Hunger strike a desperate act to expose “Canada’s Love Canal”

By John MacKie

May 25— When the tough former steelworker in Sydney, Nova Scotia who had lost a kidney to cancer said “Look, no one cares whether we’re alive or dead here,” Elizabeth May (pictured above with her daughter) knew she had to do something, immediately.

So the executive director of the Sierra Club of Canada went back home to Ottawa, talked it over with her nine-year-old daughter, and went on a hunger strike to bring attention to the plight of Sydney residents who live around Canada’s most notorious toxic waste site.

It was a desperate move, and perhaps a bit foolhardy — she didn’t really do anything to prepare for the ordeal; she just stopped eating. Only two days in, she got terribly ill from dehydration and detoxification, and developed a splitting headache.

But she persevered, going 17 days without food until Health Minister Allan Rock announced a proposal for new studies into the Sydney tar ponds.

May ended her hunger strike on May 18 by taking a bite out of an organic strawberry. But her 15-year battle to help Sydney residents won’t end until she’s satisfied that the problem is resolved.

“It’s a scandal from beginning to end,” said May, who was in Vancouver Thursday for a Water Forum conference at the Coast Plaza Hotel.

“Canadian and Nova Scotia taxpayers put about $3 billion into keeping a failed steel mill running in Sydney [that produced the toxic waste].

“Basically to find a comparable site, you have to go to Eastern Europe and go to the former Soviet Union.”

May has written a book on the issue, Frederick Street: Life and Death on Canada’s Love Canal.

“Actually in terms of the volume of hazardous waste, it’s far more serious than Love Canal,” said May, noting that the toxic site is “smack dab in the middle” of Sydney, which has 30,000 people.

“The levels of cancer in Sydney are the highest that have been documented anywhere in Canada. Sydney also has a very high birth-defect rate, and very high multiple sclerosis, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s and heart disease.” said May.

“We haven’t tested the kids, but I know from working and being in that community that it’s rare when I meet a mother who has healthy kids, really rare. Some of the kids twitch in the night in their sleep. Some of them scream from headaches in the middle of the night.”

At May’s meeting with Sydney residents April 27, the despondent former steelworker crystallized the mood of his neighbors.

“They just felt so defeated,” said May, who is originally from Cape Breton herself. “They’ve tried things before, and no one ever listens.”

Off the top of her head, she broached the idea of a hunger strike on Parliament Hill. No one paid much attention at the time, but she soon resolved to go through with it.

“I knew I was taking an enormous chance,” she said. “But I had to do something that reflected my sense of desperation and frustration to get people to pay attention to the health problems in Sydney.”

“I did see a doctor every couple of days, and I don’t think I did any long-term damage,” she said. “My blood pressure stayed normal.

“The big risk of a long fast is that you can permanently damage your organs, because the body needs to digest protein. Sometimes the body can start digesting its own protein, which can damage your heart muscle.

“I’m still weak now; the doctors were worried and they wanted me to stop. But it doesn’t appear I’ve done any long-term damage.”

Unfortunately, the same can’t be said for Sydney residents who have been dealing with toxic residue from the failed steel plant.

May is appalled that the Nova Scotia government still won’t acknowledge the severity of the toxic waste problem, possibly because it took over the mill when it was going bankrupt in 1967 and ran it for more than three decades.

“With the high cancer rate, the standard response by the Nova Scotia government is that people in Sydney have a lifestyle problem,” she said. “They smoke too much, they drink too much, they eat too many salty foods.

“The reality is [that] a study done by Dalhousie University compared Sydney’s cancer rates with those of neighboring industrial communities where people were coal miners instead of steel workers.

“It’s the same lifestyle. They smoke as much, they drink as much, they eat the same foods. They’re from the same genetic pool. But when you look at the difference between cancer rates in Sydney and cancer rates in the adjacent communities, it’s striking,” said May.

May is also appalled at how much money was spent to try to keep the money-losing steel mill afloat.

“Most of the time it had about 600 to 700 workers,” she noted. “It would have been much cheaper in 1967 to give every worker a million dollars and close it down.”

Source: Vancouver Sun

Power firm vetted Bush energy regulators

By Julian Borger

Washington, DC, May 26— Applicants for jobs on the commission regulating the US energy market have been vetted by the Enron Corporation, the country’s biggest electricity power company and a significant contributor to George Bush’s election campaign, according to a report published yesterday.

Soon after being appointed chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, Curtis Hébert told the New York Times, he received a telephone call from the Enron president, Kenneth Lay, offering the company’s backing to help him keep his job if he adapted his views on deregulation.

Hébert said he was offended by the approach and turned down the offer.

His appointment as chairman, which was provisional pending the nomination of other members of the commission, has since been called into question by Vice-President Dick Cheney.

Hébert’s chief of staff, Walter Ferguson, confirmed the newspaper account yesterday. “[Mr. Hébert] has always been forthright and he’s been a straight-shooter with folks in the industry,” he said.

Lay, a close friend of the Bush family, confirmed that the telephone call took place, but said it was Hébert who asked for Enron’s backing to keep his job.

Either way, environmentalists and other critics of President Bush argue, the fact that the conversation took place at all demonstrates the leading role corporations like Enron have in making energy policy in Washington under the new administration.

According to a joint investigation by the New York Times and Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), Lay and other Enron executives interviewed other candidate members of the Regulatory Commission and supplied the president’s personnel adviser, Clay Johnson, with a list of the company’s preferred candidates.

The two commissioners Bush chose to fill the vacant Republican seats both had the backing of Enron and other power companies.

“It just confirms what we believed and what we’ve been saying, that the Bush-Cheney energy plan is written by corporations and it’s in the interests of the corporations,” said Kevin Curtis, vice-president for government affairs of the National Environmental Trust, a Washington advocacy group.

Enron, a $100 billion behemoth in the energy trading market, was a significant backer of Bush in last year’s election. It contributed $1.7 million to Republican candidates, 72% of its total campaign spending.

It is a strong supporter of deregulation in the electric power market, in particular the opening up of state markets to outside suppliers.

At the time of the phone call from Lay, Hébert had launched an investigation of the pricing policies of big electricity traders, such as Enron.

“One of our problems is that we do not have the expertise to truly unravel the complex arbitrage activities of a company like Enron,” he told the New York Times, adding: “We’re trying to do it now and we may have some results soon.”

Mr. Ferguson confirmed yesterday that the investigation would continue.

The large-scale deregulation of regional electricity markets since 1996 has failed to reduce prices in many states, and since the chaos and power shortages produced by the botched deregulation in California, the pace of market reform has slowed down, much to the frustration of Enron.

In their telephone conversation, a few weeks after Hébert’s appointment, he said Lay told him that “he and Enron would like to support me as chairman, but we would have to agree on principles.”

Those principles would involve the pace and nature of deregulation.

Lay said that there was “never any intent” to link Hébert’s employment with the commission’s policies.

When Hébert, a former Mississippi state regulator, was given the chairman’s job in January, the White House told him he would keep it at least until Bush’s other nominees, Pat Wood and Nora Brownell, were confirmed by the Senate.

Their appointments were confirmed this week, and Vice President Cheney told PBS that Wood, head of the Texas public utility commission, should now get Hébert’s job.

Ferguson said yesterday that the president was the only one who could decide whether Hébert should keep his job.

Other candidates for seats on the commission also say that Enron played a role in the selection process. Joe Garcia, a Florida regulator and now a leader of the Cuban-American National Foundation, an exile pressure group, said he was interviewed by Lay and other Enron officials.

Source: The Guardian (UK)

Biggest US water polluters not punished

Washington, DC, May 28, (ENS)— More than one in four -- 26 percent -- of the nation’s largest industrial, municipal and federal facilities were in “significant” violation of the Clean Water Act at least once during a recent 15 month period, a new report indicates.

The report by the US Public Interest Research Group (PIRG) describes shortcomings in the monitoring of water pollution and efforts to deter polluters. At the most basic level, the government, including both state agencies and the US EPA, have failed to properly pursue and punish polluters.

The annual report shows a drop in the number of significant polluters since last year, when US PIRG documented that almost 30 percent of major facilities were in serious violation of the Clean Water Act. But this year, there is an important difference -- the report, “Polluters’ Playground: How the Government Permits Pollution,” comes just weeks after the Bush Administration proposed slashing the US Environmental Protection Agency’s budget for environmental enforcement.

“It is outrageous that the Bush administration is proposing to slash enforcement budgets when more than one in four polluting facilities are breaking the law,” said US PIRG environmental advocate Richard Caplan. “We need clean water now, and we have to start by requiring polluters to obey the law.”

When Congress passed the Clean Water Act in 1972, there was a visible water crisis that made a compelling case for action. Pollution in the Cuyahoga River caught on fire in 1969, and a spill off the coast of California left millions of gallons of oil along the coastline.

The goals of the act were to return all waters to fishable and swimmable conditions by 1983 and to eliminate the discharge of all pollutants by 1985. Now, almost 30 years later, 40 percent of US surface waters still do not meet the fishable and swimmable standard.

There have been over 36,000 beach closings and advisories since 1988, and in 1999, 48 states issued fish consumption advisories because of high levels of dangerous chemicals.

To learn the source of these continuing pollution problems, US PIRG analyzed the behavior of major facilities nationwide by reviewing violations of the Clean Water Act between October of 1998 and December of 1999. The violations were recorded in the US EPA’s Permit Compliance System database, which is not a public record. US PIRG obtained the data under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

The major findings of the report include:

* More than 26 percent of the 1,730 major facilities examined were in Significant Non-Compliance with their Clean Water Act permits for at least one quarter during the 15 month period.

*159 major facilities were in Significant Non-Compliance with their water pollution permits during the entire 15 month period.

*Of the 42 industrial facilities in Significant Non-Compliance for the entire 15 month period, EPA records indicate only one received a fine over the past five years.

*The 10 states with the greatest number of major facilities in Significant Non-Compliance were Texas, Ohio, New York, Alabama, Tennessee, Louisiana, Pennsylvania, Florida, Missouri and Indiana.

*The 10 states with the highest percentage of major facilities in Significant Non-Compliance were Utah, Tennessee, Ohio, Vermont, Missouri, Oklahoma, Alabama, Rhode Island, Nebraska and Indiana.

The continued dumping of hundreds of millions of pounds of toxic chemicals into waterways and the significant violation of the Clean Water Act by almost 1,700 large facilities stems from several specific policy failures, US PIRG argues. Governments, both state and federal, do not pursue and punish polluters.

Meanwhile, the courts have eroded citizens’ ability to file suits in order to enforce the Clean Water Act. In addition, regulators have failed to progressively lower permitted amounts of pollution in order to move toward the zero discharge goal of the Clean Water Act.

One out of every four facilities is operating on an expired permit.

The Bush administration has attempted to justify proposed cuts to the EPA’s enforcement budget by arguing that states are better suited to carry out enforcement activities. But as the US PIRG report details, many states are already failing in this task.

To bring about consistent compliance with permits and move toward the zero discharge goals of the Clean Water Act, US PIRG recommended the following:

*Set tougher penalties. Penalties should be set high enough to remove any economic incentive for polluters to break the law and to deter lawbreaking in the first place. This approach has proved successful in New Jersey, which passed a tough Clean Water Enforcement Act in 1990 that helped to reduce the state’s ranking among states in terms of percentage of facilities in Significant Non-Compliance to 46th.

*Allow citizens full access to the courts. Obstacles to citizen suits should be removed, including the current rules that bar citizens from suing federal facilities.

* Expand the public’s right to know. US PIRG says the public should have greater access to information about enforcement, including the requirement of submissions of comprehensive data by facilities that discharge into waterways and easy accessibility of that data through online Internet searches.

*Strengthen whistleblower protections to extend the statute of limitations for protection of employees that report illegal activities by their employers.

Last year, Representative Frank Pallone, a New Jersey Democrat, introduced legislation that would accomplish most of the recommendations made by US PIRG, and he is expected to reintroduce the bill in the current Congress.

“We urge Congress and the President to listen to the public’s demands for clean water,” said Caplan. “The Administration’s proposed cuts to the EPA’s enforcement budget take us in the wrong direction at the wrong time.”

Polluted suburbs ‘stunt sexual development’

United Kingdom, May 24— Teenagers living near waste incinerators sexually mature later than their peers. Tests compared teenagers living in polluted suburbs to those living in a more rural area.

Scientists found that boys from the suburbs had smaller testicles and girls smaller breasts than their rural peers.

They also found high levels of two particular chemical pollutants, dioxins and PCBs, in the children’s bodies, both of which are thought to retard sexual development.

Lead researcher Dr. Jans Staessen, from the University of Leuven in Belgium, told BBC News Online: “In the exposed group 40% of the boys and the girls were not matured to the adult stage of sexual development. Almost all of the other group were.

“Youngsters are especially vulnerable to a large number of noxious agents and their protection is an important public health challenge.

“Our findings suggest that current environmental standards are insufficient to avoid measurable biological effects, which may be the harbinger of disorders in adult life.”

Pollution levels

Human exposure to pollution is usually monitored by analyzing external sources such as soil and water samples.

But the Belgian team took a more direct approach to examine the effect on the human body.

They analyzed blood, urine and tissue samples for concentrations of pollutants.

But they also looked for chemicals produced by the body when it reacts badly to the effects of pollution -- these are known as biomarkers.

Two hundred 17-year-olds were involved in the study, which concentrated on three areas near Antwerp in Belgium.

Half lived in the polluted industrial centers of Hoboken and Wilrijk, near to waste incinerators and a motorway network.

Monitoring

The others lived in the rural area of Peer, where there is no heavy industry or motorways.

The study looked at four main classes of environmental pollutants, heavy metals, and three classes of chemical pollutants, some of which can cause cancers.

The children from the industrial areas had higher concentrations of all the pollutants in their samples. Children exposed to lead were found to have biomarkers indicating kidney malfunction.

While children with traces of exposure to pollutants called PAHs (polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons) and VOCs (volatile organic compounds) had biomarkers indicating damage to their DNA.

Dr. Staessen added: “Biomonitoring of adolescents is a sensitive method to track exposure to common environmental pollutants of different classes and their biological effects long before overt disease develops.

Dr. Michael Warhurst, Safer Chemicals Campaigner from Friends of the Earth (FoE), said there were growing levels of exposure to chemicals -- particularly affecting the poor.

“Scientists have found 300 man-made chemicals in the body,” he said.

“What’s particularly interesting about this research is that they were going into people’s bodies and finding out what was going on.”

A year ago, FoE published a report called ‘Crisis in Chemicals’, which looked at a “biomedical revolution” which it said would make it easier to measure different aspects of the body.

The research is published in The Lancet medical journal.

Source: BBC News