Illinois Personal Injury Lawyer Blog
Something really wrong happened here. Bronx Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott just announced the closing of the Bronx New School. Walcott said that the soil at the school– and the air that the kids breathe at the school–are soaked with a carcinogen known as trichloroethylene, or TCE. And not just a little bit of TCE. Contamination in the air was up to 10,000 times so-called “safe” levels. [See this 8/19/11 media article]. The revelation that a school is contaminated is always jarring. Last week, I wrote about air contamination (high levels of lead) at a public elementary school in Chicago’s Pilsen community (see my blog from last week). That school’s 500 children are threatened by having to breathe this lead, and it was particularly galling to learn that Illinois environmental officials had long-resisted the requests of local families to test the air at the school. But, for as bad as the Pilsen situation is, this situation at the Bronx New School is even worse…..maybe the worst I have ever heard of. Why? One reason is that school officials knew since last February of the TCE contamination at the school–and then waited 6 months to tell parents about it. In other words, 300 kids went to the Bronx New School for most of last semester, at a time when school officials knew that it was not safe for them to be there. That’s an outrage. But even more outrageous is the fact that there should never have been a school there in the first place. The Bronx New School is, believe it or not, a former industrial plant that was known to have used TCE and other dangerous chemicals for perhaps as long as 70 years. Ignoring this huge red flag, the Board of Education leased the site 20 years ago. Then, despite knowing that it had been an industrial site, and despite a public record documenting the use thereof dangerous chemicals, the Board evidently never bothered to do what any D+ science student would know to do: test the property before you start sending kids there for 7 hours a day. Here’s how reckless this is: in a terrific piece of reporting, Juan Gonzalez of the New York Daily News describes how he hired an environmental firm which, 24 hours later, had produced a 241-page report documenting the dangerous chemical history at the industrial site that would become the Bronx New School. In other words, Mr. Gonzalez discovered in a single day what the school board had failed to discover in twenty years. Rage and fear and guilt now dominate the thoughts of the parents who trusted school officials and sent their children to the New Bronx School for the past 20 years. Those families–and evidently there were many–who have wondered whether the headaches, dizziness and other illnesses afflicting their children were connected to the school today have good reason to be afraid….and angry. Doctors are now advising that their children be tested for evidence of exposure to the chemicals known to pollute the soil and air at the school. Is there anything more awful? Sadly, what I have learned from years of fighting pollution and polluters, is that when children are in environmental harms’ way, it is irresponsible adults who have put them there. For the children at the Pilsen school, it’s a polluter down the road who is belching lead into the air that they breathe, and the so-called “environmental protectors” in Illinois government who so callously refused for years to take seriously these kids’ health. For the children at the New Bronx School, it’s the owner of the highly-contaminated industrial site who thought it would be OK to lease it out for a school, and, mainly, the apparently reckless people at the school board who–charged with protecting the lives of these children–never thought that their lives might be in danger at a school located on a toxin-laced industrial site. When we hear news like this, we often say, “there should be a law…..people should not be allowed to do this to children.” Well, as it turns out, we don’t need a new law. Right now–without putting any new laws on the books– people are not allowed to do this to children. There are environmental laws that forbid sending children to a school like this, for example. There are criminal laws, too. And, particularly in the case of the New Bronx School, prosecutors need to look hard at using them. All over this country, there are laws that put people in jail for “recklessly endangering” the lives of children. These laws forbid adults from dimwittedly putting children in harms’ way. Especially when the adults have the duty to keep those kids safe. After all, these children are not strangers to the adults who run the school board and the school. They are the very children whom those adults are paid to protect. I’m having a hard time imagining the excuse that will work here. And I’m having a hard time imagining that, unless someone really gets punished for what the adults did to the children at the Bronx New School, we will be a society that can truly claim to give a damn about protecting its children.
Articles Tagged with environmental contamination
130 Livonia Homeowners Sue Ford for “Enormous Toxic Chemical Pool” Causing Contamination in Their Neighborhood
LIVONIA, Mich. August 8, 2017 – More than 130 homeowners in the Alden Village neighborhood of Livonia, Michigan will be filing a lawsuit against Ford Motor Company, alleging that dangerous chemicals from Ford’s nearby Transmission Plant have migrated into the neighborhood, contaminating groundwater and soil, and threatening the intrusion of chemical vapors into their homes. Attorneys for the homeowners will file the suit in Wayne County Circuit Court tomorrow, August 9.
THE PRESS CONFERENCE WILL BE HELD
TOMORROW, WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 9, AT 1:00 PM EST,
Norman Berger Joins the Collins Law Firm as Of Counsel
After serving as co-counsel to The Collins Law Firm in many ground-breaking environmental cases over the last 18 years, Norman Berger has joined the Firm as of counsel, where he will help lead the Firm’s efforts to demand clean up and financial compensation for the families they represent who have been put in harms’ way by dangerous chemical contamination.
Norm’s long track record in this area is extraordinary:
He has been litigating environmental cases for over 30 years, beginning with his work as an Assistant Attorney General for the State of Illinois enforcing environmental laws in the 1980s. He participated in many of the major Superfund cases in the Midwest during the early years of Superfund enforcement in the late ’80s and early ’90s. He tried one of the first Superfund private cost recovery cases in federal court, and has since been involved in litigating environmental cases under the federal Superfund statute, the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA), the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act and many State statutes nationwide. For the last 18 years, together with The Collins Law Firm, Norman has represented individuals and families whose homes have been contaminated by industrial pollution, resulting in diminished property values, property damage, and serious health issues. Their efforts in this area have resulted in remedies ranging from mandatory property cleanup to the provision of clean water supplies to monetary reimbursement for property damage and medical expenses in excess of $65 million. This includes negotiating a $7.2 million settlement in a toxic tort case for a client whose childhood exposure to chemicals caused cancer.
Are We Ready to Take on the Fossil Fuel Industry Over Global Warming?
The world is heading for a potential climate catastrophe and a recently released report has unmasked the biggest corporations responsible. The report entitled “Carbon Majors: Accounting for Carbon and Methane Emissions 1854-2010”, by researcher Richard Heede, “offers the most complete picture to date of which institutions extracted the fossil fuels that have been the root cause of global warming since the Industrial Revolution.”
In other words, this report lists which corporations are responsible for the majority of the carbon dioxide emissions that are fueling climate change. It’s obvious that energy corporations would be on this list. What is surprising is how few corporations can be responsible for so much. A full 63% of carbon dioxide emissions since the 1850s can be traced back to only 90 of the largest fossil fuel and cement producers in the world. Predictably, the United States accounts for a large share of these corporate giants. Among the nefarious 90 are the 21 American corporations listed below:
Chevron Texaco
What Should You Do if Your Groundwater is Contaminated?
Tens of thousands of Americans will learn this year that the water just underneath their home-their groundwater-is contaminated with chemicals that some nearby factory dumped probably decades ago, and left to bleed down through the soil, infiltrate the groundwater, and ultimately migrate into your neighborhood.
I’ve been representing families in exactly this predicament for nearly 18 years. This is what I’ve learned they should be doing/asking in response to this news:
(1) Talk to an experienced environmental lawyer about your legal rights and options. Contaminated groundwater, and what to do about it, involves some complicated legal, scientific, and sometimes political issues. Also, while you are going to need access to accurate information, and quickly, in order to make good decisions to protect your family, those most likely to have the information-the polluter and sometimes government-may not want to give it to you. A lawyer can help you get it.
PFOA and PFOS Should Not be in Your Family’s Drinking Water
PFOA and PFOS belong to a family of “fluorinated organic chemicals”. They are dangerous to human health. Before virtually all production of these chemicals was halted in 2006 (due to health concerns), PFOA and PFOS were used in a number of industrial processes; to fight fires at airfields; and to make carpets, clothing, and fabrics for furniture.
Health officials warn that sustained exposure to even low levels of these chemicals may result in adverse health effects, most notably, testicular and kidney cancer; damage to liver tissue; negative effects to the immune system and thyroid; and developmental damage to fetuses during pregnancy and to breastfed infants, such as low birth weight, accelerated puberty and skeletal variations.
The EPA tells us that while the levels of PFOA and PFOS in the blood of people that have been tested have been decreasing in the 10+ years since production of these chemicals stopped, PFOA and PFOS still pose a threat to human health in specific locations where the chemicals were historically used and dumped, buried or spilled, and allowed to migrate into water systems. Such locations include:
World Health Organization Report: Airline Passengers and Crew Exposed to Toxic Air
A study by the World Health Organization (WHO) has concluded that the air inside airplane cabins can be “contaminated by pyrolysed engine oil and other aircraft fluids [that] can reasonably be linked to acute and chronic symptoms”, including:
- “eye, nose and throat irritations, skin reactions, recurrent respiratory tract infections and fatigue, nausea and cramps”, and
- “cardiovascular, neurobehavioral, neurological and respiratory symptoms, chronic fatigue, multiple chemical sensitivity, aerotoxic syndrome, cancer, and soft tissue damage.”
How TCE and PCE Can Harm Us: Expert Information You Can Trust
If you have reason to research how chemicals can harm your family-say, for example, your water supply has been found to be contaminated-please be careful. There is a lot of “information” available on the internet, but not all of it is reliable. In the unreliable category are studies performed or funded by the companies who manufacture those chemicals, or use them in their industrial processes. They have hundreds of millions, maybe billions, of dollars to gain by convincing us that their chemicals are safe. And while this extraordinary financial stake does not necessarily make their research false, common sense tells us that it may well cause them to resolve the scientific grey areas in favor of the conclusion that chemicals are safe, or not as dangerous as perhaps they truly are. That alone should cause you to look elsewhere for information to which you can trust your family’s health.
Who should you trust?
The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), for one. NRDC is a non-profit organization of scientists, lawyers, and other professionals who approach health and environmental issues from the people’s point of view. They take no money from polluters and others who might want to minimize environmental dangers to human beings. They advocate for those things that protect people, and insist that all doubts about, say, whether a chemical is dangerous, be resolved in favor of protecting human life and health, unless and until the doubts can be conclusively resolved to prove such protection unnecessary.
Who are the Environmental and Health Agencies in Your State?
There are many potential reasons why you might want to contact your state’s most important environmental and health agencies. Usually it is because you are concerned about an environmental issue in your area. Here are 10 questions you may want answered:
(1) Is there an environmental investigation being conducted in my area into possible groundwater or air contamination?
(2) Has a local plant, factory, or landfill been cited for violating environmental laws or regulations?
Clean Water Isn’t a Right if You Never Had It
I’ve been working for nearly 18 years helping families in American neighborhoods use our court system to force the companies that polluted their water to clean it up. Despite all the anguish that having contaminated water initially caused these families, and despite the truly reprehensible behavior of some of the polluters who caused the contamination, I’ve always known one source of hope and pride: the American belief that everyone in this country has the right to clean water. We back up this belief with a host of laws–like the federal Clean Water Act–and regulations that compel our government agencies and courts to honor the right to clean water, even if it means forcing a polluter to spend millions of dollars to restore clean water to a neighborhood.
Now, it’s certainly a fair criticism–I’ve voiced it regularly–that our “clean water” laws could be stronger, enforced more vigilantly, or applied more thoughtfully, to help the disadvantaged in our communities. But the very fact that we have these laws at all, available for enforcement by courts who take them seriously in the great majority of cases in which I have been involved or of which I am aware, separates us from most countries in the world.
We Americans are often stunned to learn that the access to clean water which most of us take for granted is not shared by many in the rest of the world. As reported by an extraordinary organization called “Charity: Water”, there are more than 663 million people in the world who live daily without access to clean water.