My search uncovered a standard array of petroleum spills from leaky underground storage tanks throughout the town, including a somewhat significant one at a gas station adjacent to my daughter’s school. Luckily, the flow of ground water appears to move away from the school’s building footprint; although the contamination appears to have migrated offsite through the utility corridor, and was bad enough at one point to have warranted concerns about vapor intrusion at neighboring properties. The state is still working on that.

I also learned about soil and ground water contamination beneath the former Standard Register facility, now occupied by Connor Homes, and how the Subway on Court Street used to be a dry cleaner. Yes, indeed a dry cleaner that had an historic release of chlorinated solvents. When the problem was discovered some 20 years ago, plumes of tetrachloroethylene (PCE) and its carcinogenic degradation products had already migrated offsite, spreading beneath the neighboring residential properties and heading toward the daycare center located immediately behind.

I remember feeling a jolt as I read through the site records, as one of the owners of the offending dry cleaner bore the same last name as mine, and perhaps even more jarring because I have friends whose young children are currently enrolled at that daycare.  But I also recall feeling grateful —as I often did when I worked in the regulatory field— for the foundation of regulations that enable problems such as these to be addressed. The investigation report I read indicated that contaminated soils had been removed, that indoor air monitoring had been conducted for the daycare and neighboring homes years ago, that exposure pathways for sensitive receptors had been evaluated — in short, that the problem hadn’t been ignored.

If you are a parent of school-aged children like I am, you have no doubt encountered the locked doors and sign-in sheets at the front office of your child’s school. You may have submitted to the required background check before serving as a classroom volunteer, and have most likely provided documentation for your child’s receipt of the required vaccinations to attend their public school. These are just a few of the many protective layers that have been put into place to guard the health and safety of our kids, and many of them —like the heightened security and locked entrances, for instance— probably a reactionary procedure born from some tragic, preventable event.

It’s easy to forget the origins of such protective measures, especially when the threat is no longer visible. Easy for parents to forgo vaccinations for their children without the shadow of an iron lung looming overhead, because the regulations that were put into place have successfully kept our exposures at bay. But the threat is still present, and cracks in the armor of those protective measures invite the risk to come back in, as reminded by the few cases of whooping cough that cropped up at our school this year.

Having worked in the public sector, I am fully aware of the inefficiencies that plague the regulatory sphere. Improvements can always be made, I agree, but regulations are often there for a reason, their very purpose a storied affair. What would have happened, I wonder, if there were no rules? If the dry cleaner hadn’t been required to investigate and remediate its mess, if nobody even knew? What would the kids of the Mary Johnson Child Center be breathing into their lungs while they napped on mats along the floor?

I guess that’s why I’m so disgusted by the efforts of Trump and his supporters to usher in Cabinet members who seem so committed to the unraveling of protective regulations — everything from economic and education policies to environmental protection. It’s as if they’ve conveniently forgotten the critical events that have shaped the policies of the agencies for which they’ve been tapped to represent. And though it’s been nearly 30 years since Love Canal and the resulting Superfund legislation, it’s been less than a year since the lead-contamination tragedy in Flint, Michigan, and only 5 months since the PFOA crisis for the citizens of Hoosick Falls, NY.

If providing safe drinking water to our children isn’t a fundamental American value, then I don’t know what is.

Or maybe that’s just it. Maybe this incoming administration is just a timeline marker for the seismic shift of American values from a commitment to the preservation of health and human rights to something a little more… green.

Look, American industries have been complaining about regulation since the first regulations were ever passed. Cut the red tape, they say now, so we can be competitive with China.

Like this?

Or this?

That used to be us. I thought we already decided that wasn’t acceptable for our future generations. And remember child labor?

 Even that had to be regulated away.

But now I’m beginning to wonder if it ever really went away. Because the truth is, the burden we’re currently placing on the backs of our future generations might be the most brazen form of child labor that there is.

Photo credits:

Flint boy: npr.org

China air pollution: journal-neo.org

China water pollution: demilked.com

Addie Card, anemic little spinner in North Pownal Cotton Mill: Lewis Hine

There is no Planet B: Inhabit.com

The post If There Were No Rules appeared first on Mary Heather Noble.

In most of those cases, when I had inherited the files and reviewed the history of the site, I reserved a sliver of compassion, an acknowledgement that for many of these sites, the atrocities I was seeing were a result of the history — of regular people mishandling materials for which the long-term environmental consequences were not yet known. They were unintended outcomes, began as honest industrial mistakes, where the long-term damage may have been mostly unforeseen.

“There was a different standard of care back then,” I remember telling some of the people whose drinking water wells I sampled. They’d pause and think, and eventually convey their understanding by sharing some anecdote about how when they were kids, they used to get x-rays of their feet at the department store, to make sure their back-to-school shoes really fit. Or how they’d played with mercury from a broken thermometer in science class, rolling the liquid ball around in their palms. We’d shake our heads and sigh about all the things we used to do that are no longer considered safe, at all the things we didn’t know.

In environmental law, there has always been an element of forgiveness for these matters, an acknowledgment of the things previously legal and unknown. Compliance with new rules to address newly discovered hazards borne from old industrial practices is usually dosed over time, the regulated community enjoying the benefit of things “grandfathered,” of phased regulation, of clemency for past mistakes. But rule-making is still a slow, contentious process, and there is always a lot of fighting along the way.

Last week, finally, the EPA issued drinking water health advisories for PFOA and PFOS at 70 parts per trillion (ppt) — this number based upon peer-reviewed scientific studies of the compounds’ toxicologic properties. The decision was no doubt triggered by the discovery of PFOA in several public drinking water systems, perhaps most notably in the communities of Hoosick Falls, NY, Merrimack, NH, and North Bennington, VT.

Indeed, this is movement in a positive direction, but what’s upsetting to me is the timing of it all. Over 10 years ago, EPA settled its PFOA case against DuPont, assessing a record $10.25 million in penalties for violations of the Toxic Substances Control Act and Resource Conservation and Recovery Act. According to the EPA’s press release, “The violations resolved in this settlement consist of multiple failures to report information to EPA about substantial risk of injury to human health or the environment that DuPont obtained about PFOA from as early as 1981 and as recently as 2004.” In other words, they knew. They knew a lot for a long time, but pretended not to know.

And now we’re halfway through 2016. DuPont knew about the health hazards of exposure to PFOA since at least 1981, perhaps even earlier, and more than a decade has passed since the EPA’s administrative response to that crime.  Meanwhile, companies like Saint-Gobain continued to manufacture Teflon products with PFOA, and the people of Hoosick Falls, of Merrimack, of North Bennington filled their baby bottles and bathtubs, water pitchers and coffee mugs with PFOA-tainted water. And nobody knew a thing.

Except that’s not exactly true, because the EPA knew something, and they should have known enough to look. Or at least required others to look.

Here’s the thing we all remember about environmental atrocities, about places like Love Canal: It wasn’t just that the drums were buried and covered up, and that the houses and school were built on top — the thing we remember most, the most damning detail of all was that the land was sold by Hooker Chemical to the Niagara Falls School Board for $1, with a liability limitation clause.

The crime was in the knowing. The crime was in the knowing and doing nothing. The crime was in the suppressing of the knowing as an excuse for doing nothing.

Photo credit: Times Union

The post On Knowing and Not Knowing appeared first on Mary Heather Noble.