfills are in low-income, Latino communities (Kettleman City, Buttonwillow and Westmorland). Environmental justice simply means that everyone has the right to live, work, play and worship in an environment that is not going to make us sick. This also implies that people have the right to have significant participation in the decision making processes that effect what happens to our environment.

The EPA’s report misses this point completely. If the EPA bothered to actually go door-to-door in the community, perhaps even with scientifically and socially sound survey in hand, they might have gotten a realistic sense of what it’s like to live in a community that for the last 30 years has lived in the shadow of a toxic waste landfill.

If the EPA took the time to talk with the families who live in Kettleman City, they might have learned about the extent to which our community has experienced cancers, fertility disorders, endometriosis, birth defects, a variety of respiratory ailments, and valley fever with frightening frequency.

The EPA’s report touches on a variety of environmental indicators, but what they were unable to put into their computer models was that we have already been dealing with chronic toxic exposure for the last 30 years.

What they don’t analyze in their scientific assessment is the effects of immediately pending projects such as the major expansions of Chem Waste’s municipal landfill and their 140 percent increase expansion of the hazardous waste landfill. And of course what their model doesn’t take into consideration is that Kettleman City residents had no say in deciding 30 years ago to live near toxic waste in the first place.

What they did put in their computer models was that for any unknown information on the toxicity of a particular chemical be it pesticides we breathe in from the air or toxic waste disposed of at Chem Waste, that a zero gets plugged into that model, incorrectly assuming that what is unknown is safe.

To sum it up, what is important is to make sure the EPA and most importantly the public understand that the very essence of environmental justice is making sure communities who are excluded from the decision-making processes have meaningful access to making decisions that lead to cleaner and healthier environments for everyone.

The role of the EPA should be to help find ways to take toxics out of communities. The EPA as an arm of the United States government should be able to enlist our society’s vast technological abilities to reduce and neutralize harmful waste instead of using the language of environmental justice as a way to protect dangerous, polluting facilities and funnel toxic waste into communities like Kettleman City. If this were your community, would you want to live near toxic waste?