EPA Dismisses Civil Rights Case Over Toxic Landfill in Alabama

[tru_m.a.c]

AP/JAY REEVES

The US Environmental Protection Agency has dismissed a civil rights case brought by residents of a small, overwhelmingly African American town in Alabama who have spent much of the past decade battling a toxic landfill they blame for causing a myriad of physical and mental illnesses.

In a 28-page letter, the EPA said there was “insufficient evidence” that authorities in Alabama had breached the Civil Rights Act by allowing an enormous landfill site containing 4m tons of coal ash to operate near residents in Uniontown. A separate claim that the landfill operator retaliated against disgruntled residents was also turned down.

Uniontown has been framed by advocates as one the most egregious examples of environmental racism in the US, where a largely poor and black population has had a polluting facility foisted upon it with little redress.

“To say there is insufficient evidence is ludicrous; I just can’t take it seriously,” said Ben Eaton, who has lived in Uniontown for 33 years. Eaton blames regular headaches and burning eyes upon the landfill, which he said has an odor than can be smelled from several miles away.

“The protection we’ve got from the government is little to none,” he said. “I can’t help but feel it’s because the population is mainly black and poor. This was forced on us. If this was a white, wealthy community, this would’ve never happened.”

The huge Arrowhead landfill rubs up against Uniontown, where about 90% of the population is black and half of the town lives below the poverty line. Arrowhead, operated by Green Group Holdings since 2011, sprawls over an area twice the size of New York City’s Central Park, accepting the waste from 33 different states.

The site used to contain a jumble of car parts, electronics and other discarded items until a flood hit a coal plant 330 miles away in Kingston, Tennessee, in 2008. Over the next two years, the clean-up of Kingston involved shifting 4m tons of potentially hazardous coal ash by train to the Arrowhead landfill abutting Uniontown.

Coal ash contains toxins such as mercury and arsenic that can affect the nervous and reproductive systems and cause other health problems. According to the EPA, people living within a mile of unlined coal ash storage ponds have a one in 50 risk of developing cancer.

Residents, already upset the landfill was placed next to a historic cemetery, began to fret that the coal ash would seep out into the air and water. Some stopped drinking the tap water. Many still spend as little time outdoors as possible due to the smell and swarms of flies. A rash of nosebleeds, breathing difficulties, mental health issues and cancers have been blamed upon the coal ash, although the authorities have not conducted any studies to analyze the potential link.

“The shipping of toxic coal ash from a mostly white county in Tennessee to this rural, poor and most black county and community in the Alabama black belt is a textbook case of environmental racism,” said Dr Robert Bullard, an academic who pioneered research that has found people of color are disproportionately blighted by pollution in the US.

In 2013, several dozen Uniontown residents filed a complaint under title VI of the Civil Rights Act. EPA officials visited the town and spoke to residents as the Obama administration sought to overhaul a federal system that has rarely invoked anti-discrimination laws to remedy environmental injustices.

However, residents’ hopes have now been squashed by the EPA. The agency handled far fewer new legal cases against polluters in the Trump administration’s first year compared with recent years, and it has moved to relax regulations around the disposal of coal ash. Coal plants generate about 130m tons of ash a year, much of it stored in ageing reservoirs that are prone to leaking.

“To date we haven’t seen any actions by the Trump administration in support of our most vulnerable communities,” said Mustafa Ali, who worked at the EPA’s office of environmental justice for more than two decades before resigning after Trump’s inauguration. “They continue to weaken or roll back basic protections critical to their survival.”

In its letter to the residents’ lawyer, the EPA said there was “no causal connection” between the coal ash and health problems nor any significant threats to Uniontown’s groundwater. In a separate letter to the Alabama department of environmental management, the EPA recommended the state “improve its nondiscrimination complaint process”.

Green Group said it had made “significant facility improvements” to Arrowhead since acquiring it in 2011 and exceeded all environmental regulations set out in its state permit. The company recently settled a defamation lawsuit against a handful of Uniontown residents, including Eaton.

Marianne Engleman Lado, a lawyer at Yale Law School who has represented residents, said an appeal against the EPA was possible but unlikely. Lado said mere compliance with environmental permits should not negate civil rights concerns.

“The decision is frustrating, it’s angering,” she said. “Uniontown is a classic civil rights situation. How can people trust the government if it can’t even recognize how this enormous facility is affecting the community? It’s mind-boggling.”

Environmental racism case: EPA rejects Alabama town's claim over toxic landfill

 

[Strapped]

Let's look into who runs the EPA

 

[ExodusNirvana]

Both Siiiides

 

[Professor Emeritus]

Both Siiiides

You not see that this situation been going on 10 years? What was Obama's EPA doing that whole time?

EPA has been on this shyt since at least the Clinton administration. They stay doing the will of corporations.

The Lawyer Who Became DuPont’s Worst Nightmare


I ain't denying that Trump has created the worst EPA ever. But maybe it will wake some people up to the fake that the EPA has NEVER been on our side, and something needs to change.

 

[Swirv]

This is environmental genocide

 

[the cac mamba]

Both Siiiides

you're right, obama should have wrapped it up under his term

 

[ExodusNirvana]

Holy shyt....EPA under Trump dismisses this case...somehow OBAMA is blamed

 

[Professor Emeritus]

Holy shyt....EPA under Trump dismisses this case...somehow OBAMA is blamed

Is everything partisan to you guys? Don't be willfully blind.

This article is from 2015. Tell me who was president in 2015.

Welcome to Uniontown: Landfill Battle a Modern Civil Rights Struggle

"The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, while touting the importance of tackling environmental racism, has done little to address the residents’ concerns"

"Federal and state regulators have examined residents’ claims on multiple occasions, Kaufmann says, and some have written letters suggesting there is little basis for them. “How many letters does EPA and ADEM have to write to get people to understand these claims are not true?” he asked."

"The subject of 11 Title VI complaints over 17 years — among the most of any other state environmental agency, according to EPA records — ADEM insists it is complying with the law. It points to the EPA’s own record to prove it. “Every Title VI case in which we’ve been charged has resulted in our favor,” LeFleur said.

A Center for Public Integrity investigation has found that the EPA’s civil-rights program, championed under presidents from Clinton to Obama, almost always closes cases without action, either rejecting or dismissing nine out of every 10. Records show the agency has failed to exercise its authority to investigate claims even when it has reason to believe discrimination could be occurring.

The Uniontown complaint is one of the few open investigations at the EPA. Some — including another complaint against ADEM over a landfill in Tallassee, 100 miles east of Uniontown — have been pending for more than a decade. For the agency, Uniontown seems like something of a test case. Under pressure to beef up its Title VI enforcement, it could decide the case in a way that breaks from its problematic past — or not."

“There is a fundamental problem here,” Lado said, of the EPA’s existing civil-rights record. Despite their rhetoric, she said, agency officials have yet to show “political will to address the problem of systemic discrimination in places where health hazards are.”

In the ensuing years, residents complained about these effects and more — at an EPA “listening session” in 2011 and at an ADEM public hearing that year. They flooded complaint lines at ADEM, often filing multiple reports a day. They enlisted help from environmental advocates who, in turn, filed their own complaints. Some, like Wathen, included test results showing unsafe levels of arsenic and other metals in the area’s surface water. But as the residents’ complaints mounted, so did their frustrations.

“They seem like they’re listening and they’re concerned,” Calhoun said of state regulators, “but they must have a deaf ear.”


Again, that's all from 2015. Tell me who was president in 2015.




Or how about this article on the case from 2009?

Clash in Alabama Over Tennessee Coal Ash

The Environmental Protection Agency, which is overseeing the cleanup and is supposed to ensure that its own decisions do not harm minority communities, defended its approval by saying that the site was “isolated” and that six local elected officials, including a majority of the county commissioners, “strongly supported” the ash contract.

Robert Bamberg, a white catfish farmer and the organizer of Concerned Citizens of Perry County, a biracial group of landfill opponents, said the group had identified 212 residences within 1.5 miles of the site. “We’re being taken advantage of by several groups of powers that be,” Mr. Bamburg said. “There’s a sense among the population that we’ve been thrown under the bus.”


This crap was going on for the entire Obama administration. Like I said, Trump is the worst, but presidents before him for both parties were already choosing corporations over people.

 

[wickedsm]

Whew.
It's a good thing voting doesn't matter at all.
Who wants to maybe be slightly inconvenienced for maybe an hour one November Tuesday once a year.

 

[Professor Emeritus]

Whew.
It's a good thing voting doesn't matter at all.
Who wants to maybe be slightly inconvenienced for maybe an hour one November Tuesday once a year.

Read the thread. The fact that ya'all think this is a "one hour once a year" issue is exactly why it stayed happening under the Obama administration.



The persecution of Black activist Tennie White was also carried out by the Obama EPA:

Did the EPA Prosecute and Jail a Mississippi Lab Owner Because of Her Activism?

IN A MUGGY Thursday morning in June, I drove through the gates of the Federal Correctional Institute in Tallahassee to meet a convicted criminal who, as far as I can tell, is the only person connected to two huge environmental contamination cases in Mississippi to ever serve prison time.

Yet, strangely, the convicted felon I was on my way to meet wasn’t a polluter. On the contrary, Tennie White, who was prosecuted by a joint team made up of attorneys from the Environmental Protection Agency and the environmental crimes division of the Justice Department, had spent her professional life exposing contamination. She was an environmental lab owner who was particularly vocal about protecting poor African-American communities. Before she was charged and prosecuted, White had spent much of her time volunteering for an organization she had co-founded to help these Mississippians contend with pollution.

Although White, who is 57, had spent years closely involved with dramatic cases that stood out even in a state with more than its share of the country’s industrial pollution — two of which in particular resulted in severe harm to many people and millions of dollars in cleanup costs — White’s prosecution wasn’t obviously related to any of these incidents. Indeed, the crime White had been convicted of didn’t seem to have any environmental consequences at all.

White was convicted in 2013 of “faking laboratory testing results and lying to federal investigators.” Maureen O’Mara, the special agent in charge of the EPA’s criminal enforcement program in Mississippi, explained in a press release that White’s conviction was essential to safeguarding the public’s health and that her “case demonstrates that individuals who falsify environmental records and try to mislead the government will be prosecuted and held accountable.”

During White’s trial, the federal prosecutor, Richard Powers, put it more simply: “This case is about lying.” White hadn’t been able to produce the original results for three wastewater tests an auto parts manufacturer named BorgWarner had hired her to perform, Powers explained to the jury at the start of her weeklong trial. He promised to convince them that she had never done the tests and had lied about them to EPA investigators. He successfully did so. On May 23, 2013, a jury found Tennie White guilty, and three months later, she was sentenced to 40 months in federal prison.

Believe it or not, it gets even worse from there. Obama EPA was already a cesspool, Trump has just drained the water that blocked the evil from view and openly celebrates its rawest form.