Dirty Justice: Tennessee Towns and Toxic Water
A 'Poster-child' Case of Environmental Racism
Washington Afro American, Commentary, Editor, Posted: Aug 03, 2007
Editor's note: It would be optimistic to think that the growing awareness about the Holt case in Tennessee will mandate the necessary intervention and reform of factors that lead to environmental racism. Still, as a significant marker of disparity in treatment among communities, it is a telling commentary.
On Jan. 9, 2007, Harry Holt died. He was 66. He died without media fanfare, despite his status as the founder of the the gospel group, the Dynamic Dixie Travelers. He died from a disease that has afflicted thousands of Americans; except, his own government might have killed him.
Unlike many African Americans, Holt had obtained his "40 acres and a mule," sharing with his three brothers a verdant 150-acre spread in rural Dickson County, Tenn.; a holding that had passed down to them through seven generations. He and other African Americans, who comprised less than five percent of the county's population, formed a small enclave on Eno Road, where their ancestors had put down stakes since the post slavery era.
It could have been a pretty picture of the American dream. Instead, the pastoral paradise was decaying from within; eaten away by a cancer.
You see, a mere 54 feet away from the Holt's home lies the Dickson County Landfill, now a garbage transfer site. But for years it had been the dumping ground for toxic waste, which eventually seeped through the soil and into the Holts' drinking water well, from which they had drunk for years.
At first the signs seemed random until Holt was diagnosed with prostate cancer shortly before Christmas in 2002 and his daughter, Sheila Holt Orsted, wove them together into a damning tapestry: cousins, children, neighbors, in fact, at least one person in every household in the neighborhood had either had cancer or died from it.
The picture grew grimmer: In 1990 the Environmental Protection Agency tested the Holts' well and found concentrations of trichloroethene, or TCE, a cancer-causing chemical, to be five times the drinking water standard. Yet, the government did nothing. Months later and again the well was tested and the TCE concentration was found to be less noxious. And so, ignoring the previous results, officials told the family that the water was fit to drink. By the time the well was tested again in 2000, the TCE concentration was a staggering 29 times the level at which the government should have intervened. But it was too late.
According to a posting on the Agency for Toxic Substances & Disease Registry Web site, drinking TCE causes symptoms ranging from nausea to liver and kidney damage, impaired immune system, impaired heart function and cancer. It may also cause skin rashes and other ailments, all signs that she has seen among her loved ones. And then her dad died.
Now the horror: Orsted said she found letters from 1993 and 1994 sent to White families whose springs showed dangerous concentrations of TCE advising them to not drink the water. And officials' response time? Not months, as in the Holts' case, but a swift 48 hours after the discovery.
The disparity is so glaring that the Holts' case has become a poster child for environmental racism. It's a little publicized issue -- you don't hear the presidential candidates or the Sunday morning pundits talking about it -- and yet for many black, Native-American, Latino, Asian/Pacific Islander and poor white communities in "Cancer Alley," La., Chester, Pa., Shiprock, N.M., Southeast Chicago, the Appalachians and elsewhere, environmental injustice is the sad story of their lives.
Incinerators, chemical plants, steel mills, landfills and more dot their landscapes; air is a soot-filled specter of death; water a tainted necessity.
The term "environmental racism" was coined in a 1987 groundbreaking study by the United Church of Christ Commission for Racial Justice titled, "Toxic Wastes and Race in the United States." It found that race was a highly significant predictor of where waste facilities were located. The study rocked the environmental and justice advocacy communities. Laws were created, factories were closed, companies were targeted, legislators lobbied. Yet, two decades later, according to a February 2007 report, "Toxic Wastes and Race at Twenty," much has not changed.
"Race [still] maps closely with the geography of pollution....People of color and persons of low socioeconomic status are still disproportionately impacted and are particularly concentrated in neighborhoods and communities with the greatest number of facilities," the report stated.
Of the more than 9 million people living in circular host neighborhoods —— many of which are urban centers - within 3 kilometers of the nation's 413 commercial hazardous waste facilities, over 5.1 million are people of color, who live in neighborhoods with one or more facilities.
Said in another away, a higher percentage of persons of color (56 percent) live in polluted neighborhoods compared to those who live in areas that do not host waste sites.
The evidence paints a bleak forecast and yet, hope is on the horizon. In the wake of Mr. Holt's death, a number of articles on the case have appeared in national media outlets like The Washington Post and Essence magazine. And this week, Sheila Holt Orsted met with the Congressional Black Caucus, who has pledged their support of her quest to obtain punitive damages from the government and the company responsible for the high toll her family has paid.
Furthermore, on July 25 she and other environmental justice activists submitted testimony at the U.S. Senate's Subcommittee on Superfund and Environmental Health hearing entitled, "Oversight of the EPA's Environmental Justice Programs."
Now the issue is again on a national stage. Let's hope that in airing the local and federal leadership's complicity in this injustice to thousands, governments are scrubbed clean, wrung tight and hung out to dry so they can, with clean hands, ensure that all Americans, without regard to race or class, can pursue and lay claim to life, liberty and a breath of fresh air.
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