People Before Profit blog

Oil spill on Ohio River

Fri, 29 Aug 2014 15:10:00 +0000

Though the U.S. has enjoyed a handful of months that were free of big oil spills, it seems the summer is set to end on a sour note, with an Aug. 18 incident that spewed somewhere between 5,000 and 8,000 gallons of crude into the Ohio River. The spill occurred during a "routine fuel transfer" by Duke Energy, which is attributed to a valve accidentally being left open, though this is not yet known for sure and the matter is being investigated.

Duke Energy should ring a painful bell for anyone familiar with the ash spill in the Dan River earlier this year - the company was also responsible for that disaster, which affected North Carolina and Virginia with 100,000 tons of coal ash. The Ohio spill occurred near a coal plant (the W.C. Beckjord Power Station - owned by Duke), 20 miles east of Cincinnati, and just a few miles upstream from a drinking water source for close to two million people, according to Greenpeace. However, the valves that allow the Ohio River's water to flow into that source have been shut, preventing contamination.

Cleanup crews are working to gather and dispose of the oil, and the U.S. Coast Guard has closed a 15-mile stretch of the Ohio River. Peter Tennant, executive of the Ohio River Valley Water Sanitation Commission, said this type of medium-sized spill occurs in the area every few years; it often goes unreported. He remarked, "This one is of major concern because of where it happened. Anytime something happens upstream from a water intake, it is of major concern. You don't want to take chances with people's health."

The Columbus Dispatch stated it is not yet known what damage has been done to local wildlife, if any. Either way, this comes as a second blow to the local ecosystem, as a previous 10,000-gallon spill hit the surrounding area back in March, affecting part of the Oak Glen Nature Preserve near Cincinnati, after a Sunoco-owned pipeline burst.

There is, however, a silver lining for nearby residents, as Duke Energy is being forced to retire the W.C. Beckjord Power Station - a 60 year-old plant - by the end of this year, thanks to new EPA regulations recently implemented by the Obama administration as part of its climate action plan. This will likely eliminate the handling of oil in the area, and thus also the resulting accidents.

Ohio-based Sierra Club organizer Neil Waggoner noted, "This is yet another example of dirty fossil fuels putting us at risk. We pay with our health. We pay for the dangerous cleanup with our tax dollars. And at the same time that Duke Energy was spilling oil into our river, it was also asking the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio to bail out some of its old, polluting coal plants by passing extra costs on to its customers. If utilities in Ohio invested these dollars in clean energy, we could breathe easier, have safe water, and power our lives without suffering these dangers."

Photo: The taint of oil, seen in the Ohio River. David Sorcher/Greenpeace

Series exposing conspiracy to deny black lung benefits wins award

Wed, 13 Aug 2014 15:16:00 +0000

WASHINGTON (PAI)--A coal industry conspiracy to deny black lung benefits to tens of thousands of coal miners has won the Heywood Broun Award - given annually to honor outstanding investigative and public service reporting - from The Newspaper Guild.

The award will be given in October jointly to the Center for Public Integrity and ABC News for their series last year, "Breathless and Burdened: Dying from Black Lung Disease, Buried by Law and Medicine." Journalists from the two organizations will split a $5,000 check.

Center reporter Chris Hamby spent a year researching the black lung series, and ABC reporters Brian Ross and Matthew Mosk amplified it. The network spotlight led Johns Hopkins University to rapidly suspend its compromised black lung program and spurred members of Congress to propose stronger legislative remedies.

A Senate Labor subcommittee held a hearing in late July on the denial of black lung benefits, as a direct result of the Center's and ABC's findings. After hearing about the denials, panel chairman Sen. Robert Casey, D-Pa., who represents one of the top coal-mining states, promised witnesses - including a retired United Mine Worker suffering from black lung - that he would draft legislation to try to close loopholes in the black lung law.

Earlier, the series prompted Casey and five other lawmakers to demand the Obama administration increase funding for Labor Department administrative law judges, who decide if black lung claims are valid or not, by $10 million in the year beginning Oct. 1. Obama proposed a $2.7 million hike. A black lung claimant waits an average of 520 days before an ALJ hears their case, the lawmakers' letter said.

"Black lung? Wasn't that something we first heard about decades ago and that public officials and the medical community have dealt with?" the 4-member Broun judging panel wrote about choosing the series as the winner among nearly 70 standout entries from 2013.

"That was our belief - that is, until reading and viewing this report," the judges said. "Despite legislative reforms beginning in the late '60s and oversight by the Labor Department, it seems the coal industry giants have been gaming the system - not only using their hired legal specialists to prolong appeals in black lung benefit cases so that the process 'outlives' the victims, they actually co-opted one of our more prestigious hospitals to aid their scheme."

ABC and the Center reported the head of radiology for black lung at Johns Hopkins read more than 1,500 X-rays over 13 years, finding that not one single miner had a serious enough case to qualify for benefits.

Testimony at the hearing showed those miners - including the UMW member - then had to get second opinions and biopsies. The testifying miner had to toil several more years after Hopkins initially rejected his claim. The hospital's analysis of his case, and of others, was wrong. Meanwhile, the coal companies paid Hopkins about 10 times the usual fees for the serial misdiagnoses, the Center discovered. "That's the heart of journalism - follow a small lead and pursue it until you expose a huge injustice," one Broun Award judge said.

The black lung series has won other major awards, including this year's Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting. The Broun award honors the best of journalism in the tradition of the famed newspaper columnist Heywood Broun, who helped found the Guild in 1933. "We believe our winner truly reflects the Guild founder's commitment to championing the underdog against the powerful, the uncaring, the corrupt," the judges said.

Two other projects were runners-up and will receive Substantial Distinction awards, accompanied by $1,000 checks to be shared by the reporters involved. The Sacramento Bee won for a series about Nevada busing hundreds of mentally ill patients out of state. The Washington Post won for "Homes for the Taking," exposing how lien buyers preyed on homeowners.

Bee reporters Cynthia Hubert and Phillip Reese began with the tale of a confused man who stepped off a Greyhound bus and wandered into a police station for help. He had lost his ID and had no money, no warm clothing and no prescriptions for medication he needed. They learned Nevada's primary mental health hospital put him on a 1-way bus trip - out of the state.

The Rawson-Neal Psychiatric Hospital in Las Vegas had a pattern of systematic "patient dumping," of more than 1,500 seriously mentally ill patients by busing them to cities in nearly every other state. The Bee's series ended the dumping and forced Nevada to increase funding for mental health services.

The Post's team of Michael Sallah, Debbie Cenziper and Steven Rich "exposed a shocking example of predation in the District of Columbia aimed largely at poor, sick and elderly residents," the judges said. Their series showed D.C.'s revenue office let aggressive out-of-town lien buyers virtually steal people's homes through lien auctions. One aging veteran suffering from dementia lost his home for $134 overdue tax bill that burgeoned into a $5,000 debt to the tax lien firms, for example.

The Post series led the D.C. City Council to pass legislation prohibiting the sale of liens on tax debts less than $2,000, capping legal fees and interest charged by lien buyers, allowing homeowners who lose homes through foreclosure to keep a portion of their equity, and banning loan buying by investors convicted of fraud and deceitful practices in other places.

Judges of the 2013 entries were James Steele, a former Philadelphia Inquirer investigative reporter and a two-time winner of both the Broun Award and the Pulitzer Prize; retired New York Times copy editor Betsy Wade, a pioneer in fighting for women's equality in newsrooms; retired New York Times senior writer Lena Williams; and panel chair Jeff Miller, retired communications director for the Communications Workers.

The judges said the contest reaffirmed their faith that exceptional and important journalism still occurs, regardless of how much the news industry changes.

Photo: An old picture presented on Capitol Hill in Washington, July 22, during a Senate Subcommittee on Employment and Workplace Safety hearing on "Coal Miners' Struggle for Justice: How Unethical Legal and Medical Practices Stack the Deck Against Black Lung Claimants" shows, coal miner Robert Bailey, standing second from right, with fellow miners after a day's work in a coal mine in Maitland W.Va. Bailey, 61, a retired coal miner from Princeton, W.Va., who suffers from black lung disease has urged Congress to help clear a backlog of claims of fellow miners who have the disease. AP

Wildfires grow while budget to fight them is depleted

Fri, 08 Aug 2014 15:25:00 +0000

Wildfires have been blazing on all summer, and the latest of them is occurring in Oregon, near the Columbia River Gorge. Owners of 140 homes have already evacuated, and despite the efforts of 400 firefighters, the flames have continued to spread over five square miles. Meanwhile in northern Idaho, another brushfire has burned across 64 square miles and destroyed five structures. But efforts to combat the blazes may be fruitless, because the money to fight them is running out.

Tom Vilsack, U.S. Secretary of Agriculture, said Aug. 5 that the U.S. Forest Service's annual budget for fighting wildfires is rapidly dwindling; in fact, it may run out by the end of the month. The fires, on the other hand, will keep burning. He suggested they were in the midst of a catch-22, as when the Forest Service's funding runs dry, it will need to dip into other projects designed to help prevent future wildfires, in order to put out the ones currently blazing. Specifically, about $400-500 million will be taken away from such projects, putting the future in jeopardy in terms of further disasters.

Vilsack, who is lobbying for an extra $615 million for the Forest Service to fight wildfires this year and next, remarked, "When we begin to run out of money, we have to dip into the very programs that will reduce the risk of these wildfires over [a longer period of] time." And those accounts aren't the only ones that suffer; in the past, they have also had to draw from other programs not related to wildfires. Such a transfer occurred in 2012, when the funding for road repairs in Arkansas' Ouachita National Forest was instead used to contend with fires throughout the U.S.

The fire in Idaho, called the Big Cougar Fire, is only 15 percent contained, and 200 more structures in its path risk becoming damaged or destroyed unless firefighters can contain it further. Resources are being used while there's still funding for them, and include four helicopters, four fire engines, and three dozers. Isolated thunderstorms are expected, but those are unpredictable; rain could help quell the flames, but lightning could spark an entirely new blaze.

One of the reasons the Forest Service and the Department of Agriculture are so hot and bothered over the depletion of yearly wildfire money is due to the likelihood that there will be many more fires. In the past, a depletion of funding by the end of August might have been manageable, but global warming has changed that. Wildfires are now likely to occur much later in the year than August.

"The really amazing thing is that we don't just see an increase in one or two regions," said Philip Dennison, a geographer at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. "We're seeing it almost everywhere - in the mountain regions, in the Southwest... That tells us that something bigger is going on, and that thing appears to be climate change."

This increases the risk for firefighters as well - even more reason why sufficient funding is necessary. Robert Bonnie, undersecretary for natural resources with the Department of Agriculture, explained, "Fire behavior is more extreme now. We're seeing larger fires. We're seeing fires where we have more houses and people. That makes them more dangerous and more difficult to fight."

The money isn't there because the Republican controlled Congress isn't doing anything to put it there, according to a report by U.S. News. A bill to overhaul the way wildfire fighting is funded was introduced by Rep. Mike Simpson, R-Idaho - and then promptly abandoned by him. Simpson gave no explanation why.

Vicki Minor, executive director of the Wildland Firefighter Foundation, a nonprofit group that helps families of firefighters killed in the line of duty, said, "Because of these fires, we lose our watersheds, we lose our hunting ranges, we lose our homes. These fire seasons are not going away, and for them to not fund wildfires... I'm just disgusted with them."

Photo: The Oregon wildfire continues to burn. AP

“The Sixth Extinction” or how humanity, perching on tree limb, saws it off

Wed, 06 Aug 2014 12:47:00 +0000

Since humans evolved from apes and climbed down from the trees we have altered nature through our activity. This is especially so since the rise of capitalism and its ruthless, destructive global exploitation of nature.

In her book, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, New Yorker staff writer Elizabeth Kolbert clearly and passionately describes how human destruction of ecological systems is today causing the sixth great mass extinction of biological species, including possibly the human species itself. In the words of scientist Paul Ehrlich, "In pushing other species to extinction, humanity is busy sawing off the limb on which it perches."

Over its 4.5 billion years of existence, the Earth has evolved through many geologic periods. We are now in a new one - what is called the Anthropocene, or human caused, era. Dutch chemist Paul Crutzen, a Nobel Prize winning scientist who helped discover ozone depleting compounds, developed the term.

Crutzen observed human activity has so altered Earth that it constitutes a new geologic age. Humans have transformed land surfaces, soil, rivers, oceans, and most importantly, have altered the atmosphere through a combination of greenhouse gas emission and deforestation.

"Because of these (human caused) emissions," Crutzen said, global climate is likely to "depart significantly from natural behavior for many millennia to come."

In popular language, Kolbert recounts how scientists came to understand extinction and discovered five previous mass extinction events. These include the end-Ordovician extinction caused by an ice age; the end-Permian extinction or Great Dying, which emptied the Earth of 96 percent of species; and the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction about 65 million years ago that did in the dinosaurs.

A sixth extinction is occurring before our eyes. Species are dying at a rate 1,000 times faster than pre-human habitation. "It is estimated that one-third of all reef-building corals, a third of all freshwater mollusks, a third of sharks and rays, a quarter of all mammals, a fifth of all reptiles, and a sixth of all birds are headed toward oblivion," writes Kolbert.

Kolbert documents pioneering scientific research of the current disappearance of species. She trudges through jungles in Panama with scientists studying the mass disappearance of amphibians, in particular the Panamanian golden frog. What's crashing frog populations is fungus called Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis, which spread worldwide. Scientists speculate the fungus migrated through international shipping.

Kolbert accompanies scientists to caves in upstate New York and Vermont in search of what are killing millions of bats. Up to 90 percent of brown bats have succumbed to a cold loving fungus accidentally imported from Europe. The fungus is spreading and causing mass die offs of other varieties of bats.

The author then introduces us to scientists researching the effect of climate change on flora and how slight changes in global temperature can make life inhospitable to plant species.

To illustrate global warming's "equally evil twin," or ocean acidification, we visit Castello Aragonese, a tiny island the product of volcanic activity in the Tyrrhenian Sea near Naples. Underwater vents around the island emit 100 percent carbon dioxide gas, which dissolves in the water.

Scientists clearly see the effects of C02. Approaching the vents, life disappears. This mimics macro changes in the world's oceans. Atmospheric greenhouse gases exchange with ocean water that cover 70 percent of the Earth's surface. Historically, about one third of all greenhouse gases, primarily carbon dioxide, have been dissolved into the vast oceans raising the acidification level.

Atmospheric C02 concentration levels are higher than at anytime in the last 800,000 years. By the end of the century the oceans are projected to be 150 percent more acidic than at the beginning of the industrial revolution. Acidification levels are reaching a "tipping point" where conditions will become inhospitable to most forms of life. Already coral reefs are disappearing.

Kolbert discusses what's called the "New Pangaea." Pangaea is the original global land expanse, when all the present day continents were connected and a single fauna and flora evolved. Plate tectonics caused the landmasses to separate into the present day continents. Fauna and flora evolved separately into unique species.

"Invasive species" are nothing new. Beginning with modern human migration out of Africa, the continents have been exchanging fauna and flora. Many scientists speculate modern humans drove to extinction other archaic human species that existed simultaneously including the Neanderthals, which apparently we Homo sapiens also mated with. With modern trade and transport, species are being exchanged worldwide at an accelerating rate leading to the "New Pangaea."

Kolbert helps us understand that unless we act now, the human species can also be a victim of the sixth extinction. At the very least humanity will deal with the effects of climate change far into the future and many biological species will disappear. Large parts of the human family, mainly the poorest and those living in the most ecologically fragile and vulnerable regions are facing an existential threat by drought and rising sea levels.

Reading the book, one is struck by the ability of humans to grasp their situation and act to change it. Climate awareness is growing and with it action to halt the discharge of greenhouse gas emissions. Also growing is awareness that the capitalist exploitative system and its drive for profits is incompatible with sustainability.

Humanity faces its biggest collective challenge - its very existence. We must not only deal with the impact of the climate crisis on nature and society today, we must be about winning a sustainable society for the future. We must face it with the "fierce urgency of tomorrow."

Book review:

The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History

By Elizabeth Kolbert

Henry Holt and Company, 2014, 336 pp (hardcover)

Another manmade water crisis in the Midwest: Toledo

Wed, 06 Aug 2014 11:25:00 +0000

While Detroit has been justifiably making headlines because of the manmade water crisis there, just south over the Michigan-Ohio state line another manufactured water crisis has erupted. Toledo, Ohio faced a weekend water ban after tests showed toxins in the city's drinking water supply.

According to The New York Times, residents of Toledo were told not to use their water for drinking, cooking or brushing their teeth. Meanwhile, children and the elderly, and those with compromised immune systems, were told not to use the water for bathing. Toledo isn't the first city in the region to face this problem; last year Carroll Township experienced a similar ban. In 2010, Grand Lake St. Marys was so bad, officials had to warn people not to even touch the water, and it's having problems again this year.

For Toledo, the problem is algae blooms in Lake Erie. The lake is the source of drinking water for 11 million people, but lately, runoff mainly from agriculture, but also from crumbling wastewater infrastructure, has lead to increasing algae blooms in the summer. Like most areas with large factory farms that apply huge amounts of manure to farm lands, the soil in Ohio is supersaturated with nutrients. But when rains come, that excess is carried away by the water and ends up in Lake Erie. There, the nutrients feed algae, creating the large blooms.

The algae can produce powerful toxins that, according to NOAA, can cause everything from rashes, to gastroenteritis, to neurotoxicity. Clearly it's a major problem, a public health hazard, and something you'd think Ohio officials would be rushing to address.

Instead of fixing the problem, Ohio passed a bill creating a fertilizer applicator certification program, but the bill explicitly exempts manure. I'll say that again: a law to create a fertilizer certification program exempts manure. It also includes a voluntary, not mandatory, nutrient management plan program. So, Ohio's solution to this problem is a program that exempts manure, and another that is voluntary. The mind boggles. Or at least it would, if weren't for the fact that the Ohio Farm Bureau championed the legislation. It's a story we see across the country-waterways in trouble and agribusiness offering false solutions.

Across Ohio another false solution is being proposed for the Ohio River. This time it's the old canard that the way to reduce pollution is to allow polluters to pay-to-pollute. The idea is that if we allow polluters to trade the right to pollute, they will reduce their pollution. We've seen this one before. It doesn't work, but that doesn't stop corporate interests from pushing it as a solution.

We know why these false solutions keep on being offered - the corporate interests that benefit from creating large amounts of fertilizer in the form of animal manure refuse to take responsibility for the pollution that manure creates. Instead, they seek to give the appearance of action while residents bear the burden of unclean water: drinking water bans, aquatic dead zones, lakes closed to swimming.

Take action today to protect Ohio's water from factory farms!

This article was reposted from Food and Water Watch with permission.

Photo: The green scum shown in this image taken in October 2011 is the worst algae bloom Lake Erie has experienced in decades. Vibrant green filaments extend out from the northern shore. (Wikipedia/NASA)

Gulf still reeling from effects of BP oil spill

Tue, 05 Aug 2014 16:14:00 +0000

On August 4, scientists from the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium released their annual measurement from the Gulf of Mexico's dead zone - in part, the product of the infamous 2010 BP oil spill. The results were troubling. The area of oxygen deprivation in the sensitive ecosystem has been estimated at 5,008 square miles this year.

Though the current exacerbation of the issue is due to nitrogen and phosphorous pollution - the product of fertilizer runoff and wastewater discharges from treatment plants - the dead zone's creation is largely owed to the spill that poisoned the Gulf four years ago, flooding it with 170 million gallons of oil.

In particular, the Gulf's coral community is suffering, according to a new study by scientists at Penn State University in State College, Pa. Using 3D seismic data from the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management and identifying 488 habitats within a 25-mile radius of the original spill site, they found that coral life there shows extensive lingering damage from the spill, suggesting that the disaster's footprint is much more severe than initially thought.

"This study very clearly shows that multiple coral communities, up to 13.7 miles from the spill site and at depths over 5,905 feet, were impacted by the spill," said Charles Fisher, co-author of the study and professor of biology at Penn State. "One of the keys to coral's usefulness as an indicator species is that the coral skeleton retains evidence of damage long after the oil that originally caused the damage is gone."

Jane Lubchenco, an Oregon State University marine biologist and director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, remarked, "The BP oil spill could have been much worse, but the caution is that we still don't fully know the true extent of the damage. But there were likely acute impacts before the oil disappeared, and in fact, some of the oil that did come ashore continues to be suspended in the environment."

Lead researcher of the Penn State study, Helen White, said most experts had previously linked coral damage to the oil spill, but added, "Now we can say it was definitely connected to the spill." The paper the scientists published elaborated, reading, "Coral colonies are vital oases for marine life in the chilly ocean depths. The injured and dying coral today has bare skeleton, loose tissue, and is covered in heavy mucus and brown fluffy material."

And experts have spotted yet another piece of the spill's aftermath, which is its effect on insects, many of which play a vital role in maintaining the integrity of the ecosystem. Louisiana State University entomologist Linda Hooper-Bui said the real damage to bugs was likely done when Hurricane Isaac hit in 2012 and stirred up oil that had lain dormant on the ocean floor. This, said Hooper-Bui, affects the insects and spiders living in the marsh grasses nearby, some of which form the base of the area's food chain.

Michael Blum, director of the Tulane/Xavier Center for Bioenvironmental Research, said, "During the spill, we were asking how long it would take to recover, and the prevailing notion was that we were looking at relatively short recovery times when focusing on coastal marsh and coastal ecosystems." Essentially, that it would "rebound in one to three years and in five years there'd be no indications of the spill. But four years on, there's still a pretty distinct signature of a response to the oil."

Samantha Joye, a University of Georgia marine biologist, added that it could be a long time before scientists really have a handle on the ripple effect of the spill; the coral degradation, decline in insect population, and continuing growth of the dead zone are merely several aspects of the issue that have recently come to light. She said, "The long-term ecosystem impacts from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill are only beginning to be realized. Some areas have recovered well, but others remain significantly impacted. And the problem with this is that the [effects] are so heterogenerously distributed that long-term, system-scale monitoring is required to truly quantify the impacts."

Photo: Nesting pelicans land as oil washes ashore - remnants of the 2010 BP oil spill - in Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana. The residual effects of the spill are negatively affecting everything from the coral reef to insect populations. Gerald Herbert/AP

New Jersey's Passaic River may receive $1.7 billion cleanup

Fri, 01 Aug 2014 16:27:00 +0000

New Jersey may soon be the center of one of the largest cleanups ever proposed by the EPA. The agency has proposed a $1.7 billion dredging of the Passaic River, arguably one of the most polluted water sources in the state. The operation would seek to remove some four million cubic yards of sediment from the river bottom and undo decades' worth of toxicity, mostly caused by nearly a century of industrial activity, including illegal dumping.

Initially, only the lower eight miles of the river would be targeted - from the town of Belleville to the city of Newark - and that alone would be a cumbersome project. It's an area heavily contaminated by high concentrations of dioxin, PCBs (synthetic chemical compounds), and other pollutants, as well as the accumulation of various litter over the years. EPA officials said over 100 companies would likely be found responsible for the Passaic River's poisoning, and would be required under federal Superfund law to pay the cost of the cleanup.

EPA regional administrator Judith Enck remarked, according to CBS, that in addition to dioxins and PCBs, "this river is heavily contaminated with heavy metals like led and mercury, and pesticides. It is a witches' brew of chemicals, and unfortunately, some of them cause cancer." She attributed the contents to chemical corporations, noting, "Right here in Newark, a chemical company manufactured Agent Orange, which was used during the Vietnam War, and it was dumped on the land" afterward, whereupon it seeped into the river. "We've studied this for years," she said. "The river communities have suffered for long enough."

This undertaking would be already be a reality - instead of just a proposal - if not for the various chemical companies that are seeking to delay the effort, environmentalists say. Debbie Mans of ecological group NY/NJ Baykeeper, said such corporations "have been paying lobbyists and lawyers instead of paying for the cleanup." She referred to the various ongoing legal battles between the EPA and chemical companies blamed for the river contamination, all of which are fighting tooth and nail to shirk all responsibility for the disaster and refusing to pay damages.

The Passaic River runs through many working-class Jersey towns, including Hawthorne, Elmwood Park, Garfield, Nutley, and Belleville, as well as the cities of Clifton, Newark, and Paterson; it flows northeast into the latter area, where it drops over the Great Falls of the Passaic River, a 77-foot-high waterfall that has been designated a national landmark by the National Park Service. The Passaic River is also home to various wildlife that have long felt its toxic effects - this includes fish and shellfish that are contaminated with mercury and have extremely high rates of deformity and mutation. People have long been advised not to fish in the area, or to eat anything caught from the river.

The Newark-based company to which Enck referred was Diamond Alkali, which operated there between 1951 and 1969 and acquired a reputation for producing low-quality products and having multiple industrial accidents. The company routinely dumped "bad batches" of its herbicides into the Passaic River, and, indeed, tossed the remains of their Agent Orange into the water as well. The empty tract where the plant once stood is now encased in concrete, preventing any further leaking of contaminants into the river. But the damage, experts acknowledge, was already done long ago.

At this point, some environmentalists remain optimistic - some not. But to move forward with this cleanup, said EPA official Ray Basso, the companies really need to play ball. Some companies have requested the agency dial back the scope of its proposal, claiming that such a large-scale dredging would take too long and would not be feasible from an economic standpoint, but the agency has refused to shave down their goal. "It's not debatable at this point," said Basso. "There's no wiggle room. We can't do any less than what is in our plan."

Basso was among those who remained hopeful, adding, "I've spent 30 years in the Superfund program. Ninety-nine percent of the parties, especially ones that have the money, do come to the table."

Mans believed the corporations should absolutely come forward and pay for what they've done. She remarked, "These are companies with brand recognition. Are they really going to walk away from this? Are they really going to tell their customers they aren't going to do this? It's not like they can't pay."

Photo: The Great Falls of the Passaic River, in Paterson, New Jersey. Wikipedia (CC)