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Emergency at Midway Village! Residents and Greenaction Take Action to Stop Further Poisoning; Demand Relocation. Trucks Blocked at Site! Resistance to Escalate Against Environmental Racism and Injustice at Midway On Saturday, November 6th, dozens of residents held an emergency organizing meeting and scheduled the next protest for Thursday, November 11, 1999 at 9 a.m.. Residents and Greenaction have vowed to escalate the resistance to this latest toxic threat. For more information, contact:
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November 6, 1999 Update Angry residents of the Midway Village low-income public housing project in Daly City, California have escalated their fight to force the government and PG&E to permanently relocate them from their homes built on top of toxic waste. Midway Village and the adjacent PG&E Martin Service Center are contaminated with chemicals including cancer-causing PNA's (polynuclear aromatic hydrocarbons). The decades long fight for environmental justice at Midway is coming to a climax. Toxic Mountain Appears Near Homes Residents were shocked earlier in the week to see a mountain of soil taller than homes and approximately the size of a football field that had just been dug up in a contaminated area. Work crews have also erected a fence on the Midway Village/Bayshore Park side of the property where the digging into toxic soils will take place beginning around December 1st. The realization that the excavation of contaminated soils for the drainage project will result in a mountain of poison in a giant, uncovered pile next to homes outraged residents, prompting the November 4th protest. Trucks Blocked at Toxic Site On Wednesday, November 4, 1999, two dozen residents and supporters from Greenaction confronted work crews and state officials overseeing the excavation of massive amounts of contaminated soils as part of the installation of a drainage pipe near their homes. The work is now on the PG&E side of the fence about 100 yards from their homes, but is scheduled to move to within feet of residences at the beginning of December. Residents backed by Greenaction marched to the construction site and briefly blocked the road and trucks working on the project, demanding to speak to project supervisors. Elderly women with canes joined their neighbors in standing in front of trucks to press their plea for environmental justice. The non-violent protest ended after state officials called from the Department of Toxic Substances Control office in Sacramento and spoke to residents about their concerns and demands. Community Demands for Health and Environmental Justice Residents are demanding a halt to the dangerous excavation and drainage project until the community is granted permanent relocation away from this toxic community. Due to the low-income status of these people-of-color public housing residents, they are unable to afford to relocate and are in effect prisoners of toxic waste and government and PG&E-sponsored environmental racism. Residents were not told about the contamination when they moved into the housing project, and they are suffering a very high rate of cancer, asthma, rashes, sterility, abnormal chromosome aberrations and other ill health effects. Residents are also demanding permanent health care and just compensation from PG&E for their illnesses. New Health Problems at Midway The federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry recently released information that DNA tests done on Midway Village residents showed alarming levels of abnormal chromosome aberrations among youth and adults: 32 of 34 minors tested and 19 of 24 adults were found to have abnormal chromosome aberrations. ATSDR also admitted that the chemicals known to be present at Midway Village can cause these aberrations, yet they have done nothing to follow-up on these troublesome findings. |