Archive for June 2012
1st National Disease Cluster Conference This Fall
A seven-year old coalition of scientists, activists and health professionals are hosting the nation's first Disease Cluster Conference in Washington D.C. September 12-14th to provide a forum for networking and information sharing among the growing number of people doing work around what appear to be dense concentrations of specific illnesses that may or may not have environmental causes. According to the National Disease Cluster Alliance, "this networking opportunity is not just the conference itself, but also the conference planning process, which will purposely be longer than usual in order to give planning participants an opportunity to interact on issues with low emotional content before broaching more controversial topics. An explicit goal is to build trust among the various stakeholders of disease cluster response." You can find out more about the Conference at the group's website here. A disease cluster is defined by The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) as “an unusual aggregation, real or perceived, of health events that are grouped together in time and space and that is reported to a public health department." The NDCA says " It’s estimated that every year there are approximately 1,000 public requests for investigations into suspected cancer clusters. This staggering figure does not even include cluster concerns about diseases and conditions other than cancer, such as autism, birth defects, multiple sclerosis, or Parkinson’s disease."
Bush EPA Persecuted, er, Prosecuted More Oil and Gas Violations than Obama’s EPA
It would have been nice for Politico or the NYT to have done such a study before a ginned-up manufactured controversy claimed the job of the Best EPA Regional Administrator We Ever Had ™, but instead the Associated Press comes out a month after the fact to conclude that "the EPA went after producers more often in the years of Republican President George W. Bush, a former Texas oilman, than under Obama." Depressing huh? And not at all what you might have expected if you listened to the moaning and groaning of Big Oil and Gas and their supporters on Capitol Hill. To hear them tell it, you'd would have thought he Obama EPA was picking industry names out of hat everyday to decide who to go after. The article uses former EPA Region 6 Administrator Dr. Al Armendariz's railroading by house and Senate Republicans as a jumping off point to examine if there's any meat to the charges that were being made at the time. There isn't. "Armendariz' territory, which also includes Arkansas, Louisiana, New Mexico and Oklahoma, has more oil and gas wells than any of EPA's nine other regions. But the number of enforcement cases against companies working those wells has been lower every year under Obama than any year under Bush. That trend extends to the rest of the country, where the number of enforcement actions against oil and gas producers dropped by 61 percent over the past decade, from 224 in 2002 to 87 last year. The decline came despite an increase in the number of producing wells and despite the EPA's listing of energy extraction as an enforcement priority under Obama. So far this year, the administration has filed 51 formal enforcement cases against energy producers.While there has been an uptick in the average fine against companies producing oil and gas since 2007, when the penalty reached a low in the decade evaluated by the AP, the average is still lower than during some years under Bush, who was viewed as sympathetic to the oil and gas industry. The year 2011 was an exception; the average soared due to a $20.5 million fine against a BP subsidiary in Alaska. That was the largest penalty against an oil and gas producer under Obama, but it was for a pipeline spill that happened five years earlier." Like we said, too bad nobody in the media bothered to check those claims out at the time of the controversy. We bet this study won't be coming up next Wednesday when Dr. Armendariz is once again raked over the coals by the House Energy and Commerce Committee, i.e. Smokey Joe Bartons' gang. Read More
A Deal in Frisco, But Will Anyone See It Before it's a Done Deal?
Word comes with today's Dallas Morning News that the City of Frisco and the Exide lead smelter have reached an agreement wherein the city will pay Exide $45 million to close operations by the end of this year….and leave over 9 million pounds of lead waste in the ground for Exide to clean-up at an undetermined point in the future. Before addressing what little is known about the deal, and the red flags it raises for Frisco residents, let's pause for a moment and praise the efforts of Frisco Uneaded, the local residents group Downwinders helped found and has sponsored for almost a year. Lord knows, the official press releases won't give them any credit. Before their arrival on the scene, Frisco city officials were still talking about what a good neighbor Exide had been, and were negotiating a way to have the smelter remain in town. From its very first meeting, Frisco Unleaded challenged this official stance, reminding the city there was no safe level of lead exposure and calling out the Mayor and Council for their inability to get rid of the smelter through amortization, the same way Dallas got rid of its inner-city lead smelter 30 years ago. In less than 6 months, the work of the group had paid off when the city voted in January to proceed with amortization of Exide. Frisco Unleaded had so completely changed the nature of the discussion that continued operation was no longer a viable alternative. That's successful grassroots organizing. But by then, the council and mayor were already convinced they wanted to engineer their own solution out of the public eye. That's what the press release today is all about. On the surface, it's certainly good news that Exide will not be spewing new lead air pollution out of its stacks and holes in the wall after this year. That's a huge step forward for public health in Frisco that should be celebrated, no question. But there are still many, many questions….. like will Exide still be using the Frisco site to dump its waste? The company is retaining ownership of all the dirtiest most contaminated parts of the operation, including the 9 million pounds plus of waste already sitting there in a floodplain, and the open, currently-in-use landfills. New waste is being deposited there daily. Will Exide be able to continue to use these landfills for disposal of its corporate waste, even after the smelter's smokestacks come down? Even if that dumping also comes to a stop on December 31st, what happens to all that waste in the Stewart Creek floodplain? It sits there indefinitely until Exide decides to clean it up. There can be no downstream development of the City's Grand Park as long as that contamination remains just upstream. Where is the buy-out figure of $45 million figure from? Where did the "$1 million" clean-up figure stated by the City Manager in the Morning News come from? We haven't seen any evidence that there's been any comprehensive testing of the area the city is buying, so how do they know it will only cost a million? The city pretends like it's doing residents a favor by cleaning up to 250 parts per million of lead in soil with the property it's buying. But what is that level of clean-up based on? California uses a 100 ppm clean-up level to protect human health. Why not use that? Lots of questions. But Frisco City Hall isn't releasing the agreement language, because according to one source, the details are still being worked out. Good enough for a press release but not good enough for public release. Moreover the Council is now scheduled to vote on this package on Monday beginning at 5:30 pm – without anyone seeing the actual document or being able to analyze it. That's not good Democracy or public policy. If they had confidence the agreement would stand up to public scrutiny, the council would let the public dig into it for a week or two and then hold a hearing and vote. Press releases are no substitute for the real thing and it's insulting for the Council to rush this important agreement through without more time to study it. You have to wonder if in fact the Council knows this agreement is not the best that could be won, that it leaves huge holes and questions about continued lead contamination in Frisco, and so doesn't want any public oversight of it for fear it would collapse from the weight. Frisco City Hall keeps vowing that they're committed to transparency, but when push comes to shove, they always retreat behind closed doors. We're cautiously optimistic that this agreement is the end of the beginning, but we don't for a minute believe it's the end. Stay tuned.
What Did Dallas City Hall Know and When Did it Know It?
Yesterday's DMN story on gas drilling in the Trinity River floodplains once again shined a spotlight on the role of the Army Corps of Engineers in the delicate business of deciding when it is and is not a good idea to go around setting off the equivalent of bombs underground near dams and levees.
Considering the subject matter, we thought it was kind of strange that the story didn't refer to the way the Corps' recommended 3000 foot buffer zone between dams and fracking originally came to light in DFW or any language from the Corps concerning the threat fracking poses to these structures.
As it turns out, Dallas might have been asked by the Corp to place a moratorium on new fracking inside the city as far back as a year ago because of proposed gas well locations threatening the Joe Pool Lake dam on Dallas's side of the Lake.
We know they asked Grand Prairie for a moratorium on new wells because of the same concern on the GP side of Joe Pool. Because she has the most experience on this matter than any citizen we know, we're going to let Grand Prairie citizen activist Susan Read of the Westchester- Grand Prairie Community Alliance tell us what the DMN should have told us yesterday.….
"The (3000 foot buffer zone or "exclusion zone") was established by the Bureau of Land Management in 1996 to do with "conventional" drilling within 3,000 feet of their federal dams and federal land. In 2010, Chesapeake and XTO sent out form letters to the Corps touting shale gas when seeking approval from the City of Grand Prairie for well sites close to the Joe Pool Lake dam (can we assume they did the same with Dallas?). These letters were sent to no one in particular care of the Corps' downtown Dallas office. Some of us doubt they were ever read. These same form letters were presented to the City of GP to show evidence of contacting all property owners in the area and became part of the files as requirements from the City of GP before approving the permits from the Railroad Commission. As we later discovered they were not aware of any of this until Carl Dimon, a retired petroleum engineer wrote to them on December 18, 2010. On February 18, 2011, the Corps' Col. Robert Muraski wrote back to Mr. Dimon thanking him for informing them of the drilling and fracking near the Joe Pool Lake Dam. In correspondence also dated February 18th, 2011, Col. Muraski writes to the City of Grand Prairie stating that the Corps never knew about the gas well sites proposed by Chesapeake and XTO near Joe Pool Lake Dam until they received correspondence from Mr. Dimon. Meetings with the Corps and the City of Grand Prairie ensued. With our Open Records Request in July of last year, we discovered that there had been numerous conversations with the Corps and the City of GP in January-February of 2011…and in this correspondence they requested that Grand Prairie AND Dallas put in place a Moratorium until they could do studies on the impacts of fracking on the already-compromised Joe Pool Lake dam. They wrote to Dallas because of the proximity of the "Luminant" drilling site on the Dallas side to the Joe Pool Lake dam. This site is one of eight well sites currently seeking a Special Use Permit from the city. Rosemary Reed (president of our Westchester Association of Homeowners) and residing only a few hundred feet from one of the well sites near the dam) wrote an email to the Corps and they responded to her email in on Aug. 14, 2011 that Chesapeake was NOT cooperating with their request to NOT pursue any more activity at the site until further notice. On Sept. 6, 2011 the City of Grand Prairie put in place a moratorium on all drilling and fracturing activities within 3,000 feet of dams and other water retention structures. It has been extended to January 2013."
Meanwhile, Dallas activist Raymond Crawford has submitted an Open Records Act request to the City of Dallas asking for all correspondence between the city and the Corps to confirm that City Hall did indeed get a request last year from the Corps to implement the same moratorium around dams and levees that it asked Grand Prairie to implement. Put in proper context, it makes so much sense that the Corps would have sent a letter to Dallas as well for the same reasons. One dam and lake with two cities on either side of them, both with gas drilling sites within 3000 feet.
Why would the Corps send one city with well sites near the dam a request for a fracking moratorium, but not send the other city with well sites just as close on the other side of the dam the exact same letter? Chances are they wouldn't and maybe that's why the city is dragging its feet in replying to Crawford's request. Is there a 2011 letter from the Corps sitting in a Dallas City Hall file drawer asking the city to quit permitting wells near Joe Pool dam and other "water retention structures?"
That's the questions the Morning News should have asked in its story on Tuesday. Let's hope there's a follow-up that puts the Dallas levee issue square in the middle of the larger issue of the Corps' moratorium request or Mr. Crawford gets his open records before the City Council votes on a new drilling ordinance that will decide where and how wells will be sited. Why is this so important? The Corps Col. Muraski set out the very high stakes involved in his February letter to Grand Prairie asking for a moratorium, noting that "significant dam safety concerns have been identified at Joe Pool Dam. As a result, that project is currently "considered to be a high priority with respect to implementation of measures that will reduce risk to thousands of persons and properties located downstream. Our engineers believe that drillng and fracking at the (Chesapeake well site near the dam in Grand Prairie) may increase the risk to the project and possibly contribute to catastrophic damn failure." At the end of the letter the Colonel says, "Since Joe Pool Dam is partially located in the City of Dallas, we will also be pursuing the moratorium with that municipality."
If a similar letter was sent to Dallas City Hall and never publicized or translated into public policy as the Corps requested, AND it takes a citizen to uncover the ruse, then the City Manager and several of her employees should be promptly fired.
New Cement Plant Rules in Trouble at EPA?
There's been a flurry of news about cement plant pollution this past week or so that we haven't been able to cover as well as we should have for a clean air group that has the largest concentration of cement manufacturing capacity in the US in its own backyard. Most important of all is the possibility that EPA will mess with its tough new cement plant emissions rules that Downwinders and so many of you fought long and hard to get passed. These are the rules that were at the center of the 2008 DFW airport hearing that drew 200 people – the largest hearing on them in the country. These are the rules that are forcing old wet kilns like Ash Grove and others around the country to finally modernize. Originally mandated to come on line in 1997, they're just now on the verge of being promulgated as final by EPA. Only there's a catch. For no apparent reason that anyone in the environmental side of the table can figure out, EPA is seriously considering giving industry a two-year extension that no court has ordered EPA to give them. There's a June 15th deadline that the agency imposed on itself, to respond to a Portland Cement Association's petition to either delay the rule outright until 2015 instead of 2013, or take comment on such an extension. Either move would delay the implementation since they're on schedule to become official in November. No one at EPA will say why they're taking the PCA petition so seriously when they've spend the last two decades blowing off similar requests by citizens. Downwinders, along with 14 other local groups, has signed a letter going to EPA Assistant Administrator Gina McCarthy that protests ANY delay and asking her to reject the PCApetition. Downwinders Director Jim Schermbeck was one of seven people that met with McCarthy in Washington DC earlier in the month to discuss how important these rules are to places like Midlothian – where's there not one, not two, but three cement plants operating within close proximity to one another. While the meeting went well, McCarthy was non-committal. We're not ones to quietly sit on the sidelines as something that we've worked for almost 20 years gets victimized by what looks to be election year politics. Expect to see more in the coming days about what you can do to prevent this public health tragedy from an increasingly wimpy EPA. Stay tuned
Yes, We Know
The Dallas Morning News finally decided to ask the Army Corps of Engineers about Dallas' plans to drill for natural gas in the Trinity River floodplain, some five years after the City leased land for that very purpose, and three months after the City's gas drilling task force voted to allow such drilling.
The Corps's response? We're sticking with our 3000 foot buffer zone we've already failed to enforce at Joe Pool Lake! For the most part, the DMN story doesn't present any new information about the hazards posed by drilling too close to dams. But there is one piece of news. A nationwide team of Corps members is "searching for what’s known and unknown about possible risks from mineral extraction near dams.The goal is to create a system that will let corps managers set a site-specific buffer zone around a dam or other structure, said Anita Branch, a geotechnical engineering specialist with the corps’ Fort Worth district.
The distance between a dam and drilling in different places might be bigger or smaller depending on local geology, geography and other factors, she said. Although the corps is looking first at its own operations, any local government would be able to use the system to make its own decisions on safety zones around non-corps dams and levees, Branch said.
Until such a system is in place, the corps’ Southwestern division, which includes Texas and surrounding states, is keeping a 3,000-foot buffer around its dams and levees.'The 3,000 feet was based largely on geology in the Southwestern district,' Branch said." In other words, don't look for this number to change any time soon since it originated in the Barnett Shale.
Unfortunately, the Corp can only enforce the 3000 buffer zone on land it owns. Otherwise, it can only "advise" and "recommend" that local governments don't act like idiots by putting active wells where they shouldn't be any. But of course in Dallas' case, they have the additional leverage of overseeing the Trinity River levees that must not only protect Dallas from flooding, but will also have to hold up to the impacts of the proposed Trinity toll road going by or through them.
So Dallas might be more interested in listening to the Corps' advice. What's the larger story missing from this one? That in 2007, without any public hearings or debate the City of Dallas decided to sell off a huge chunk of open space that also serves as flood control for gas drilling. And then, citing the "undesirable uses" already occurring in the flood plain the city's own drilling task force decided those same floodplains would be a great place for drilling – and left themselves the out that any such drilling would have to be done with the Corps' permission. Only it doesn't. It can only recommend when it comes to the city-owned property that's already been leased. So it will have to be up to the Dallas City Council if it wants to be sure no drilling takes place in the Trinity River floodplain. They'll have to make the Corp's recommendation official policy.
Are there at least eight council members who will take the Corp's advice? Don't take it for granted. And one more thing. If 3000 feet is the appropriate structural buffer zones for dams, what's the appropriate structural buffer zone for underground pipelines, bridge supports, and even home foundations?
They Were Against Clean Air Before they Were For It
It's always a good darkly-comic read when fierce opponents of clean air take credit for progress even while they're still fighting against it. So get ready from some really twisted pretzel logic as you tackle the official and severely anti-climatic Ash Grove press release that announces the 2-year, $136 million effort to convert the Last Wet Kilns in Texas™ to dry kiln technology, eliminating hundreds of thousands of tons of air pollution by 2014.
This news was first broken by us last January, then Ash Grove applied for the state permit it needed (w/o having to be bothered with public notice or comment), and then again over a week ago when we pointed out they'd ink the engineering contract. Nevertheless, we'll leave it up to the company to have the belated last word. But you're not going to find any mention of Downwinders' seven-year "Green Cement Campaign," or the more than a dozen local governments that overwhelmingly voted for procurement policies that explicitly said they were not buying wet kiln cement because it produced too much air pollution. Or the lawsuit that Ash Grove eventually was forced to file when they lost a 5-0 vote over such a procurement policy at the Tarrant County Commissioners Court. Or how Downwinders successfully intervened last year to protect those procurement policies when Dallas and Arlington were thinking about ditching them over that Ash Grove lawsuit. No, Charles Sunderland the Third and Company would rather drink lye than give us our due.
But the press release does cite the "U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) portland cement National Emissions Standards for Hazardous Air Pollutants (NESHAP) rule, which are scheduled to take effect in Sept. 2013," as a determining factor in the modernization.
That would be the same standard that over 200 local residents supported in-person throughout a day-long hearing at DFW airport in 2008. It was the largest, best-attended hearing on the rules that EPA hosted that year, including stops in L.A. and Washington D.C. , capping over a decade of organized support from Downwinders at Risk. No other single grassroots group did more for so long to make sure those rules got approved because no other group was faced with such a concentration of old, dirty wet kilns that we knew would have to modernize to conform to them. By linking their decision to the NESHAP standard, the company is at least acknowledging a large factor that Downwinders had a large impact on. But the comedy of the Ash Grove press release lies not in what it leaves out, but what it crams in – toasts to its success from all the elected officials who worked do diligently to destroy the NESHAP rule and, or thwart our Green Cement Campaign.
“My colleagues will be delighted, as I am, to know that Ash Grove is making this investment in Midlothian during difficult economic times. The costs that this company is incurring to comply with mandated federal air emissions regulations are incredible while sales are down in the industry by more than 40 percent. We are fortunate that they are 0making this investment in Texas. In my estimation, Ash Grove always has been a leading corporate citizen,' Texas House Appropriations Chairman Jim Pitts (R-Waxahachie) said in his reaction to the decision."
Give him points for consistency: Rep. Pitts was against the federal cement plant rules when the economy was booming too. And he fought any and all attempts to protect the downwind cities from Ash Grove's green cement lawsuit in the Texas legislature. But he's delighted that both evil strategies worked in concert with one another and produced this wonderful result!.
Smokey Joe is merely pleased: “For years, I’ve seen these companies scrutinized by groups who would rather shut them down and force Texans to rely on imported cement. In spite of that, in a bad economy, Ash Grove has chosen to continue to operate in Texas and further improve on its record of reducing air emissions. I am pleased by Ash Grove’s decision and by the knowledge that it will be among the lowest emitting cement producers in Texas,' said U.S. Rep. Joe Barton (R 6)….."
Yes. That's the same Joe Barton still trying to sabotage the very NESHAP rules he's congratulating Ash Grove for following. Don't spend too much time thinking about the hypocrisy in this one, it'll make you pass out. In point of fact, the fight over cement pant pollution in Midlothian has been about citizens dragging an industry kicking and screaming into the 21st Century, being forced to reduce its pollution but also becoming more efficient. Jim Pitts, Smokey Joe, and Charles Sunderland the Third never mention that while pollution has been significantly reduced in Midlothian as a result of all those nasty federal mandates and citizen lawsuits and permit fights, the actual manufacturing capacity to make cement at Midlothian's three cement plants has grown.
Meet a “Minor Source” of Air Pollution in the Natural Gas Mining Cycle
Despite overwhelming community opposition, Allegheny County (Pittsburgh) is getting its very first compressor station this month. It's tastefully located near a mall in order to process gas being extracted from near-by Marcellus Shale wells. Not considered a great hot spot for the gas itself, the county nevertheless finds itself in close-enough proximity to the gas patch to be of use to operators as a repository for some of its other facilities along their fuel cycle. Along with five compressor engines there will also be three dehydrators, and reboilers, and two 6.500 gallon storage tanks. It will release 35 tons of smog-forming Nitrogen Oxide (NOx), 17 tons of Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs), 7 tons of formaldehyde (a known carcinogen), and 11 tons of soot/Particulate Matter pollution. The NOx figure alone is the equivalent of something like 2500-3000 cars worth of pollution alone. No mention in the article how much CO2 is being emitted. This facility is considered a "minor source" of air pollution by the Allegheny County Health Department. Everything is relative of course. Compared to the steel mill smokestacks that made up the skyline of Pittsburgh for most of its existence 70 tons of crud a year might strike you as smallish. But when you stick that same 70 tons of crud as close as 500 feet away from a neighborhood or school that's not used to having heavy industry located so close, it doesn't look all that minor. And that's why the Dallas City Council's task force recommendation to allow compressors on the gas well pad itself, restricted only by the same zoning requirements of a drilling rig that produces a lot less pollution, is so nonsensical. Compressors are giant polluters. Their engines can be the size of locomotives. Imagine five of these only 500 feet from your yard or child's school. That's what's being endorsed by the task force and that's what citizens are rejecting out of hand. One of the major issues the Dallas City Council will have to decide as part of its new gas drilling ordinance is how and where these huge, necessary parts of the gas industry infrastructure will be allowed to locate.
Mesopotamia or Midlothian – Burning is Bad
Here's a great story from Wired that reports the results of the first tests done in and around the places where the military's "burn pits" were located during the most recent Iraq and Afghanistan wars.
Not familiar with "burn pits?" If you grew up in rural Texas you are because it's exactly the way your grandfather got rid of his family's trash – by putting it in a big pile and then putting a match to it. Besides turning a ravine into an impromptu landfill, burn pits are the most popular way of disposing of your garbage when Waste Management just can't get to you.
In the military, burn pits were the disposal option of choice for everything: human waste, paints and paint removers, asbestos insulation, plastic and styrofoam containers, old computers and monitors – any waste you can imagine being generated at a front line military base.
Not surprisingly, troops that spent time around these open-air waste incinerators have been complaining about chronic bronchitis, neurological disorders, and rare cancers – just like people who live dowwnind of waste burning at cement kilns and incinerators. Military spokespersons have reassured these whiners that there was "no specific evidence" of the pits doing any human health damage. To which all of you who've been doing this for a while will respond: "How many times did anyone look for such damage?" The answer is zero – until now. Pulmonologist Dr. Anthony Szema of the Stony Brook School of Medicine, just released the results of an experiment that links the burn pit dust to immune system damage. Dr. Szema exposed 15 mice to the dust from the remains of a burn pit in Iraq. When collected on-site, the pit still stunk with the incinerated remains of animal carcasses, lithium batteries, printers and glues. This lovely cocktail of toxins was then inhaled by the mice and researchers tracked their respiratory system and spleen for signs of strain. And they got them.
Lung inflammation occurred within two hours of exposure, and T-cells dropped by a third. T-Cells are a critical component of the human immune health originating in the bone marrow but then going to the Thymus to finish their development. AIDS and other immune destroying diseases kill T-Cells. After two weeks of being regularly exposed to the burn pit dust, the mice had lost 70% of the T-cells they started with. "I can't even imagine what this date shows when you think about someone coming back from Iraq," Szema says. "these guys weren't inhaling the air once. They were working in it, sleeping in it, exercising in it. For days on end." Despite being limited to mice, Szema is confident that the results are transferable to humans. The symptoms of his mice line up with those being reported by veterans to a database at BurnPits360, a website dedicated to tracking the health of exposed servicemen and women. It's also one more step in understanding why different people react to pollution differently. With your immune system offline everyone is vulnerable to different inherent health weaknesses that are exacerbated. Dr. Szema isn't surprised at the results of his groundbreaking tests. "Based on the patients I've seen, this is a no-brainer. If anyone tries to say, ' Oh dust is just dust,' I can tell them that's simply not true."
CDC Recommended Lead Levels Go Down, Exide Lead Numbers Go Up
Behind-the-scenes, many factors are driving the action between the City of Frisco and the owners of the Exide lead smelter that sits in the middle of town. We can only speculate for now. Meanwhile, let's look at some pressure points that entered the public record this last week on a collision course, and make the smelter's exit seem inevitable, no matter how much the state tries to stave it off.
On Wednesday, for the first time in 20 years, the federal government lowered the recommended limit for lead exposure in young children, where it can often do the most harm. And it wasn't just decreased by the Centers for Disease Control – it was slashed by 50%, from 10 micrograms of lead per deciliter of blood to 5.
If those sound like tiny amounts, that's because they are. But the bad news is that the overwhelming consensus of environmental health specialists is that numbers even below this amount are doing cognitive and behavioral harm to children. Even the CDC itself states that there is no known safe level of lead exposure. Not that any amount will do harm necessarily, but that any exposure is statistically capable of doing harm based on the field studies coming in. CDC estimates there are 450,000 kids nationwide that don't meet the new standard for a poison that will not honor it. We don't know how many children in Frisco fall into this category, but we do know, thanks to Dr. Howard Mielke of Tulane University, that the children the state health services agency tested for blood lead showed that 1.6 times more kids living in Frisco had blood lead levels above 2 micrograms per deciliter compared to the state as a whole – 60% above the norm.
Meanwhile, new monitoring results from around the Exide smelter show that it failed for a second month in a row to obtain the new federal standard for lead particles in air of .15 micrograms (Look under "Monitoring Data" and download). In March the three month rolling average for March was.19 and .22 for April. This would mean more if TCEQ had not granted a 13 month free pass to break the standard instead of enforcing a deadline in November of this year.
Did we mention that the new air-lead standard is of course based on the science behind the old blood lead level of 10 micrograms per deciliter, and therefore instantly obsolete even before Exide has to comply with it? The regulations are forever chasing the science. It might take another 4 to 10 years to lower the lead-air standard. And then more research will show even more subtle effects of lead at lower levels of exposure and so on. People who live around facilities like Exide can never win. And sooner or later, Exide lawyers or its insurance companies will be explaining why its a really bad idea to keep operating a lead smelter in a densely populated area that includes gated communities where people can spend a lot of money on attorneys themselves. We hear that things are proceeding apace in some kind of "peace with honor" resolution to this train wreck between the city and he company. Surely this last week's news can't help but spur those discussions.
DPD Needed (Again) to Protect Gas Drilling Proposals
(Cross-posted from the Dallas Resident at Risk website) The last time the Dallas Gas Drilling Task Force met in February, they voted on recommendations so bad—like fracking inside city parklands and within 500 feet of neighborhoods—they actually needed police protection during the deliberations. As the Task Force finally presented those recommendations to Mayor Rawlings and the City Council today, the only thing that changed was the crowd: What had been a small handful of activists became a filled-to-capacity hearing room with more people lined up outside than sitting down inside. Several organizers were forcibly removed yet again as they vocalized their disagreement with the idea that drilling all along the Trinity River floodplain and even inside the levees is somehow “safe and reasonable.” As it turns out, stating the obvious can get you kicked out of City Hall very quickly.Lots of coverage! CBS – NBC – KERA – Dallas Morning News – Dallas ObserverTo their credit, several City Council members pushed back against the worst proposals and even started using some independent thought to come up with better ideas in a few minutes than the Task Force had conceived of in 8 months. Unfortunately, some of the other Council Members fantasized about drilling royalties replacing billions of dollars of tax revenue and improving quality of life in Dallas—as if you can just go out and buy that at the mall. Some seemed convinced that fracking is perfectly safe and that it is going to be allowed in Dallas, regardless of what the pesky residents want. But neighborhood groups representing close to 180 homeowners associations all over the city have endorsed our “five protections” position. The gas-masked protesters were the lead story on the 6 o’clock news tonight. Democracy is on the march, and the police can’t evict us from the streets.Mayor Rawlings announced that there will be two more briefings before the City Council takes any votes, so we’ll see you all at City Hall again in the near future. You’ll get the schedule as soon as we do. Stay tuned for more interruptions of your normally scheduled programming