Keepin' Us Healthy

The Defense Department, the nation's biggest polluter, is resisting orders from the Environmental Protection Agency to clean up Fort Meade and two other military bases where the EPA says dumped chemicals pose "imminent and substantial" dangers to public health and the environment.

The Pentagon has also declined to sign agreements required by law that cover 12 other military sites on the Superfund list of the most polluted places in the country.

  Truthout

Actually, I’m surprised the EPA under Bush is ordering clean-ups. Maybe they know it doesn’t matter if you don’t enforce the orders.

Pentagon officials say they are voluntarily cleaning up the three sites named in the EPA's "final orders" - Fort Meade in Maryland, Tyndall Air Force Base in Florida and McGuire Air Force Base in New Jersey.

But they don’t want anyone checking to make sure.

At all three sites, the military has released toxic chemicals - some known to cause cancer and other serious health problems - into the soil and groundwater.

[...]

EPA spokeswoman Roxanne Smith said final orders were issued because the agency is worried about drinking water and soil contamination at Fort Meade, Tyndall and McGuire. "Under DOD's management, some of these sites have languished for years, with limited or no cleanup underway," she said.

[...]

Congress established the Superfund program in 1980 to clean up the country's most contaminated places, and of the 1,255 sites on the list the Pentagon owns 129 - the most of any entity. Other federal agencies with properties on the list include NASA and the Energy Department, but they have signed EPA cleanup agreements without protest.

But Superfund sites are only one aspect of the Pentagon's environmental problems. It has about 25,000 contaminated properties in all 50 states, and it will cost billions and take decades to clean them up.

The Pentagon poisons American citizens, and its own troops. I assume the brass drink bottled water.

Speaking of the EPA

Officials of 18 states are taking the EPA back to court to try to force it to comply with a Supreme Court ruling that rebuked the Bush administration for inaction on global warming.

[...]

Arizona, California, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Iowa, Maine, Maryland, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Washington and the District of Columbia, plus representatives of the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection and the cities of New York and Baltimore, and several environmental organizations.

  TPM

Go ahead on.

Speaking of Pelicans

Before the EPA and the Endangered Species Act, the brown pelican went extinct down here on Galveston Island, along with other bay creatures, due to pesticide use and harbor activity. This is not a unique story, and not a particularly old one. And yet the Bush Administration has singularly set about dismantling and obstructing the agencies put in place to preserve our natural environment. I was trying to find some information on the brown pelican’s demise and recovery here, but the first thing I found was an interesting current local story I hadn’t heard yet.

March 28, 2008:

Port of Galveston officials may never know who buried an entire railroad tank car filled with thousands of gallons of liquid, including a degraded form of the pesticide DDT. But they’re leaning toward the storage tank theory.

[...]

Initial samples taken by the port’s environmental consultants detected DDE, a breakdown product of DDT. The federal government banned DDT in the 1970s. It was blamed for devastating wildlife, particularly birds, and probably causes cancer in humans. Tests also detected the pesticide Endosulfan, a neurotoxin. Ingestion of even small amounts of Endosulfan has been linked to seizures and death.

[...]

The Port of Galveston, once controlled by private interests, became an (sic) public enterprise in 1940. There is no institutional memory of anyone burying the car since that time, said Bernie Curran, director of administration at the port.

  Galveston Daily News

I would think that any public enterprise would have had to keep records, and done so, unless they didn’t want anyone to know they were burying the tank. And then, why would you bury a tank in the first place unless it had something in it that you knew you would have to dispose of, presumably at a fair cost if it were indeed banned chemicals? And that would lead me to suspect it was done after 1970. (Is it the only one?)

The article speculates that the tank might have been buried by a private enterprise before 1940 for use as an underground storage tank. I think that’s very doubtful. The discovery of the tank car was only made when crews were installing a storm drain. A private enterprise using large amounts of pesticides wouldn’t completely bury a tanker to store them, would they? Not very handy to get to when you need it. It was never registered with the State as a storage tank. And, by the way, the State says it’s not going to investigate.

But, back to the brown pelican in Galveston. The following comes from an article by Gary Clark.

Four years before the ban on DDT, the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries together with the Florida Game and Fresh Water Fish Commission started reintroducing brown pelicans to Louisiana. With the DDT ban, nesting success of the pelicans increased, and by 1979, nearly a thousand birds fledged on North Island in Louisiana’s Barataria Bay.

In 1990, brown pelicans---probably coming from Louisiana---returned to Galveston Bay.

My wife recalls that I jumped up and down like a little boy when I spotted a brown pelican in Galveston in the summer of 1990. And well I might have acted like a kid, because I hadn’t seen the bird anywhere near Galveston in 30 years!

Brown pelicans began nesting on Little Pelican Island in Galveston Bay in 1994. By 2001, their numbers in the bay had increased to 2,200 breeding pairs.

The Houston Audubon Society played a large role in the recovery of brown pelicans by managing the islands in Galveston Bay where the birds nest. Due to successful recovery of brown pelicans, the National Audubon Society recommended removing the birds from the endangered species lists of Texas and Louisiana.

  Nature Photographers

I can’t imagine Galveston without brown pelicans. That would be just too sad. So let’s get this administration out of Washington and far, far away from any power, and send packing those Republican congresstools who do its bidding. Not just for Galveston’s pelicans (and me), because that’s not the only thing they threaten, but for the sake of the whole world.

Industrialized Nation

The White House pressured the Environmental Protection Agency to weaken requirements that companies annually disclose releases of toxic chemicals, congressional auditors said Wednesday.

  CBS

....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.