Environmental contamination

JUST THE LATEST REASON FOR AMERICANS TO BE ANGRY AT THE POLITICAL ESTABLISHMENT: Members of Congress Immediately Protect Themselves Against Possible Lead Exposure, While “Regular” Americans are Routinely Denied Environmental Protection

July 9, 2016 | Shawn Collins

Day after day these days, we see expressions of clueless bewilderment from government officials: “Why are the people so mad at us?” “Why do they hate us?” “Why are they so anxious to throw us out of office?”

There are, of course, a thousand reasons, but none more revealing of what’s broken about our government than this: While every branch of our government-Executive, Congressional, Judicial-has been working overtime to deny basic environmental protections to American citizens, when these same officials are threatened by contamination in their environment, protection for them arrives swiftly and surely.

Cases in point:

Portland Parks Director Needs to ‘Get’ that Lead Contaminated Drinking Water is Dangerous…or Quit His Job

July 7, 2016 | Shawn Collins

PORTLAND PARKS DIRECTOR NEEDS TO ‘GET’ THAT LEAD-CONTAMINATED DRINKING WATER IS DANGEROUS…..OR QUIT HIS JOB

A recent review of the Portland Parks and Recreation’s (PPR) handling of high levels of lead contamination in the drinking fountains at the Multnomah Arts Center concluded that the agency failed for years in its duty to protect citizens, especially kids, from the contamination. In a nutshell, the review found that PPR was aware since at least 2013 that lead levels in the water at several of the drinking fountains were unacceptably high, according to EPA standards, but ignored those results. The review also found other evidence of PPR’s shocking disregard of the health threats posed by the lead-contaminated water, including:

· PPR staff’s ignoring of a directive to replace lead plumbing;

LIFE-SAVING REGULATION OF TOXIC POWER PLANT EMISSIONS DECLARED INVALID BY US SUPREME COURT

July 8, 2015 | The Collins Law Firm, P.C.

Co-Authored by Norman B. Berger

If a new environmental regulation requiring power plants to reduce toxic emissions would prevent 11,000 premature deaths every year; prevent many thousands more illnesses every year; and produce benefits that outweigh the costs by as much as $80 billion every year, would you say that’s enough reason to have the regulation?

Of course you would. But a majority of the US Supreme Court recently said that all of that wasn’t enough. Or, more precisely, that it didn’t matter. And so it declared invalid the life-saving regulation. The Court’s decision is just the latest sad example of how this country’s institutions will protect the “right” of powerful business interests to pollute our air and water, even though their pollution is badly injuring–and even shortening the lives of–American citizens. (And this is to say nothing about the power plants’ role in greenhouse gas emissions which are choking our planet and threatening to permanently displace millions this century).

Environmental Justice is a Civil Right

June 5, 2015 | The Collins Law Firm, P.C.

Co-authored by Gregory Zimmer of The Collins Law Firm, P.C. Shouldn’t it be that living in a pollution-free community is a basic right of American citizenship? Shouldn’t it be that having clean air to breathe and safe water to drink does not depend on whether you are wealthy, or well-educated? It should be, of course, but it’s not. Here is something I’ve learned in 15 years as an environmental lawyer: Rich people don’t have environmental problems; or, if they do, the problems get powerful attention, very quickly. For rich people–with big salaries and houses; graduate degrees; money enough to fund political campaigns; and kids going to private schools–lawyers, elected officials, and government regulators almost reflexively align to come to their aid. But what happens to everyone else? In many of the cases that I and my partners have handled, and in nearly every contaminated community that we have visited, the victims of the contamination are the poor and middle class. Often they are racial minorities. Many bought modest homes near an industrial plant, years ago, believing the proximity was an advantage. Jobs were available. They could walk to work. Maybe even go home for lunch. The plant would sponsor their sons’ and daughters’ little league’s teams. A factory humming with activity and fat with profit would shoulder a big chunk of the community’s property tax burden, keeping the burden reasonable for the family-homeowners. But, these seeming advantages came at a secret price: the company’s reckless dumping of toxic chemicals out the back door, or belching of chemicals out of a smokestack, put directly in harm’s way the very folks who had made the company work, and, indeed, made the community work. The chemicals wound up in the community’s groundwater–its drinking water supply–and in the air that the families were breathing in their yards and sometimes even inside their homes. Years after the reckless chemical disposal occurred, and the company closed its doors, maybe even going bankrupt, the families were trapped in their contaminated and badly-depreciated homes, left to fend for themselves. The Midwest–once the home to busy factories that made things for the entire world–is now pock-marked with communities wracked by decades-old contamination. But sometimes, it works the other way. Sometimes, rather than the families buying homes near (what turned out to be) a polluting factory, the toxic hazards actually followed the families. In and around Los Angeles, for example, studies show that toxic hazards followed minorities, rather than the other way around.¹ The politics of this is as obvious as it is harsh: it’s easier to get a permit to locate an environmentally-dangerous facility near poor minorities than it is to locate it among the upper class. What would be an intolerable threat in a community of the fortunate is, in a neighborhood of the disadvantaged, routine, and something the residents will just have to learn to put up with. They have no power to stop the intrusion into their peace and safety, and the violence to their health. Sometimes, they don’t even mount a protest. They have learned that it will do them no good. Racial minorities truly bear the brunt of this. Disproportionately, they live in aged, dilapidated buildings, or near industrial sites and roadways. They can’t afford to live anywhere safer. So, they are exposed to pollutants like soot, smog, and lead. The US EPA says that African Americans are 79% more likely than white Americans to live in areas where air pollution threatens their health.² One particularly grim statistic: lead poisoning rates among Hispanic and African American children are roughly double those for white American children. Double. And there are 7 states where Asians Americans are more than twice as likely as whites to live in the most polluted areas.² We should be ashamed of statistics like this, stories like this. Clean air and safe water should not be the exclusive privileges of the wealthy, or non-minorities. What can we do to move forcefully in the direction of environmental justice for all? Here are some ideas:

We must put the right to be free from pollution on the same legal footing as the right to be free from discrimination in, for example, schools, jobs, and housing. In other words, just as a landlord cannot refuse to rent to, or a school cannot refuse to admit, or an employer cannot refuse to hire, a minority because she is a minority, neither can a community allow its polluting factories to be sited exclusively, or even mainly, in neighborhoods of poor and minority citizens. And neither can we continue to tolerate unhealthy air and water simply because it affects a community of citizens who–because they are poor or under-educated–do not know how to make their voices heard in order to demand their rightful share of government resources to protect themselves and their children.

If the government is aware of an environmental problem that potentially threatens health, it must notify all affected citizens. This sounds so obvious, and it seems that a law forcing the government to do this should be unnecessary. Does the government really have to be told that it must warn people who the government believes to be in danger? Sadly, yes, it does. In our experience, many of the environmental problems that threaten communities were known to their government years, even decades before anyone alerted those most likely to suffer.

Contamination in America’s Drinking Water, and The Harm It Causes

June 2, 2015 | The Collins Law Firm, P.C.

Co-authored by Gregory Zimmer of The Collins Law Firm, P.C. What are the most common harmful chemicals in the water that many Americans drink every day? What harm can these chemicals cause to people? The EPA regulates the nation’s drinking water supply through National Primary Drinking Water Regulations (NPDWRs or primary standards), which are legally enforceable standards that apply to public water systems. These standards protect public health by limiting the levels of contaminants in drinking water.¹ However, drinking water sources can and do regularly fail to meet those standards–also known as Maximum Contaminant Levels (MCLs). Five of the most harmful chemicals that are often found in levels that violate those standards include:

(1) total trihalomethanes (TTHMs),

(2) manganese

NO COUNTRY FOR POOR PEOPLE: Polluter-Friendly Regulations Force Children in Chicago’s Pilsen Community To Breathe Brain-Damaging Lead…For Years

August 10, 2011 | The Collins Law Firm, P.C.

Let me ask you something: If the air breathed by children attending an American elementary school was contaminated by lead levels so high that it could damage their brains, and cause them life-long learning disabilities, how long would you say their parents should have to wait until that air was cleaned-up? How long would you be willing to wait, if it was your child? A day? A week? A month? How about 6 years? That’s right, 6 years. As the compelling stories written by the Chicago Tribune’s Michael Hawthorne show, here’s what’s going on in the Pilsen community, a largely low-income, Latino neighborhood on Chicago’s West Side. This past April, federal, state and local government learned that the levels of lead measured at the local Perez Elementary School–attended daily by 500 children–was at or above federal limits during three month periods in 2010…….that lead levels exceeded federal health standards on fully 20% of the days measured…..and that, on one day, these levels measured more than TEN TIMES the federal limit [see these Chicago Tribune articles by Michael Hawthorne dated June 15, 2011 and April 1, 2011]. And our government says that it knows where most of this lead is coming from–the smelter operated by a company known as “H.K. Kramer & Co.”, less than 2 blocks away, whose annual sales are reported to be more than $10,000,000 [according to Cortera]. How bad is this level of lead for those elementary school kids? Really bad. For starters, there is no “safe” level of lead for kids to breathe. Studies show that even tiny amounts of lead entering the body can damage the brains of young children, and trigger learning disabilities, aggression, and criminal behavior later in life. So, given the staggering dangers posed to these kids by the lead in the air they are breathing at a school that they have no choice but to attend, you would think that our laws would be set up to protect them and force a rapid clean-up. But they are not. In fact, they are set up to let polluters like H.K Kramer take their sweet time. Under those polluter-friendly laws, Illinois environmental officials will have two years before they have to decide how much H.K. Kramer should reduce (not even fully clean up, mind you) this lead pollution. These same officials will then have until 2017 – – 6 years from now – – to make sure that H.K. Kramer has reduced lead levels like it will have been told to do. And if we get to 2017, and H.K. Kramer hasn’t done what it has been told to do? Then, the school children of Pilsen will just have to trust that the state officials who sauntered through the previous 6 years will suddenly treat their plight with urgency. One might tell the Pilsen children to not hold their breath on this….but then, they are probably holding their breath right now….because they have to. There’s so much lead in the air. Recent news stories chronicle how so much of our country’s wealth and economic power has become concentrated in the hands of a very few people and corporations. The Pilsen story painfully demonstrates how that enormous power disparity plays out in the writing of our environmental laws. The children of Pilsen did not have anyone speaking for them when the laws were written about how much time government officials and polluters would have to clean up pollution. Government and the polluters acted essentially as one in crafting laws that ensured that neither of them would have to move very fast, or spend very much money, on cleaning up the air in places like Pilsen. And evidently neither of them noticed how cruel it would be to take 6 years to clean up pollution that can ruin a child’s life in 6 hours.

Polluters Underestimating Their Pollution: Liars… or Just Idiots?

June 10, 2011 | The Collins Law Firm, P.C.

Maddening, but not surprising. Business as usual, really. Earlier this week, Japan’s nuclear power industry announced that the amount of radioactivity that spewed out of the damaged Fukushima nuclear reactor was more than twice the original estimate of just 3 months ago. More than twice. The same report also said that the Japanese people should have been told (but were not) that radioactive contamination caused by Fukushima in even faraway neighborhoods was 1,000 times “normal”, far higher than those levels believed to cause long-term health problems. The reason the people were not told is that Japan’s nuclear power industry didn’t trust the radioactivity estimates being generated by their own radioactivity monitoring systems. This episode really takes you inside the mind of the polluter when it comes to protecting the people’s health. Do you see what happened here? The Fukushima polluters trusted the low “estimates” of the contamination, and so told the public about them, but didn’t trust the high “estimates”, and so kept them a secret. What I’ve learned from suing polluters over the last eleven years is that they ALWAYS underestimate the contamination they have caused, how many people it affects, and how much risk it poses to human health. Here’s my experience: As I said a few blogs ago, in my first case, the polluter’s environmental consultant confidently assured the worried families living near the industrial plant that they were at no risk because the contaminated groundwater had not moved off of plant property……when later testing would show that it had moved ALMOST THREE MILES off of plant property. A few cases later, the people running the leaking landfill were “confident” that dangerous, explosive methane gas had not migrated off the landfill property…..and then testing revealed that the methane had in fact moved THREE-QUARTERS OF A MILE off the property, and had settled underneath hundreds of homes near the landfill. More recently, after the company which owned the polluted plant found chemical contamination in the air inside a home near the plant, it was so confident that this home’s contamination was an isolated incident that it didn’t test other area homes for another three years…..and when it finally did, it found chemical contamination IN EVERY HOME it tested. This is what you learn: polluters always underestimate pollution. Always. So, are these so-called “estimates” really just lies the polluter is telling? Or, are the polluters’ low estimates just honest mistakes made in the heat of the moment….in the rush of trying to get information “out the door”? For those of you inclined to believe that these habitually low estimates are just honest mistakes, ask yourselves this: when was the last time you heard a polluter OVER-estimate the pollution it caused? I can say that the next time I hear this will be the first. If polluters’ incorrect “estimates” are truly honest mistakes, then sometimes the estimate should be low, and sometimes it should be high, right? Isn’t that how honest mistakes work? Not too low ALL THE TIME, right? One justification for underestimates which I hear often –from both polluters and people in government who are supposed to protect the public, but often sound like polluters’ spokespeople– is that “we don’t want to alarm anyone with big, scary pollution numbers”. So, what, you lie to them? You give them phony low estimates, so they won’t worry….because they will have no reason to know that they SHOULD be worried? Especially from the government, this kind of behavior is shameful. It’s not the government’s job, or the polluter’s for that matter, to lull people into a false sense of security. It’s to tell them the truth so that they can protect themselves. So are polluters liars, who purposefully underestimate their pollution? Or are they habitual mistake makers–idiots, really–who just can’t get it right? The real answer is that it doesn’t matter. While we can debate forever whether the liar-polluter or the idiot-polluter is more dangerous to your family’s health, the truth is that they both are very dangerous, and should not be trusted to help you make decisions about how to protect your family.

Five Things to Do if Your Water or Neighborhood Is (or Might Be) Polluted

May 23, 2011 | The Collins Law Firm, P.C.

(1) Get smart. Find out the names of the polluting chemicals. You will usually learn them, as most of our clients have, from a newspaper article or TV story, or from a letter or knock on the door from a government official. You need to know the chemicals’ names so that you can learn about how they may affect your family’s health. Here’s a good website with commonsense information about the health effects of most chemicals found in polluted water, air, and soil. When you learn this information, you will then understand what you must do to minimize, or eliminate altogether, your family’s exposure to the pollution. (2) Get control. You need reliable information in order to protect yourself and your family. And you need it sooner, rather than later. So, resolve that you will take responsibility for getting answers, and not wait for the government, or the polluting company, to decide when to give them to you. The government tends to move slowly, and its resources for protecting the environment are usually stretched very thin. The polluting company may wish, in order to save money or its reputation, to downplay the extent of the pollution it has caused, or even deny that there is any problem at all. So don’t settle for getting answers, or the problem getting fixed, on their timetable. It’s your family, not theirs, that’s living with the problem. (3) Get noisy. The old adage that “The squeaky wheel gets the grease” applies big time to fixing pollution problems. So you must make some noise – to get answers, get heard, and get your problem solved sooner, rather than later. Because polluted water, air, or soil typically affect many families, not just one, neighbors can make noise by banding together to do the necessary research, make phone calls, hold informational meetings and rallies, etc. Another way to make noise is to enlist the help of local newspapers and TV in making the pollution in your neighborhood a high profile story that puts pressure on the government to fix it. (4) Get a lawyer. Fighting pollution in your neighborhood is usually scientifically and legally complicated. The company that polluted your neighborhood has had a lawyer working – often behind the scenes, and for years – to get her client “off the hook” for the problem it caused. And that lawyer has hired scientists to help accomplish this goal, usually by offering theories about why the company really didn’t do anything wrong, or about how the pollution isn’t really as widespread or dangerous as it truthfully may be. While you will never have the money that the company has to pay lawyers and scientists, hiring an experienced environmental lawyer of your own is the best way to get some power on your side, and use the legal system to help you get the answers and solution that you need. (5) Get tough. Don’t panic. When you arm yourself with reliable information, band together with your neighbors, and hire a good lawyer to do battle with the polluter, you have taken the most important steps toward protecting your family. While panic is an understandable human reaction to first learning that your family’s water, air or soil may be polluted, don’t allow those feelings to cause you to lose sight of those steps – like the ones we mention above – that you must take to protect the people who matter to you most. The opposite of panic – denial – is also an emotion to be avoided. Pretending that there is no problem does not take you and your family out of harms’ way… it keeps you there. Get informed. Get represented. Get moving.

The Gulf Oil Spill, Fukushima, the Budget Bill: Why The Government Doesn’t Protect Us

May 12, 2011 | The Collins Law Firm, P.C.

We’ve been representing families in lawsuits against polluters for filling their homes with toxic chemicals for the better part of the last decade. We’ve obtained safe water supplies and clean air in homes for thousands of families, and recovered millions of dollars in lost property value for them. During jury selection we’ve asked prospective jurors to raise their hands if they believe that the government adequately protects them from environmental harm. The next person who raises her hand will be the first. Almost a year ago to the day, we and the rest of the world watched in horror as a single deepwater well in the gulf exploded and began spewing millions of gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. For weeks on end we listened to lies from industry, and from government, about everything from how this could happen, to the severity of the problem, to how and when they would clean it up. Now we hear lies about the damage done, including the destruction of industries, families, wildlife, and the ecosystem. The recently issued government report on this disaster lays the blame at the doorstep of BP and, to no one’s surprise, does not emphasize the responsibility of the government for allowing this to happen. Truth be known, this was one well among thousands. The whole approach to permitting and regulation of drilling in the Gulf has been folly from the word go. It has been dictated by industry and the politicians who depend on them for their jobs through our coin-operated political system. More recently, we and the rest of the world have watched in horror as the nuclear plants in Fukushima imploded and have begun to wreak havoc by spreading dangerous levels of radiation throughout Japan. Again, we’ve listened to lies from industry and the government, this time Japan, about everything from how this could happen, to the severity of the problem, to how and when they will stop it. The spin about how little harm has been caused is just beginning, but make no mistake, we will not hear the truth. The truth is they don’t even know how much damage this will cause and may not for generations. The problem remains out of control. And now, the budget deal. Last week, on the one year anniversary of the “spill” in the Gulf, our President and representatives in Congress cut a deal on the budget that takes $1.5 billion away from EPA’s budget. 16% of its total budget! Its recent efforts to regulate the atmosphere destroying emissions have been shelved. The prospect of meaningful enforcement has been crushed. And this, as part of a deal that increases our war budget by $5 billion dollars. Industry and its henchman worked hard for this. Its no wonder that no one believes the government protects them from environmental harm. It doesn’t. It can’t. And it won’t until we take our leaders out of the pockets of industry.