Legal dumping!!!!

Nature and Politics

by Jeffrey St. Clair and Alexander Cockburn


Down the Drain

When New Yorkers flush their toilets, the waste ends up more than 2,000
miles away in Hudspeth County, Texas. It's carried there by train and then
sprayed on 78,000 acres of desert only a few miles from the small town of
Sierra Blanca.

Remember Sierra Blanca? It's the largely Hispanic town that in 1999 fended
off plans to locate on its doorstep a dump for radioactive waste from the
Northeast. Now it finds itself as the neighbor of the largest sewage sludge
dump in the nation. On most days the air is putrid, and now people are
beginning to come down with strange illnesses. And in George Bash's Texas
there's little legal recourse to stop the flow of sludge.

How New York City's sludge--toxic, foul-smelling and loaded with live
pathogens--got to Sierra Blanca tells us a lot about the way poor,
minority-dominated communities in America become dumping grounds for the
powerful. And it also speaks volumes about the shameless political
panderings of George W. Bush.

For decades, New York City dumped its sewage into Eastchester Bay. Then in
1988 Congress banned the ocean dumping of sludge and a mad rush ensued for a
new disposal site. First they looked to Oklahoma, but reports that the
sludge was contaminated with a toxic menu of pollutants, ranging from
arsenic and chromium to mercury and lead, prompted the state legislature to
pass a law banning the import of out-of-state sewage. Next New York eyed
Arizona. But this normally compliant state also rose up, banning sewage
shipped by rail after finding out about the high levels of benzenes and
disease-causing germs. Finally, in 1992 they homed in on a site in Hudspeth
County, Texas, only three miles away from the town of Sierra Blanca.

The company that won the lucrative contract to haul away and dispose of New
York's sludge was Merco Joint Venture, a Long Island firm with a nasty
reputation. In return for its $158 million deal, Merco pledged that they
would use the "nutrient rich" sludge on arid ranch lands in the Southwest in
order to "reclaim" them. Merco didn't take any chances that their permit
might be denied. They put 40 local people on their payroll, including the
former sheriff and his wife, former state environmental regulators, and
politicians. They unfurled a $598,000 public relations campaign and,
according to a 1995 report in the New York Times, "threatened to sue anyone
who stood in the way." They also made a $1.5 million bequest to Texas Tech
University. The funds were earmarked for a study of the beneficial uses of
sludge, although officials at the university had endorsed the dump even
before the money was in their pockets. The permit was approved almost
immediately, without an environmental review or any public hearings.

The permit allowed Merco to dump more than 200 tons of wet sewage sludge
every day. There were problems almost immediately. The air began to stink,
causing residents who lived more than 20 miles from the dump to gag from the
odor. Property values dropped and some ranches close to the dump simply
couldn't be sold. Then people began developing skin rashes, blisters, and
strange cases of influenza. Complaints to the state environmental agencies
went unheeded. "The chemical vapors mixed with a fecal smell are
indescribable, except to say it smells like death," says Bill Addington, a
Sierra Blanca resident and environmental organizer. "The Texas Air Control
Board came down and told us it was just the smell of cow patties."

Addington and others filed a civil rights action with the EPA in 1997,
alleging that the dump amounted to an act of environmental racism. The EPA
summarily dismissed the action. Later that year, Merco applied to the Texas
Natural Resource Conservation Commission for a five-year extension of its
permit. They also requested that the permit be expanded, allowing them to
triple the amount of sludge the company could dump on each acre. The members
of the commission are Bush appointees. According to a report on the dump by
the Texas chapter of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility,
Merco hired Cliff Johnson to navigate the permit through the commission.
Johnson is Bush's former legislative director.

The commission dismissed complaints by local residents and swiftly approved
the new permit. Soon Merco began dumping 400 tons of wet sludge a day. When
New York City's Environmental Protection Commission dispatched a
fact-checking team to Sierra Blanca, they were met with hostility. "I don't
think it's fair for you people to come here and shove this thing down our
children's throats and say that it's good, because it's not," said Margie
Mendez, a teacher at the local grade school. "You're not here to see the
kids come in with warts, or having stomach viruses, or blisters in their
mouths."

Naturally, Merco's management of the dump didn't improve. In 1999, the
company was forced to admit that it had violated federal and state
regulations by not properly treating the New York City sewage sludge for
bacteria and pathogens. This was the second time Merco had been caught. In
1994, it was fined $12,800 for dumping untreated sludge. This situation is
serious, since untreated sludge can carry e. coli, salmonella, and TB. In
1996, there was an outbreak of New York flu virus in Van Horn, Texas, 30
miles west of the dump site. "We feel like guinea pigs," says Addington.

The town of Sierra Blanca is so destitute it can't even afford to build its
own sewer system.



"Capt. Rob" wrote in message
ups.com...
Ah ... er ... I hate to tell you this but it ain't silt. It's the same

"silt" that forms in a septic tank.


100% wrong. The bottom conditions of the Sound are quite unique and
specific after thousands of years. It's nothing at all like the bottom
of a septic tank. Of course it helps if you actually know what "silt"
is. You clearly don't. Quite simply...

1 : loose sedimentary material with rock particles usually -uf,1-
millimeter or less in diameter.

It's a generic term for the most part. Damage to the Sound has been due
to illegal dumping allowed by local and Federal goverments. The system
is recoverable to some degree. The water itself, literally "flushed" by
tha race every day is cleaner than the Maryland/PA or local beach
waters.
Bob Crantz knows nothing about ecology. He's a Google hound with no
inherent knowledge base. And you may know even less.

Robert B
35s5...A better faster boat than yours!