Document BRaOZGVk2L1az6LEwL2QxVbOj

RACHEL'S HAZARDOUS WASTE NEWS #311 Providing news and resources to the Movement foe Environmental Justice - November 12,1992 JACKSONVILLE On Tuesday, October 27, one week before his election as President of the United States, Governor Bill Clinton o f Arkansas gave the final order to start bunting dioxin in an incinerator in a residential area o f Jackson ville, Arkansas, a community o f29,000 people 15 miles northeast o f Little Rock. The incinerator was built in the residential neighborhood w ith state funds for the purpose of burning 30,000 b an d s o f mixed hazardous wastes abandoned in Jacksonville by a company called Vertac Chemical, which manufactured pesticides and herbicides there from 1948 to 1986. The N ew York Tim es (Nov. 2, 1992, pg. B ll) reported that the Governor made the decision himself to start the bum; "Mir. Clinton, who has overseen the investigation and deanup at Vertac most o f the last 13 years, gave final approval on Tuesday to a plan to bum the chemical wastes in an inrinerator." The Times said (O ct 28,1992, pg. A14), "No other environmental issue in Arkansas has so dominated the public debate during Gov. Bill Clinton's 12 yean in the Governor's Mansion as the chemical contamination in Jacksonville and what to do about i t " Over the yean the Vertac site was used for marm- _ facturc o f DDT, aldrin, dieldrin, toxaphene and the chemical warfare defoliants 2,4-D, Silvex, 2,4,5-T, and Agent Orange. In 1979 state and federal investigators discovered dioxin on the Vertac property and in the soil and water several hundred yards from the site. Official surveys subsequently found dioxin from the plant in Jacksonville's central d ty park, making its once-popular swimming and fishing lake o ff limits to the public. Almost immediately, dtizens began pressing for a thorough, safe deanup of the Vertac site .' In what has now become a familiar story, state and federal authori ties delayed cleanup. According to the New York Tunes, "Since 1979... Vertac's toxic wastes and what to do about them have been.the source o f considerable strife in the community and have dominated the attention of Gov. Bill Q inton and his environmental advises." (Oct. 30, 1992, pg. A16.) In 1986, Vertac declared bankruptcy and willed i s 93-a.re site to the people o f Arkansas.. V eitac's execu tive i abruptly left town and have never been successful ly traced. The New York Times said, "Vertac abandoned the plant leaving behind roughly 30,000 barrels of chemical wastes, along with acres of contaminated soil, tanks filled with toxic materials, and o f poisonous piping. The EPA [U.S. Environmental Protection Agency] considers the site one o f the country's w ont hazardous waste sites, not only because o f [the] extent o f the contamination but also because the plant is only a few blocks from a day care center, a hospital, and hundreds of houses." (O ct 28, 1992, pg. A14.) By 1989 state and federal officials had made firm plans to build an incinerator in a residential neighbor hood o f Jacksonville to bum some 22 million pounds of V eitac's dioxin-laced wastes. On at least two occasions a majority o f the citizens of Jacksonville expressed, through referendums and public meetings, that they did not want the incinerator b u ilt Many local people considered it a dirty, danger ous way to "get rid of* the wastes. They pointed out that deanup teams had already packed the 30,000 barrels in special drums, which were not an immediate threat The real threat was the wastes already released into the community, the ground and the groundwater. Incinerating the 30,000 barrels would be a cosmetic gesture that did not address the residual problems. State and federal officials ignored these expressions o f senti ment and forged ahead with their plan to bum the visible evidence, to make Jacksonville look clean again. The real deanup o f soil and w ater would have to wait for a later time. In 1990, Marco Kaltofen, a chemical engineer with the National Toxics Campaign presented Governor Clinton with a W hite Paper outlining alternatives to incineration, including chemical destruction (dechlorina tion), and above-ground storage in sted-reinforced concrete buildings. Subsequently in 1991 the U.S. Office o f Technology Assessment (an aim o f Congress) released a report called D ioxin Treatm ent Technologies, in which they reported the successful destruction of dioxin-containing wastes by chemical dechlorination processes. Chemical dechlorination occurs inside a dosed container, releasing nothing to the surrounding environm ent Jacksonville has two other Superfund dumps besides the Vertac site, and OTA reported that a chemical dechlorination technology called BCD had been shown to successfully detoxify soils from these other sites. "Test results confirmed that BCD is a candidate technology for the cleanup e f halo-caxboncontaminated liquids and soils in an environmentally acceptable manner (closed system)," OTA said.2 The term "halo-carbon" in this case referred specifically to 2,4,-D, Silvex, 2,4,5-T, and dioxins, which were succes sfully destroyed by the BCD process. The U.S. Navy has selected BCD technology to dean up its contamina ted sites, and has built a BOD decontamination machine which is in use now to clean up PCB-contaminated soils' in Stockton, California. State and federal officials in Arkansas turned a blind eye to these alternative technol ogies. At public meetings throughout 1989 and 1990 -som e o f which we attended--state and federal environmental officials insisted repeatedly that the Vertac site incinera tor would emit zero dioxin into the surrounding commu nity. A trial bunt was conducted during October, 1991. State and federal officials examined the data and de clared the incinerator a resounding success. But Green peace chemist Pat Costner analyzed the trial bum data C00094 and published her own analysis, showing that die incinerator had not achieved the required 99.9999% destruction o f the wastes, but had in fact achieved only 99.96% destruction. This meant that the incinerator was releasing 400 times as much dioxin as the regulations intended. State and federal officials studied Costner's analysis and subsequently admitt! that she was right. Costner then calculated that the incinerator would release somewhere between 150 and 800 g ran s o f dioxin into the community during the tw o-ye^ bum. Is this a lot of dioxin? EPA has established a "safe" level o f dioxin as 0.000001 micrograms o f dioxin per kilogram o f body weight per day. If you ate this ranch dioxin every day for a lifetime and retained it all in your body, you would accumulate a body burden o f 1.79 micrograms o f dioxin. (A microgram is a millionth o f a gram, and there are 28 grams in an ounce.) So w e'll call 1.79 micrograms an "EPA safe" dose. If w e say, somewhat arbitrarily, that 10 times this amount represents an "EPA unsafe" dose, we can calculate that the V eitac incinerator w ill em it some where between 8 million and 45 m illion "EPA unsafe" doses o f dioxin into the community o f Jacksonville during the two-year bum. State and federal officials say the proposed burn does not violate any state or federal laws and thus should be allowed to proceed. One Arkansas health department official excused the dum ping of 150 to 800 grams of dioxin into the community saying, "You have to appreciate how much dioxin there is in this community already." Pat Costner points out that this w ill be the largest intentional release o f dioxin that has ever been executed. Officials o f the Arkansas Health Department say they had nothing to do with choosing incineration to get rid o f the Vertac wastes. However, they have made careful plans to take advantage o f the experiment by gathering data about dioxin levels in human tissues in Jacksonville residents before and after the burn. The pre-bum study o f dioxin in blood and urine o f Jacksonville residents will be released some time during the next month or so. After the experimental bum is over, new samples will be taken and comparisons will be made to see wte* levels o f toxins (if any) have lodged in the tissues o f the human subjects o f the Jacksonville dioxin experim ent "I can say without fear o f contradiction, we w ill have the best database on [dioxin in tissues of] the general population o f the U.S. that has ever been developed," Dr. M orris Kranmer, principal investigator o f the study, told us. No long-term followup o f health effects in the community has been planned. Despite massive pressure from national environmen tal groups and local community organizations, one week before the election, Bill Clinton gave the final order to begin the Jacksonville dioxin bum experim ent The New York Times noted, "Unfavorable publicity about the Veitac project contributed to M r. Clinton's reputation as a leader with a less than sterling environmental record, his aides said. 'H e's been beaten up pretty badly over this,' said Kenneth L. Smith, Mr. Clinton's top environ mental advisor." (Nov. 2,1992, pg. B it.) The Tim es went on: "The Veitac project has become typical o f toxic waste cleanups around the country In which costs escalate amid interminable delays caused by Federal rules aimed at gaining public tru st M r. Smith said the Governor believed that unless changes were made in the rales and the public began to accept some degree of risk, fewer toxic-waste cleanup projects could proceed or ever larger sums o f money would be si phoned frora the Government's budget for all environ mental programs." No sooner had the Governor given the go-ahead than a coalition o f five organizations--including the Washingten-based Government Accountability Project-sued in court to stop the experiment. Judge Stephen M. Reasoner ruled October 29 that the experimental bum could go ahead for three days, during which the state must test the incinerator's ability to destroy dioxin with 99.9999% efficiency. If anything less than 99.9999% is achieved, "the Court orders that the burning be stopped immedi ately," said Judge Stephen M. Reasoner. The experimental bum occurred over the weekend, bid by that time Governor Clinton's attention had been swept up by other matters, namely a nation to which he has solemnly promised that things w ill now be different.12 [1] Marco Kaltofen and Sanford J. Lewis, A W hite Paper on the F easibility o fA lternatives to Incineration ; o f W astes a t the Vertac Site in Jacksonville, Arkansas (Boston: National Toxics Campaign Fund, October 27, 1990). [2] U.S. Congress, Office o f Technology Assessment, D ioxin Treatm ent Technologies--Background Paper [OTA-BP-O-93] (Washington, D .C : U.S. Government Priming Office, November, 1991). Racket's Hazardous WaOe News (ISSN 1065-4623) is Environmental Research Foundation published weekly by P.O. 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