A blast from the Clintons' past: Ohio children test positive for mercury (talk about immoral) [View all]

[Skwmom]

Last edited Mon Feb 8, 2016, 12:38 AM - Edit history (5)

WTI wanted to build America's largest toxic waste incinerator in East Liverpool, Ohio. The incinerator is located 1,100 feet from an elementary school.

WTI was owned by Jackson Stephens, who donated $200,000 to Bush #1 to help this project along.

There were problems and the project was not going to be approved during the Bush #1 administration.

When Bush's ratings tanked during his bid for re-election, Stephens donated $100,000 to Clinton #1 as well as extending a 2 million line of credit to the DLC when they were tapped out.

Bill Clinton won and with some serious monkey business (a Hillary crony) at the EPA, the permit was approved.

President Clinton and Vice President Gore visited East Liverpool while campaigning for election in 1992; at that time, Mr. Clinton said that, if he were elected, WTI would never be allowed to operate. But the huge incinerator began burning hazardous waste in 1993. Mr. Clinton has not returned to East Liverpool since he became President in 1992.

WTI failed part of its test burn in 1993, releasing four times more mercury than allowed. Children at the elementary school were tested for mercury in their urine prior to WTI operation and again six months after the facility started burning as part of a state health study. In the first test, 69 percent of the children tested negative; the follow-up test found that nearly the same number tested positive.

U.S. EPA's own risk assessment of the facility found at least 27 possible accident scenarios that could threaten the lives of the children in the nearby elementary school. Despite these and other problems, the U.S. EPA issued WTI a full commercial operating license in 1997. The agency has also allowed the facility to nearly double the types of wastes it can burn.

When Clinton became president, he appointed Carol Browner head of U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Ms. Browner then sent a small cadre of scientists to court in Cleveland, Ohio, to serve as expert witnesses on behalf of Waste Technologies, Inc. (WTI).

Because a memo to Ms. Browner from one of her staff was leaked to Greenpeace (a plaintiff in the lawsuit trying to shut down WTI), Ms. Browner's staff were forced to admit under oath that after Ms. Browner took office on January 20th, EPA conducted a secret risk assessment on the WTI incinerator. EPA's secret risk assessment revealed that the incinerator would be 1000 times more dangerous than EPA had estimated in the risk assessment they released to the public.

Hillary's Involvement:

The EPA Deputy Administrator Robert Sussman that eventually approved WTI's application was a law school classmate of both Bill and Hillary.

Sussman had previously acted as legal counsel to the Chemical Manufacturing Association, at a time when two of its biggest clients, Du Pont and BASF, were negotiating contracts to supply two-thirds of the waste to WTI." The Nation Magazine

The plant opponents cited Sussman's appointment to the EPA through the influence of first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, whose former law firm represented the original founder of Waste Technologies, Jackson Stephans.
Source Archives Cleveland Plain Dealer

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/2/24/462327/-

Note: East Liverpool is in an economically depressed community of conservative, hardworking essentially blue-collar people, poor people and people of color. All of East Liverpool's 500 black American residents live in the area of the incinerator.

http://www.greens.org/s-r/078/07-42.html

Update: What happened in later years when toxins were released:

The EPA found that the Heritage incinerator emitted gases that contained high levels of toxic chemicals into the air 195 times over 175 days from November 2010 through December 2014.

Those emissions happened through both mechanical failures and operators’ errors, according to the EPA’s findings.

The toxins, which could have been different on different days, likely included dioxin, which can affect reproductive and fetal health; cadmium, which can cause kidney disease and fetal malformations; chromium, which can cause cancer; and others, including mercury, lead and PCBs — the same toxins that once accumulated throughout Lake Erie.

WHAT WAS THE OUTCOME:

As required by Ohio EPA, Heritage took measures to prevent future incidents by intensifying screening, adding tighter restrictions on waste, performing more frequent inspections of solids within the secondary combustion chamber to remove and control buildup, redesigning the slag quench system, and cancelling problem waste streams. These measures will need to be added to the facility’s permit requirements.

In addition, Heritage agreed to pay a $34,000 civil penalty. A portion of the penalty, $6,800, will go to Ohio EPA’s Clean Diesel School Bus Fund. This fund helps retrofit school buses with pollution control equipment to reduce particulate emissions from diesel fuel engines to protect students who ride buses.

WOW. A 34,000 penalty. That will teach them to "cut it out."


http://www.democraticunderground.com/12511169175