Archive for December 2012
Another Win for Your Lake of Air
Late Thursday night Downwinders at Risk, as part of the Dallas Residents at Risk alliance, won a victory that citizens weren't supposed to win.
Immediately after Thanksgiving, Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings and City Manger Mary Suhm had plotted to speed the approval of the first gas drilling permit in Dallas. One left over from 2008 that would be exempt from the new drilling ordinance now in the works. One that included a compressor station and allowed for the drilling in city parks and flood plains. City Hall believed it had greased the tracks with threats of gas company lawsuits and given the City Plan Commission no choice but to approve the permit. Just to be sure, they scheduled the Plan Commission vote for December 20th, a time guaranteed to result in smaller crowds of opposition at City Hall. But something happened to make things go a little off-script. Responding to calls for help, enough Dallas residents showed up to articulately speak against the permit for more than an hour. They represented hundreds of neighborhood groups, the environmental community and public interest organizations like the League of Women Voters. If the raw numbers didn't match earlier attendance, the people that did show up represented real constituencies numbering in the thousands. When the vote was finally called at 7:30 pm Thursday evening, we won 7 to 5. The "grandfathered" gas drilling permit would not be approved by the Plan commission. To overturn this decision, the City Council must find 12 votes – a super majority – in favor of the permit at its mid-January meeting. This was not the result Dallas City Hall was counting on the Thursday night before Christmas. But thanks to supporters like you, it was the result that happened. Just as we mobilized opposition to Midlothian cement plant pollution, and helped organize Frisco residents to close down an obsolete and dangerous lead smelter, Downwinders is drawing a line in the Shale in Dallas and leading a push back against irresponsible urban drilling. And, against very long odds, we're winning….again. We do this to protect your lake of air. You ingest an average of 200 gallons of water every year, or about five bathtubs' worth. But you inhale approximately two million gallons of air every year – your own small lake of air.
In DFW, chances are your lake of air is going to have smog in it, along with some soot, some Sulfur Dioxide, Volatile Organic Compounds, as well as an assortment of other manufactured If your tap water was dirty brown and had lots of particles in it, you'd probably choose to drink bottled water. But when the air is dirty brown and has lots of particles in it, your lungs don't have a choice about the air they can use. Downwinders at Risk is here for one reason and one reason only: to defend your lake of air. Whether your air is threatened by smelters, gas rigs, cement plants or too-common smog, we're working to clean it up. For our efforts, Downwinders was proud to receive the first-ever GreenSource DFW award for Outstanding Grassroots Group in 2012. Looking ahead to 2013, your lake of air faces new threats, including worsening new permits by the Midlothian cement plants to burn large volumes of industrial garbage, and indiscriminate aerial spraying of pesticides by local governments. Downwinders at Risk will fight these threats with the combination of good science and citizen activism that's made us the foremost clean air group in DFW. But we need your help to do it. Our work depends on contributions from folks like you who appreciate what we do. Our annual budget is usually only around $30-50,000. We do all the work we do with an amount of money larger groups spend annually on office furniture or travel. We don't get money from a parent group in Washington or New York. Our board members are all from DFW. They're ordinary citizens like you, not rich patrons. Small donations make up a very large percentage of what we take in every year. We couldn't do what we do without you. In the time it took you to read this message, you've inhaled a couple of more gallons of air. Don't you think it should be clean air? You keep supporting us; we keep working for you – and surprising the opposition with victories that citizens in Texas just aren't supposed to be able to pull-off. That's our promise. Thanks for your consideration and Please click here to safely and securely donate online, or send checks to Downwinders at Risk, PO Box 763844, Dallas, TX 75376. Your donation is greatly appreciated and will be wisely spent. Thanks.
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Call to Action: First Vote on Dallas Gas Permits in 3 Years Thursday
For the first time in three years, the City of Dallas will be officially acting to approve or disapprove gas drilling permits within its city limits. It happens this Thursday, December 20th at 1:30 pm in the City Council Chamber on the 6th floor of City Hall.
The three permits being sought by gas operators Trinity East authorize up to 20 wells each, for a total of 60 wells.
One of the permits is requesting a gas compressor station only 600 feet from a soccer complex.
The other two permits would allow gas drilling in city parks and in the Trinity River floodplain.
These are all bad ideas. Lois Finkelman, the Chair of the Dallas Gas Drilling Task Force advised the City to keep compressor stations out of town. The city currently doesn't allow drilling in the flood plain or on parkland. This vote roles all these bad ideas into one big Very Bad Idea.
Then there's the bad government part. Instead of the City Council adopting a new gas policy that covers all gas operators and then allowing permits to be issued under that policy, the Council is doing it backwards. It's issuing permits for specific sites before the broader, more comprehensive policy is in place. Since drilling in the flood plain and city parkland isn't allowed under current law, the Plan Commission is being asked to approve permits that violates city regulations, with the expectation that the Council will then make these prohibited activities legal. The Council is asking the Plan Commission to do its dirty work for it. It should decline the offer.
Compressor stations are the cement plants of the gas cycle. In fact, some of their emissions are larger than those of a cement plant. Only instead of 300 foot stacks, the pollution comes out 20 feet above ground level. Unlike a gas drilling rig, these facilities run 24/7. By Standard Permit compressors are allowed to emit up to 25 tons of Volatile Organic Compounds like Benzene and Formaldehyde, both carcinogens, 25 tons of Sulfur Dioxide, a respiratory irritant, and 250 tons of smog-forming Nitrogen Oxide. They're also some of the largest sources of Greenhouse Gas pollution in North Texas. Compressors are large industrial operations that don't belong anywhere near people, much less a soccer field full of kids.
Opening the door to drilling on city parkland and in the floodplain sends the wrong message at the wrong time. This allows green space to be permanently removed for industrial use. It creates flooding hazards. It sets s a terrible precedent that will come back to haunt Dallas.
The Powers that Be hope that by scheduling it so close to Christmas, this vote, which brings to an end a three year moratorium on such gas permit requests, will be under your radar. Please show them they're wrong. We know it's a pain to have to deal with this right now, but we don't have any choice.
For three years, we've managed to hold off the rush to drill in Dallas. Time and again you've helped us do so by showing up at critical points in the process. This is the most critical one so far.
And once again, only a strong public showing of opposition from you and other supporters of a sane public health and environmental policy can prevent this Very Bad Idea from becoming reality. Please be there at City Hall at 1:30 pm on Thursday or show up as soon as you can. We wouldn't be asking for your help at this busy time of year unless we really needed you to be there for this one.
Meanwhile, our friends at the Texas Campaign for the Environment have just set up an easy way to e-mail members of the City Plan Commission with prepared comments or ones of your own making at this site: http://www.texasenvironment.org/dsp_TargetTemplate_choices.cfm?TTID=39
Please send comments in between now and Thursday at 12 noon to have an impact. Thanks very much for your support. If enough of us show up, we can do it again.
Jim Schermbeck, Downwinders at Risk
Public Health Action Alert – Exide’s “Community Meeting” on Wednesday
Please come and insist that the clean-up of the Exide lead smelter be open to public notice and comment, and not done behind closed doors.
Exide is hosting a hastily called "public meeting" on demolition and dust control plans for its former Frisco lead smelter Wednesday night beginning at 7 pm at the Frisco Depot in the Historical District, 6499 Paige Street.
Among other things, Exide wants to permanently leave a waste landfill in central Frisco with approximately nine million pounds of smelter waste inside, instead of trucking it out.
The city is letting the company have its way, even though this landfill in downtown will be an impediment to economic development and a constant threat to groundwater and air contamination that will demand never-ending monitoring.
All of the decisions about the clean-up of the smelter site are taking place behind closed doors with no public input or notice.
Last Friday the company submitted its plan for the permanent hazardous waste landfill and got it approved the very same day without any public notice or comment.
Wednesday's meeting is about a demolition plan that has already been written by the company without listening to any public concerns. They're only letting residents know about it after the fact.
We know it's the holiday season – that's why Exide scheduled this meeting. The company hopes you've quit paying attention. We hope you haven't.
There's a lot of dangerous material on the Exide site. If it's not disposed of correctly, Frisco could have an economic and public health black hole in the middle of town forever, what USA Today called lead "ghost factories." That's why this is important.
Meanwhile, the city of Frisco is protecting your interests by…being a silent partner to Exide's plans. City Hall has defaulted to the state and the company's judgment and isn't acting as an independent watchdog.
The City is writing press releases with Exide, but it isn't asking hard questions about the clean-up, or hiring its own experts to double-check what Exide and the state are proposing. It isn't demanding public notice or comment on behalf of residents. In fact, the city is keeping information about the clean-up and smelter to itself, refusing to post it online or release it to residents or reporters.
Come to the Wednesday night Exide meeting to express your displeasure with a strategy that's putting the same people responsible for creating the Exide mess in charge of "cleaning it up."
At this point we need the same public pressure that caused the city to change course and close the outlaw smelter to help open the closed doors that are hiding the clean-up process from public view.
“Animals are the Sentinels”
In the late 1980's Sue Pope became concerned about her horses and cows. Her favorite Arabian was developing "heave" muscles on its torso that Pope's vet said was the result of the horse straining to breathe. Her cattle were acting strangely and not developing as they should. These problems seem to come out of the blue, for no obvious reason Pope could figure out. She also noticed that she and her family didn't feel the same either and wondered if what was affecting her animals was also affecting them. She spoke with her neighbors, some of whom were also noticing strange things among their stock and themselves. They didn't have any answers either. That's when Pope started to look for causes outside the gate of her small Midlothain ranch.
And that was the beginning of what eventually turned into Downwinders at Risk. Because of her own experience it has been Sue Pope's belief that more than expensive monitors or dubious risk assessment studies, "animals are the sentinels" for human health. They are literally the canary furtherest down the coal mine.
When the ATSDR decided to review the monitoring information from Midlothain for it's "health consultation" beginning almost ten years ago, they were in part drawn by the large file of documented cases of animals illness, disease and deformities. There's more than one animal stock breeder who has moved to Midlothian over the last 25 years expecting that elusive "fresh country air" to benefit their animals only to find them suffering weird symptons never experienced before in previous locations.
Animals are sentinels, especially livestock, because they don't go to school or work, but stay in the same place all day and night, they graze exclusivley on local plants grown in the local soil. They drink the local surface and/or well water. Livestock have the most exposure and the most "exposure pathways" to whatever potentially harmful chemicals might be in the environment. If it's harming the animals, it's probaly harming people as well.
That's the context for a new article out in The Nation about animals gettign sick in the gas patch.
"Earlier this year, Michelle Bamberger, an Ithaca veterinarian, and Robert Oswald, a professor of molecular medicine at Cornell’s College of Veterinary Medicine, published the first (and, so far, only) peer-reviewed report to suggest a link between fracking and illness in food animals. The authors compiled case studies of twenty-four farmers in six shale-gas states whose livestock experienced neurological, reproductive and acute gastrointestinal problems. Exposed either accidentally or incidentally to fracking chemicals in the water or air, scores of animals have died. The death toll is insignificant when measured against the nation’s livestock population (some 97 million beef cattle go to market each year), but environmental advocates believe these animals constitute an early warning.
Exposed animals “are making their way into the food system, and it’s very worrisome to us,” Bamberger says. “They live in areas that have tested positive for air, water and soil contamination. Some of these chemicals could appear in milk and meat products made from these animals.”
In Louisiana, seventeen cows died after an hour’s exposure to spilled fracking fluid. (Most likely cause of death: respiratory failure.) In north central Pennsylvania, 140 cattle were exposed to fracking wastewater when an impoundment was breached. Approximately seventy cows died; the remainder produced eleven calves, of which only three survived. In western Pennsylvania, an overflowing waste pit sent fracking chemicals into a pond and a pasture where pregnant cows grazed: half their calves were born dead. The following year’s animal births were sexually skewed, with ten females and two males, instead of the usual 50-50 or 60-40 split.
In addition to the cases documented by Bamberger, hair testing of sick cattle that grazed around well pads in New Mexico found petroleum residues in fifty-four of fifty-six animals. In North Dakota, wind-borne fly ash, which is used to solidify the waste from drilling holes and contains heavy metals, settled over a farm: one cow, which either inhaled or ingested the caustic dust, died, and a stock pond was contaminated with arsenic at double the accepted level for drinking water."
People used to ask Downwinders why we decided to take on air pollution from the gas industry. The reason is that all of the red flags we saw over the years in Midlothian are also being raised around gas facilities – individually and/or collectlively. Many of the same chemicals, many of the same health effects from those chemicals, and then the warning from the animals.
Better than TCEQ monitors. Better than out-of-date risk assessments. Animals are some of the best Guinea Pigs we have in the laboratory of chemicals we all swim in. If we would only listen.