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FinalCall.com News
National News
Officials allow dioxin to poison historically Black town
By Adrianne Appel
Updated Aug 14, 2007 - 10:19:00 AM
BOSTON (IPS/GIN) - A U.S. health agency appears to have been using residents from a small town in Louisiana as test subjects against their will: It has repeatedly monitored dangerous levels of dioxin in their blood without sounding any alarms.
Residents of Mossville, La., say the U.S. Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry did nothing to get their community out of harm’s way, despite knowing about the risks of dioxin. In addition, the agency failed to release important test results for five years and made it generally difficult for the community to obtain its actual data.
Mossville residents traveled to Washington on July 25 to testify about the situation before a Senate committee. Their aim was to raise questions about the actions of the toxic substances agency and the EPA, as well as to ask for help in ending pollution in Mossville.
“The air is staggering,” said Haki Vincent, a Mossville resident. “Come stay at my place and you will see firsthand that the air and water is repulsive.”
Mossville is closed in by 14 chemical factories, including Conaco Phillips, a petroleum giant, and Georgia Gulf, a vinyl products manufacturer that had revenues of $2.4 billion in 2006, according to the company.
A historically Black community founded in the late 1700s, Mossville is unincorporated and has had no voting rights within the state. With no way to control what businesses operate within the town’s borders, residents have watched as some factories have moved to within 50 feet of people’s homes.
Dioxin compounds are a byproduct of petroleum processing and vinyl manufacturing, and residents in Mossville say the factories are releasing so much of the pollutant into the air that they are becoming sick.
Studies show that the community suffers from high rates of cancer, upper respiratory problems and reproductive issues, and residents say dioxin pollution is the cause.
Residents want an end to the pollution and want to be moved away from the factories.
“Here in this community, people are being inundated with pollution, and it is killing us,” said Shirley Johnson, a Mossville resident.
The Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry tested the blood of 28 Mossville residents in 1999 and found dioxin to be present at levels two to three times higher than what is considered normal. But the agency offered no explanation for the high dioxin levels and failed to mention the factories as a possible source of the pollutant.
The disease registry agents left Mossville until 2001, when they returned and re-tested 22 people. They found that average dioxin levels had dropped slightly but that they were still two to three times higher than normal.
This same year, a division of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency found levels of a dioxin compound called vinyl chloride to be present in Mossville’s air at concentrations 100 times what is permitted by federal law, and ethylene dichloride to be present at 20 times the legal concentration.
But again the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry failed to consider that the local factories could be responsible for the dioxin in the blood of people in Mossville.
“The source of dioxin exposures in the Mossville residents is not known,” the 2001 report said.
The agency did not release the 2001 results until 2006, with no explanation as to why.
“I’m not going to tell you it was the quickest thing we’ve ever done. It is what it is,” said Steve Dearwent, an epidemiologist who led the study.
“This can only be called callous indifference of agencies to the fact that people in Mossville are sick and dying as a result of toxins being dumped on them,” said Nathalie Walker, a lawyer with Advocates for Environmental Human Rights, an environmental group that is representing Mossville.
Delma Bennett, a resident of Mossville, takes photographs of the many people in the community who use breathing machines. “I live in a community that is dying. Schools are gone. Most of the light and happiness of this community doesn’t really exist anymore,” he said.
The Agency for Toxic Substances does not believe that the dioxin levels experienced by people in Mossville are high enough to cause health problems, said Mr. Dearwent, the epidemiologist, who was permitted to speak with a reporter only if a U.S. agency communications expert listened in on the conversation.
Mr. Dearwent said that in Mossville, older people had the highest levels of dioxin in their blood, and younger people had nearly normal levels. This fact points to previous exposure to dioxin, he said, suggesting that a reasonable suspect is typical U.S. store-bought food, which is generally contaminated with some amount of dioxin.
“It’s perceived that all the dioxin exposure is related to industry. Our interpretation is that it is related to their diet,” Mr. Dearwent said. However, tests did not show high amounts of dioxin in local Mossville food, he acknowledged.
Before the health agency experts left Mossville in 2001, they advised residents to change their diets, Mr. Dearwent said, adding that there is no evidence that the factories are releasing dioxin that is settling on the community.
“If there is an exorbitant amount of dioxin being released, it would show up in the soil, the dust and the people. Especially the younger people,” he said, but the agency’s results did not show this.
This interpretation differs markedly from that of independent scientist Wilma Subra, who was hired by the environmental organization to do an independent analysis of dioxin pollution in Mossville.
Ms. Subra found dioxin in the nearby soil to be 2 to 230 times what the EPA considers acceptable. She also compared the U.S. agency’s data about dioxin in the blood of Mossville residents to the type of dioxin compounds actually being emitted by the five vinyl factories in the town.
The analysis found an exact match between the specific dioxin compounds being released by the factories and the compounds found in the blood, Ms. Subra said. Also, the compounds showed up in the blood in the same percentage as those being released by the factories.
“This is inappropriate exposure to the community,” she stated.
Louisiana is known for its long history of gross environmental problems, and the situation in Mossville reflects that history, Atty. Walker said. “The politics have not changed. We have a lot of work to do.”
Monique Harden, an attorney with the environmental organization, said, “What we’re up against is the control of corporations in Louisiana. They have a huge lobbying body and exert a huge influence.” She added that some factories have increased their emissions recently.
Georgia Gulf said the industries in Mossville have improved their environmental records.
“Industry in Louisiana has reduced total [reportable] emissions by more than 80 percent since 1987,” Georgia Gulf spokesman Will Hinson said in a statement to IPS.
In 2005, a local Mossville environmental group filed a petition against the U.S. government with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights of the Organization of American States, on the grounds that Mossville’s environmental human rights are being violated. The group is waiting for a response from the U.S. State Department, Atty. Walker said.
Change is long past due, resident David Prince said. “Fourteen facilities are just spewing these poisons and nothing has been done.”
