Do you live near a Superfund site?

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With all of the environmental talk surrounding global warming/climate change, I'm afraid that most Americans are completely unaware of the toxic dumping grounds that lie right in their own backyards. Maybe this diversion is intentional. Maybe it's not. Either way, exposure to toxic chemicals and heavy metals is a much greater threat than CO2. Cancer, skin diseases, blindness, reproductive failure, diabetes (yes, diabetes), asthma, and death are all directly linked to exposure.

74 million Americans live within a 4-mile radius of A Superfund site. A Superfund site is an uncontrolled or abandoned place where hazardous waste is located, possibly affecting local ecosystems or people. Here's a helpful link to learn more about your own neighborhood: http://www.epa.gov/superfund/sites/

You might find it interesting to note that most of these sites are in low income neighborhoods. I just watched the documentary Mann v. Ford which is about a Native American community in NJ that has been devastated by the dumping of toxic paint sludge from Ford. The court case involved 647 plaintiffs who all experienced exposure to extreme levels of dioxins from the dumping and burning of waste materials, including paint. The entire town is sick. All of the women in the community had at least one miscarriage. Their family members die often and die young. 30 of them died during filming. The case was settled out of court and the plaintiffs received an average of about $8000 each - not even enough to pay for a single surgery. http://www.nj.com/entertainment/index.s ... entar.html

Many people remember the Erin Brockovich case, but few realize just how common and rampant these dumping practices are. The EPA is a joke. They have fallen far from their original purpose which was to safeguard the people from harmful business practices. In the current pro-business political era, our own interests are not being served. We can't even take the large corporations to court anymore. Mandatory arbitration clauses, world-class legal teams, and punitive damage caps all leave us powerless.

I'm not really sure why people don't talk about these things. Maybe it's just because the important people are rarely affected. Anyway, I think people have a right to know what lies beneath their soil, what's lurking in their taps, and what's going into their lungs.

I don't find it interesting that these sites are in low-income neighborhoods.

Poor folks live in the less expensive parts of town, like near the smelly factory.

I'm a little jaded because my work is sort of peripheral to the business of environmental regulation.

I suspect that if you posited to anyone working in a hazardous industry today that the EPA is lazy and/or has no teeth, they would find that idea to be quite alien.

Superfund doesn't work as well as it should and probably needs reform, but ultimately it runs up against the harsh reality that bottomless corporate coffers often don't actually exist.

I'm not defending polluters, but there are sites that will cost so much to "clean up" that no private organization actually has the money to do it. Culpability and the ability to make recompense don't necessarily go hand-in-hand.

And people do make poor choices about where to live sometimes. In Salt Lake City there are people who rent and even buy condos that are a stone's throw from an oil refinery. A stone's toss, even. When the refinery was built, they were 20 miles out of town, but now they have neighbors. Who is to blame for that?

There are nuclear sites that were operated for the department of energy by organizations that were later acquired by Dow Corning. Some of them are horrifyingly radioactive, but Dow can't actually afford to clean them up, and was only peripherally involved with them by way of acquiring a company after it had exited the nuclear operation in question.

It's easy to point at Dow and say, "you did this, you have to clean it up" but maybe they didn't actually do that, and maybe we - the tax payers - have to clean it up.

Organizations that dump hazardous pollutants can and do today find themselves paying huge sums of money in fines to the EPA and other organizations. Even our own military, to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars.

But finding people to pay for the sins of the 70's and 80's isn't always so easy.

That's fair. It's true that a lot of the damage we see today was done years ago and not necessarily by the current owners, but certainly not in all cases. Not in the Mann v. Ford case. And I understand that a real and true clean-up effort may very well be beyond the means of most, there's a whole lot more that could and should be done.

I think the loudest message that can be sent is punitive. Ford paid out a total of $11 million to the residents of Ringwood, or about $8000 each. What a joke. Families that lost their children and their livelihoods. There's a guy who's so messed up that his internal lesions are causing fecal matter to flow into his scrotum. As kids they used to play with the little pink paint balls. They thought it was just fun. In 2010, Ford's net profits were about $6.6 Billion.

As far as the EPA goes, I remember soon after 9/11 when they declared ground zero safe. What horsesh*t that turned out to be. In 2005 the EPA was sued by nine states for not following the guidelines of the Clean Water Act. Natural gas drillers are allowed to bypass the Act entirely. There has been a lot of talk about political pressure within the EPA and I remember seeing an interview with former members saying how more often than not, their hands were simply tied. (can't find it now, but I probably could if anyone's interested).

Maybe we shouldn't even be having the companies clean up their own mess in the first place. There's a clear conflict of interest here. They're going to do the bare minimum, at best. Maybe we should have public workers clean it up and send them the bill (there's a good jobs initiative). What about companies who profit off of both the clean-up and the pollution. Who manufactured the dispersants used in the Gulf and how do we know that the dispersants are safe?

Maybe I'm just having a bad day but it just seems like such a huge environmental clusterf*ck. Everyone's talking about light bulbs and heat waves but no one seems to be paying attention to the fact that our country has become one big toxic wasteland. I hate that I have to tell my kids to stay away from creeks and rivers. I hate worrying over tap water and tuna. There are probably city kids today who haven't even ever seen a clear sky. This is what I think the going green movement should be about.

I'm pretty sure that superfund was envisioned as a system where the government did the cleanup and then passed the bill to whoever they could find to be responsible - but the law of unintended consequences took over.

We know that the dispersant used by BP was Corexit, made by Nalco. We know that it's safe because it's dish soap.

To be more specific it's "ionic and anionic surfectants". Which is to say, the same thing you get in a bottle of Dawn dish detergent.

The question is largely whether they are sulfates or phosphates - that isn't mentioned in the MSDS - but in either case, in a volume of water like the gulf, it's not a major concern. Either breaks down into compounds that are eaten by plankton.

The only known major risk was that the combination of oil and detergent could ultimately result in a bacterial bloom (due to bacteria eating the oily detergent) that may starve a large area of oxygen and cause a dead zone, but that does not appear to have happened.

The gulf will recover. Just like it did after Ixtoc I.

The findings on Corexit aren't exactly as you described. The evidence so far has been that not only has it not worked as intended (the oil is not degrading), but the mixture of Corexit with the oil may be more toxic than the oil alone. http://www.heraldtribune.com/article/20 ... ?p=1&tc=pg

They used Corexit in the Exxon-Valdez spill and almost all of those workers are now dead. Their average life expectancy is 51 years old. http://www.businessinsider.com/warning- ... ead-2010-6

The Herald Tribune article is rife with erronious logic and alludes to things that it does not actually say. It's written to be alarming rather than informative, and it looks like it succeeded.

In my area, upper middle class houses got built on a site that used to be a early cold war era air force toxic waste dump that predated environmental laws. Nobody who approved the site or the dumping would have ever guessed anyone would ever put houses anywhere near there. They basically just cleaned up the top of the site. Most people don't know those weird half buried concrete vaults used to hold nuclear weapons either.

I didn't read the 2nd article.

From what I've read, Corexit does not seem to contain NPE. Your own quote says "some of the dispersants" and i have no doubt that some dispersants do. But you're asking about Corexit.

I don't mean to be rude but you need to learn how to read things critically even when you agree with them.

The first question I'd ask about the valdez cleanup crew is whether they were career hazmat cleanup guys. Or whether they took a break from organic gardening to clean up one oil spill and then went back to a perfectly safe and natural environment.

Look, you're reading articles that have been written in the most alarming tone that the authors can muster - not just in spite of a lack of solid, credible supporting evidence but because of a lack of credible supporting evidence.

And then you become alarmed by them, and accept what you have read suggested to be possibly true as manifestly true.

Fishermen have a higher fatality rate than the exxon-valdez cleaners. Clearly this is because sea water is highly toxic. It is well known that as little as a tea spoon of sea water in the lungs can cause death.