Protect American Families from Dioxin
Posted March 17th, 2010 by Lois Marie GibbsIn 1978, I discovered my child was attending an elementary school built on top of a 20,000 ton, toxic-chemical dump in Niagara Falls, New York. As a mom, I was outraged! That shocking discovery spurred me and my neighbors to lead a three-year struggle to protect our children and families from the hazardous waste buried in our backyards.
When we bought our homes, none of us knew that Hooker Chemical Corporation, a division of Occidental Petroleum, had dumped 200 tons of a toxic, dioxin-laden chemical and 21,600 tons of various other chemicals into Love Canal. We just knew we were getting sick. We knew there were too many miscarriages, too many birth defects, too many central nervous systems problems, too many urinary tract disorders, and too much asthma and other respiratory problems among us.
Hooker and Occidental knew the chemicals they had buried in the canal could damage the health of the people who lived in the surrounding neighborhood. When the company sold the land to the town school board for only $1.00, the deal contained a stipulation that if anyone was harmed by the buried waste, Hooker and Occidental would not be responsible.
After we organized and won evacuation from Love Canal in 1980, I moved to Virginia to give my children a home safe from dioxin and other toxic contamination, and to start an organization that would help people fighting toxics in their neighborhoods.
Soon after, I realized that Love Canal was not the only dioxin problem. There were sites all across the country contaminated with Dioxin. Dioxin poses a serious health risk to both children and adults. In response, more than 100 countries have signed a treaty that calls for a global phase out of dioxin. Dioxin is a powerful cancer causing agent and human carcinogen.
You don’t have to live next to Love Canal in New York or Dow Chemical in Midland, Michigan, to suffer the effects of dioxin. The average boy, girl, woman, or man in the U.S. has enough or almost enough dioxin in their bodies to damage their health.
The only way we can save our families from further exposure is to eliminate the sources of dioxin in everyone’s backyard.
We now have an opportunity to do that.
The EPA is soliciting comments on their proposed cleanup guidelines for dioxin.
EPA is proposing an interim preliminary remediation goal (PRG) for residential soil at 72 ppt TEQ and commercial/industrial soil at 950 ppt TEQ which are based on non-cancer effects.
What’s shocking is that if cancer effects were used to determine the cleanup goals, the levels would go down to 3.7 ppt and 17 ppt respectively at the generally accepted one-in-a-million cancer risk. EPA did not fully use cancer effects to determine the cleanup goals, despite dioxin’s classification as a “known carcinogen.”
At the request of Dow Chemical and the American Chemistry Council, the EPA has extended the public comment period on their proposed cleanup guidelines for Dioxin to Friday April 2nd. Now more than ever, we need your help to counteract lobbying by Dow Chemical and the chemical industry. Join thousands of Americans by telling EPA that more stringent guidelines must be developed for Dioxin cleanup.
Here’s some other ways you can help protect American families from Dioxin:
- On Twitter? Tweet this! RT@chej Protect American Families from Dioxin – Take Action Today http://bit.ly/ac6r5H Please RT!
- On Facebook? Post this to your friends – Protect American Families from Dioxin – Take Action Today http://bit.ly/ac6r5H
- Tell your friends and family using CHEJ’s tell-a-friend form.
Remember, there is still time to take action and let your voice be heard!
Lois Marie Gibbs is the Founder and Executive Director of the Center for Health, Environment and Justice (CHEJ) located in the metropolitan Washington Area. In 1978, Lois founded the Love Canal Homeowners’ Association, and CHEJ in 1981, an organization that has assisted over 10,000 grassroots groups with organizing, technical and general information nationwide. Her vision has guided CHEJ’s efforts to provide critical organizing and technical assistance to communities engaged in their own environmental struggles.
Lois has been recognized extensively for her critical role in the grassroots environmental justice movement. She has spoken at numerous conferences and has been featured on many television and radio shows including 60 Minutes, 20/20, Oprah Winfrey, Good Morning America, and the Today Show.
3 Comments
March 19, 2010 at 10:24 am by Elizabeth cokerMy two children were dismissed from the private school we were attending in Franklin, Tennessee when I began to raise health concerns about the Toulene, Acetone and Benzene found in the air in a First Grade classroom and in a nearby test well during the clean up of a chemical leak from a paint company located a short distance away on top of a hill. The chemicals leaked into the ground and rolled down the hill into a creek in the neighborhood.
My daughter got sick on the playground while playing soccer. One official report said that at the time, fumes were offgasing from a trench built to capture the free flowing VOC’s leaked into Liberty Creek and the Harpeth river. The trench was origianlly intended to capture and contain the chemicals for clean up by the company’s environmental consultants.
The creek flows into the river at the corner of the playground just a short distance away from the school’s property line.
The school denies that there is any problem by telling parents the contaminants are at low levels, when in fact, after gaining acess to the air quality monitoring data, I had an independant toxicologist and medical doctor confirm that the data actually showed that
eleven times in 2008 the levels spiked to a much higher degree above the chronic aceptable level.One of the weeks reported with a spiked reading included the day I had to take my daughter to the emergency room with breathing problems, irritated skin,among some of her symptoms and weakness to the point that I had to carry her to the car.
I have spent the past two years investigating the company that did this polluting and it turns out they have skipped town twice, once in New Jersy and again in Indianna, leaving behind hazardous waste sites to be cleaned up. They are currently responsible for a “biorenewal project” of the scenie Harpeth river at the point where all water life is still dead in the area where the pollution is most concentrated. However, once media attention fades away, I doubt they will follow through and actually do a real clean up.
This is the fourth year since the discovery of the “leak” from underground pipes leading to hundred year old above ground storage tanks.
The company also allegedly added lead to their enamel, according to former employees, after the time frame when lead was outlawed.
The company was a supplier of yellow enamel for school pencils to several large pencil manufacturers in the Middle Tennessee area.
The 5,000+ pound leak from the Egyptian Lacquer Manufacturing Company was first discovered in 2006 by teachers and children who smelled an acrid odor while they were outside getting “fresh air” at recess on the playground adjacent to the prestigious Williamson county prep school started in 1889.
The leak is still seeping into the river.
The company is allowed to continue their manufacturuing operations and the children have never been removed from the playground.
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March 18, 2010 at 5:02 pm by Alan Kennedy- and please for Goodness’ sake
don’t send your Dioxin to Africa
where it only serves to reduce the chances of survival of so many stressed species
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March 17, 2010 at 8:12 pm by Renee G DavisOne way to greatly reduce dioxin is to ban incineration as a method of waste disposal. The second is to make our paper industries closed loop systems like in the European Union. These two policy measures would drastically reduce dioxin.
The following is from the book, “Living Downstream.”
“No matter how improved or what they are called, incinerators present two problems that landfills do not. First incinerators only transform garbage; they don’t provide a final resting place for it. There remains the question of where to put the ashes. Second, these cavernous furnaces create, out of the ordinary garbage they are stoked with, new species of toxic chemicals. In addition to producing electricity, they generate hazardous waste.
Somewhere between the furnace and the top of the stack, in the crucible of heating and cooling, carbon and chlorine atoms rearrange themselves to create molecules of dioxins and their closely related organochlorine allies, the furans.
Even at a few parts per trillion, dioxin is capable, it seems, of profoundly altering biological processes.
The most poisonous by far, however, is the dioxin known as TCDD. The symmetrical arrangement of its chlorine legs prevents enzymes — ours or any other living creature’s — from breaking TCDD apart. In human tissues, TCDD has a half-life of at least seven years. This particular geometry also allows TCDD admission into a cell’s nucleus and access to its DNA.
These cavernous furnaces create, out of the ordinary garbage they are stoked with, new species of toxic chemicals. As the dioxin researcher James Huff once noted, “In every species so far exposed to TCDD…and by every route of exposure, clear carcinogenic responses have been found.” These include cancers of the lung, mouth, nose, thyroid gland, adrenal gland, lymphatic system, and skin. Dioxin also causes liver cancer in rats and mice, but it does so more often in females.”
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