Polluted Promises by Melissa Checker

Author:Melissa Checker
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: NYU Press
Published: 2005-01-15T16:00:00+00:00

They have the funds to prolong these cases as long as they want to. They’re not paying any money out, so they can just wait for people to die. I think they think the longer they make people wait, the less active they will be. That’s really what’s happened as far as the lawsuit’s concerned. We don’t even hear from the attorneys no more.

Other activists I spoke with took their suspicions even further and accused SWP of actually buying off HAPIC’s attorneys, as well as one or two local leaders who had suddenly dropped out of the fight. Such allegations have never been substantiated. What matters here is that HAPIC activists believed that companies would go to great lengths in order to not pay them.

Resigning themselves to the fact that their lawsuit might never pan out, HAPIC leaders looked to longer-term solutions to their problems. In 1996, Dr. Rumph won a $170,000 grant from the Centers for Disease Control to conduct a three-year survey of SWP area residents’ health problems.67 Also in 1996, Utley (again following a pattern of post–civil rights activists)68 ran for county commissioner. Although he did not win the election, Utley claimed that the publicity he generated for Hyde Park made the experience a victory of sorts. Reflecting on the campaign, he said, “I didn’t win, but I had the opportunity to let everybody know that the environmental issues were here and were going to stay.” Utley’s interpretation of the election again points to the importance activists placed on drawing public attention to their problems.

HAPIC leaders also continued to examine other sources of contamination in the neighborhood. For years, SWP had claimed that Goldberg Brothers scrap metal yard and Thermal Ceramics were responsible for many of the contaminants found in Hyde Park’s soil. In 1997, HAPIC activists mounted a brief but successful attack on the scrap yard. Over the years, the business had expanded until its piles of tires, car parts, and rusting metal spread into the backyards that lined the west side of Walnut Street. Water flowing from the ditches around the scrap yard had often looked suspicious, and certain test results (combined with activists’ increased knowledge about toxic chemicals) alerted residents to the possibility of serious contamination in and around it. Earlier that year, Arthur Smith attended a regional environmental justice conference, where some of his colleagues advised him to contact the EPA’s Emergency Response Team (ERT). Smith returned from the conference and quickly organized a neighborhood-wide phone and letter-writing campaign. Eventually, the EPA reappeared in Hyde Park. This time, ERT scientists determined that Hattie Elam’s yard on Walnut Street contained dangerous levels of PCBs and warranted a $100,000 cleanup, financed by the U.S. EPA.69 However, the ERT did not find significant enough contamination in other yards around the Goldbergs site to merit similar cleanups, although they did order Goldbergs’ owner to erect a concrete retaining wall designed to stem the flow of chemicals into the yards of Walnut Street residents.

In the middle to late

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.