But no one’s had it as bad as the 1,200 residents of the West Calumet Housing Project in East Chicago, Indiana — whose homes are actually located within the boundaries of the USS Lead Superfund site — and who have been told to relocate their households on short notice, due to critically unsafe levels of lead in neighborhood soil.

It’s been reported that two-thirds of those residents are children. Many of them are now lead-poisoned children. Nearly all of them have brown skin. I scroll through article after article, photos of black kids sitting on front steps, next to big EPA yard signs warning, “DO NOT play in the dirt or around the mulch.” With an illustration of a brightly-colored ball on fresh green grass, just to make the message clear.

What is it, exactly, that I want to say about all this?

My first impulse, just an echo of what has already been said: This never should have happened. Of course it shouldn’t have happened. We (they) should have known better.

Except that the West Calumet neighborhood was developed in the 1960s and 1970s, when the EPA was in its infancy, and before Superfund even existed. And I can tell you from personal experience in environmental remediation that stupidity was a pervasive problem in historic land use decisions. (Who builds a residential neighborhood on a former lead smelting site? The same type of planners who build a school and residential neighborhood over a filled, toxic canal that has been purchased for a dollar.)

But there’s more to this case than just the 20-20 hindsight of spackling over industrial blight. What I’m trying to say, is that when I read about 29 children with blood lead concentrations significantly over the CDC’s level of concern, all because they are living and playing in yards with lead levels containing as much as 227 times the lead limit allowed by the EPA, and then I think about how long this hazard has resided in the soils of this community, and how long that soil has been kicked up into dust by Goodwill-purchased sneakers, and tracked into hallways and wiped onto hand-me-down shirts tossed onto the backs of kitchen chairs before those children rifle through the pantry for something good to eat — when I think about what has happened here, and how long it’s really been happening, it triggers the same visceral anger I felt when I first started learning about PFOA.

Here’s why: Because both public health catastrophes reveal the same dysfunctional premise upon which our environmental health practices seem to rely (especially in low-income areas). Which is to say: Action need not be taken until harm has already been caused.

The EPA is quick to mention that action has, in fact, been taken. And yes, approximately 90 of 1,200 properties in the neighborhood were sampled during a three-year investigation started in 2003. Roughly half of the sampled properties contained lead-contaminated soil above the EPA’s standards, and 15 of those were contaminated enough to require time-critical removal action by the agency in 2008. These data were used to justify the neighborhood’s designation as a Superfund site in 2009, and an additional time-critical removal action was taken in 2011 for 16 additional properties. So yes, action was taken for some properties… sporadically, over a long period of time. My oldest daughter was born in 2003. A lot of childhood development happens during a 12-year period.

So one wonders what action was taken for those whose properties weren’t tested, or whose soil was tested but didn’t meet the threshold for emergency removal. A flimsy pamphlet on how to reduce your lead exposure? A recommendation that you wash your children’s hands and toys when they come inside from play? And one wonders how much action was taken to educate new residents of the neighborhood and housing project over that 10+ year period. A public notice for a public meeting?

Widespread testing to determine which soils needed removal was not initiated until 2014. In response to the shock and outrage recently expressed by residents of the West Calumet Housing Project over the sudden urgency of lead contamination in their neighborhood, Robert Kaplan, acting administrator for the EPA’s Great Lakes Region, told The New York Times that EPA “had in fact warned West Calumet residents for at least a decade to avoid the soil with public notices and community meetings.” Clearly a statement in the agency’s defense, but one which also implies that not only should residents have known about the lead, but that their ignorance about the matter may have played a role in their family’s health effects.

I can think of no greater insult beyond the trespassing of an industrial contaminant across the boundaries of my own cells and those of my children, than the suggestion that its preventable harm was solely my responsibility.

Kaplan’s remarks stink of a patriarchal you-should-have-known-better mentality, a scorn typically reserved for a scantily-clad sexual assault victim found in her pitiful shredded clothes.  What did you expect, living in the projects? You knew that there was lead.

Let us be clear. They were warned for at least a decade to avoid the soil. Not “We regret that it has taken this long to take full action on this issue.” Or simply, “We’re sorry, we didn’t know it was this bad. We are working on fixing the problem.” The sad irony of Kaplan’s subtle judgment is this: Even if West Calumet residents had been scientifically knowledgable enough to deduce the hazards in which they lived, or civically savvy enough to be fully engaged in the Superfund public process, what could they have done? Where would they have gone? The state and federal government certainly wouldn’t have footed any bills on the possibility that they might be harmed. They would have certainly wanted some proof.

Proof which requires routine blood lead testing and consistent funding of such programs — an issue in Indiana, I suspect, considering its less-than-stellar commitment to public health funding. It’s quite the lesson in environmental injustice, on the interconnectedness of environmental degradation, public health, race, politics, and urban American culture. An ugly, despicable lesson, but one that must be dragged into the light.

Photo credit: nbcnews.com

Works consulted: Final Feasibility Study Report, U.S. Smelter and Lead Refinery (USS Lead) Superfund Site

The post Bloodletting/Blood-lead-ing appeared first on Mary Heather Noble.

The air smells green here in this valley, like the mountains on either side. Green, like the algae-coated edges of a river walk, the smell of freshly cut clover. Like the heavy limbs reaching over railroad tracks, like the chain-linked fence choked with vine.

At the entrance, by the retention pond, two boys who look to be about my oldest daughter’s age are circling each other on their bikes. What is it with kids and abandoned sites? My presence seems to have thrown them — my Subaru, the camera around my neck— perhaps making them pause, wonder if maybe they shouldn’t be here after all. I’m wondering the same thing myself, my American ethic regarding private property so ingrained that it almost eclipses my right-to-know.

One of the boys raises his hand in a reluctant wave, testing me. I wave back, which somehow gives them permission to proceed. They ride by quickly, trespassing out of curiosity, perhaps, or just to get to the other side. I like to think that my reasons are a bit more principled than that.

Muscle memory leads me to the usual suspects: the loading dock, and what I assume to be part of the main production floor. It’s only after I’ve peeked in windows that I notice the sign warning me that video surveillance is in use — a witness to my witnessing.

The site investigation has already begun: I find a monitoring well, and the asphalt is freshly crumbled from Geoprobe borings recently completed around the building. I’m careful not to go too far, not to snoop too much, but I have a pretty good hunch about what they’ll find. The contaminated supply well, which serves roughly 450 people in Pownal’s Fire District #2, is close by. Too close, I think — only 1,000 feet away.

One thousand feet. What is this distance, really? Not quite the length of three football fields. A solid golf drive by a pro. One thousand feet is roughly the length of a soapbox derby race, something else whose outcome appears to depend upon gravity and luck.

If you Google “1,000 feet” you’ll find links to the 1,000-foot rule, the geography of punishment for registered sex offenders. In many communities, one thousand feet is the minimum distance a molester must live from a school, park, or day care center — a policy the merits of which I certainly don’t intend to debate here. But one wonders… is distance is the only factor? Is distance is the only thing to fix?

Here in Pownal, one thousand feet is the distance between a Teflon site and a contaminated well. One thousand feet is all it took for 450 people to be exposed. A lot can happen in time and space.

Map of Pownal Fire District #2. Supply well is located in northwest quadrant, roughly 1,000 feet from the former Warren Wire Manufacturing facility located on the corner of Lincoln Street and Route 346. The facility’s retention pond is indicated on the map. Source: WCAX.com

The post Trespassing: Witnessing appeared first on Mary Heather Noble.

The day is bright, cold spring. Wind gusts around the corners, flapping and twisting municipal door hangers into indecision. Back and forth, back and forth, back and forth they dance. I lean in for a closer look:

Village of Hoosick Falls Water Users 

WATER UPDATE

Information about Temporary Filtration and Flushing: 2/25/16

It’s late March now, months after the news about contamination of the village’s water system with perfuorooctanoic acid (PFOA) went public. The likely culprit, Saint-Gobain Performance Plastics, a manufacturing facility that uses Teflon to make coated plastic film, tape, and insulated wiring — one of the few remaining companies that still employ people in this town.

This town, like so many other former mill towns in northern New England and upstate New York— a place of 19th and early 20th century prosperity, now faded into a shadow of its former self. You’ve been to a town like this, perhaps even lived in a town like this. Grass-filled, uneven sidewalks between old Victorian homes. The lovingly maintained, brick bungalow library sits around the corner from a house with a crumbling porch. Faded plastic toys accumulated in the yard. Buds emerge on the trees after a long and difficult winter. The sign in front of St. Mark’s Episcopal Church reads, Please pray for our town to get through this water crisis.

The Saint-Gobain facility peeks through the trees from the Little League fields on Waterworks Road, where parents, probably grateful for the work, may gather after their shifts to cheer on the batter poised over home plate. The fields are empty now, except for a father pitching balls to his son. He lifts his head and watches me pass by. I wonder if he’s the kind of dad who would lean against the chain-linked fence and brag about his tough Teflon kid.

This morning, before I left home, my children wanted to know where I was headed. “Hoosick Falls?” my daughter said, “Who’s sick? That’s funny.”  It is, until it isn’t.

Just like all the other towns that have lived through a water crisis, it was the amount of cancer that made people wonder. Michael Hickey, the Hoosick Falls resident whose inquiry set current events into motion, lost both his father and grandmother to kidney cancer. He worries about his son. The water in both of their homes contained concentrations of PFOA well above the initial 0.4 ppb threshold limit set forth by the EPA, and since that testing, the EPA has revised its recommended limit to 0.1 ppb. Meanwhile, public health officials in Vermont, in response to a similar water crisis in nearby North Bennington, have used the same toxicologic studies to justify a 0.02 ppb PFOA standard.

The sluggish, inconsistent response must sting, like a reported case of domestic abuse that won’t be believed. And this is a matter of violence — just ask any cancer survivor about what the body must endure. I can’t help but think: if this crisis had been an act of terror, if someone had knowingly added PFOA to a public water supply, it would have been considered an act of war.

Later, when I am standing in the foyer of the Hoosick Township Historical Society building, studying photos of the community’s fallen soldiers from the Second World War, I will remember that Teflon’s inaugural application was for the Manhattan Project, the atomic bomb. I will remember that Teflon’s commercial utility was born from the science of intentional destruction, much like modern-day pesticides born from military nerve agents, and I will marvel at how intertwined the fingers of commerce and war have always been. I will mourn the dull, persistent echo of their intergenerational casualties.

But now, I wait outside the Armory on Church Street, where officials from the New York Departments of Health and Environmental Conservation stand behind tables with flyers containing information about how little we really know about the health effects of PFOA. A young woman walks by on the sidewalk, pushing a stroller with a little boy, maybe two or three years old. She doesn’t go inside. Is she worried about the water that is dwelling inside his cells? Is she worried about his future? Maybe they’ve already been inside to talk with the experts, given samples of their blood. Maybe she’s just looking ahead, soldiering on, accepting their new normal.

The building is beautiful inside — an old gymnasium with a mile-high ceiling and light brick walls, that appear to have been dressed up for a reception. I am impressed by the art, the optimism of this space. Brightly colored quilts line the front of the gym, and everywhere I turn are hand-painted owls with the slogan “Hoosick Rising” — a redevelopment-focused antonym to the downtrodden Hoosick Falls.

Across the room from the make-shift phlebotomy lab, where citizens may get their blood sampled for PFOA analysis, is a little wishing tree with positive messages from Hoosick Falls residents, about why they love their town. Here is where I find the soul of this place — neighbors expressing love and support for one another in the face of challenging times. You’ll never find a place with friendlier people, one postcard reads. Another card touts the value of the history of Hoosick Falls. The one that makes me pause: I ❤︎ HF because we have a great pool for kids to swim in. Love, Raegan.

When I meet the DEC officials, I tell them that years ago, I used to be an environmental regulator myself. They relax into a comradely stance. We exchange technical details on the contaminant of concern. Yes, PFOA appears to be very soluble in water.  No, they don’t yet know how quickly it’ll break through the activated carbon filters — they will be monitoring them frequently, and there’s a feasibility study being conducted to identify alternative sources of drinking water for the area. No, they don’t believe there are any break-down products, but they’ve heard that several different perfluorinated compounds (PFCs) can degrade into PFOA. They are just now learning about these chemicals, which industries use them, how they behave when they’re released. There are probably multiple sites — Teflon-related manufacturing was the industry du jour. The agency is doing the best it can with the resources that it has.

I can feel the tension against resignation to the absurdity of the situation, how difficult it will be to get their horse to catch up with this runaway cart. It’s really a failure of the Toxic Substances Control Act, we all agree. Teflon has been in commercial use since the 1940s, its toxicologic profile held in secret by DuPont from early as the 1960s, and even now, ten years past an historic $10.25 million settlement between the EPA and DuPont, concerning DuPont’s failure to report the risk of harm that PFOA presents to human health and the environment — even now, the EPA lacks sufficient data to confidently adopt appropriate exposure standards for this ubiquitous synthetic compound.

One DEC official shares with me that earlier in the week, he received a request from the Commissioner’s Office, probably for the purpose of briefing a politician in the wake of this water crisis: “They said, ‘Please identify any public water systems in New York that are at risk of becoming polluted by any regulated and/or unregulated contaminants.’” He looks at me, shaking his head. All of them.

The woman from the Department of Health informs me that about 2,500 of the town’s 3,500 residents have requested to have their blood tested for PFOA. I ask her if there is a certain threshold concentration of PFOA in blood, above which residents will be referred for more rigorous medical monitoring. “We aren’t yet sure what the long-term plan for bio-monitoring will be,” she admits. “I guess it depends on what we find.”

But she doesn’t know what they will find. No one does. They can only guess, based upon the epidemiological studies and exposure data they have gathered from previous PFOA contamination cases in Ohio, West Virginia, and New Jersey.  I leave the Armory a little shaken by the sense of bearing witness to another accidental experiment.

On my way out the door, I notice a poster for the Hoosick Has Heart community blood drive. Donate blood. Save a life. Monday, April 11, at the Hoosick Falls Community Alliance Church.  The bright cold and piercing wind send shivers down my spine. I hope they get their sample results before then.

The post A Walk in Hoosick Falls appeared first on Mary Heather Noble.

But no matter how savvy I think I am about the science, or how much people like me tend to believe that science is what’s going to save us, there is but one essential discipline whose role is really the driver of this bus.

Remember that phrase coined by political strategist James Carville in the 1990s? “It’s the economy, stupid.” Well, I can’t seem to get that phrase out of my head… again. And while Carville’s point back then may have been to emphasize the importance of the struggling economy in the 1992 presidential election, my point in resurrecting the phrase is this: It doesn’t matter how the science explains the cause-and-effect relationships involved in an environmental health crisis. What really matters is the why it happened — which, unsurprisingly, is almost always a matter of economics.

Take Flint, MI, for instance. Sure, I understand the science behind what’s happened:  Water drawn from the Flint River and delivered to Flint’s municipal water customers from spring of 2014 on was more corrosive than the City of Detroit water they had been using prior to then, so the new water literally ate through their aging infrastructure, causing lead and other particulates to pour from their taps. Chemistry 101, right?

But the science doesn’t explain how Flint River water got into the pipes in the first place, nor does it explain why months passed without any corrective action, despite complaints from residents about the visible contamination of their drinking water. Science also fails to provide an acceptable explanation for why Flint pediatrician Mona Hanna-Attisha was belittled and attacked when she released her findings that the percentage of Flint children with abnormally high blood lead levels had doubled since the City switched its water supply. Or why it wasn’t until late December and early January that authorities declared the continued lead poisoning of Flint’s children as the emergency that it was.

More than a year of daily, chronic exposure to lead-contaminated water has occurred in hundreds of Flint households — in a predominately African American community where over 40% of the population lives below the poverty level. Science? No, I think another discipline might be at play. You can almost see the words in the thought bubbles hanging above the City and State officials’ heads: It’s just for a few more months. Really, what difference does it make?

There’s an important term that is often tossed around in civil discourse about economics: “moral hazard.”  Moral hazard refers to the elevated risks one party might take in an economic transaction because another party will bear the negative consequences of those risks. We heard a lot about moral hazard around the Wall Street bank bailouts in 2008, and we often hear conservative grumbling about the moral hazards of the Affordable Care Act —or any social service program, for that matter— and how it isn’t fair for the taxpayers to pay for someone else’s (potentially irresponsible) personal choices.

But the concept of moral hazard is seldom discussed around matters of environmental or personal harm, when the asymmetry of risk involves something other than cold hard cash. Which seems misguided, since the underlying presence of unfairness is the same. Think about it: What if the moral hazard threatens one party’s ability to breathe? The ability to drink clean water? The ability to go to school or play in a city park without getting shot? Where are the conservatives then?

I don’t present this idea as a theoretical argument, because unabated moral hazards are yielding environmental and human health tragedies as we speak. Consider for a moment the economic equation controlling gun regulation in this country.

Consider the matter of DuPont in Parkersburg, WV, where, for decades, the company dumped thousands of tons of perfluorooctanioc acid waste (PFOA, formerly known as C8, the main ingredient in Teflon) into the Ohio River, unlined ponds and beyond, causing widespread contamination of surface and drinking water resources in Parkersburg and surrounding communities. DuPont not only exposed thousands of people to a toxic chemical, they actively concealed the known health effects of PFOA (identified in their own internal toxicology studies) for decades, so they could continue to bring in over $1 billion per year in profit from their highly successful Teflon products (read the recent New York Times article about the case here, a Huffington Post article about it here, and a slightly older one from The Intercept here).

DuPont had even developed a different chemical to replace PFOA in the early 1990s—one that was reportedly less persistent in the environment and stayed in the body for a shorter duration of time— but the company ultimately decided against replacement because the economic risk was too great.  Of course, when the exposure imposed upon workers of DuPont and the 70,000 people served by PFOA-tainted drinking water systems is factored into the equation, along with the link between PFOA and birth defects, kidney cancer, testicular cancer, thyroid disease, and other serious ailments, one wonders where the asymmetry of risk really falls.

—Which brings me back to my point: This is an economic equation, a deeply unbalanced one that is designed to limit the loss of profits, the loss of dollars and cents. Until we start attaching appropriate value to the lives at stake in these institutional transactions, I’m afraid the science is never going to be able to catch up to our inevitable loss.

Photo credits:

npr.org

dispatch.com, Chris Russell, Dispatch file photo

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2014 Siskiyou Prize Winner: Mary Heather Noble

Ashland Creek Press is pleased to announce that New York Times bestselling author Karen Joy Fowler has chosen Mary Heather Noble’s memoir, PLUMES: ON CONTAMINATION OF HOME AND HABITAT, as the winner of the 2014 Siskiyou Prize.

Of PLUMES, judge Karen Joy Fowler writes, “I was impressed from the first page with both the beautiful writing and careful intelligence of PLUMES.  This book takes on one of our most troubling issues, the increasing toxicity of our polluted world, to creative a narrative that is both personal and universal.  PLUMES neither minimizes the complexities of these issues nor overstates its conclusions, but leaves the reader with much to think about.  An exceptional book.”

Noble is joined by prize finalists Amy Hassinger for her novel, AFTER THE DAM, and Julie Christine Johnson for her novel, THE CROWS OF BEARA.

The Siskiyou Prize for New Environmental Literature honors literary works that focus on the environment, animal protection, ecology, and wildlife. The prize is named for the Klamath-Siskiyou region of northern California and southern Oregon, one of the most diverse eco-regions in the world.  The Klamath-Siskiyou has the highest concentration of Wild and Scenic Rivers in the nation, the largest area of roadless wild lands in the Pacific Northwest, and the tallest old-growth trees on earth.  Due to this large network of still-intact lands, the region is a refuge for fish and other wildlife that struggle for survival in other parts of the world.  Considered a global center of biodiversity, the Klamath-Siskiyou region is an inspiring example of the importance of preservation.

The Siskiyou Prize is open to unpublished, full-length prose manuscripts, including novels, memoirs, short story collections, and essay collections.  Winners receive a cash award of $1,000, an offer of publication from Ashland Creek Press, and a four-week residency at PLAYA.  The 2015 Siskiyou Prize will open in Spring 2015.  Please visit siskiyouprize.com for the full announcement and complete submission guidelines for next year’s contest.

The post The 2014 Siskiyou Prize for New Environmental Literature Awarded appeared first on Mary Heather Noble.

I recently finished reading Kristen Iversen’s book, Full Body Burden, and —even as a person familiar with the toxic secrets of government and industry— found the details of the Rocky Flats environmental legacy to be shocking.  Shocking, perhaps, because Iversen’s details are delivered so personally: her seemingly perfect hometown with room for children and horses to run and explore tainted by the invisible emissions of a secret nuclear weapons plant, rumors of covered-up contamination, and the cancer clusters to fuel them.  Woven into Iversen’s account of Rocky Flats is her own parallel tale of family erosion from her father’s alcoholism, shrouded in the stoicism of the family’s Norwegian heritage.  The dual narratives are powerful, delivering with unrelenting honesty the anxiety of knowing something deeply unsettling about your home, yet lacking the will or means to leave.

I do not personally know Kristen Iversen, but years ago, I worked with her sister, Karma, at the New Mexico Environment Department.  Our department was responsible for issuing wastewater discharge permits for all types of facilities: municipal wastewater treatment plants, dairies and food processing facilities, mining operations and other industrial facilities, including, among others, Los Alamos National Labs (LANL).

Neither Karma nor I oversaw any permits for LANL — she was a soil scientist who specialized in agricultural wastewater permits, and I was fresh out of graduate school, just getting my feet wet with permitting municipal and small-scale industrial wastewater discharges.  But I can recall the frustration of our more-senior colleagues who did manage permits for the Federal facilities, the secrecy shrouding activities at LANL and Sandia National Labs.  And I can remember talking with Karma about the rumors that floated around those sites: elevated rates of thyroid cancers, stories about dogs developing cancerous growths on their paws from their frolics in the adjacent canyons.

As a new State government employee, I was careful not to be blindly swayed by the hysteria of misguided risk perception.  There were always people with “too much time on their hands,” quick to bundle anecdotal tidbits with partial information to formulate wildly speculative conclusions about the dangers of site X or the devious intentions of company Y.  But after a few years of seasoning and a broadened portfolio of sites, I began to understand the paranoia.  I can recall thinking of more than a few of my sites that I could never live near there.  I could never live with the anxiety.  You know what they say about the restaurant business — once you know what goes on in the kitchen, you’ll be reluctant to eat out again.

My foray into the history of Rocky Flats via Iversen’s Full Body Burden prompted me to revisit Ellen Meloy’s The Last Cheater’s Waltz and her anxiety of place.In The Last Cheater’s Waltz, Meloy is wrought with the guilt and paranoia of inhabiting and loving a place as beautiful as the redrock canyon country of southeastern Utah, and knowing its role in the widespread violence of nuclear weapons development and testing in the American Southwest.  Like a betrayed lover, Meloy traces the path of uranium mined from her Moab-area home to the weapons development facility in Los Alamos and the Trinity nuclear weapons test site in New Mexico, seeking some kind of — what?  Understanding? Redemption for choosing to live there despite its tainted past?

Meloy’s journey is an attempted exorcism of the anxiety of place — a theme most intriguing to those of us with academic inclinations, but imagine what that must feel like in the first person.  Imagine what it feels like to live in a place, or be from somewhere where you have a high probability of developing some condition, some malaise, just because you call that place home.  Love Canal.  Rocky Flats.  Fukashima.  Or imagine what it must be like to love a landscape with a hidden history as as cursed with death as  Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  These are no ordinary betrayals.  To most of us, these are abstract places, places to consider in the large-scale debate about environmental degradation.  But to some of us, these places are home.

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