NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #31/NN_1992_31.iso/spool/misc/activism/progress/9539

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From: New Liberation News Service <[e-mail]>
Subject: NLNS: Burning Dioxin in Clinton's Backyard
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Burning Dioxin in Jacksonville, Arkansas
Rachel's Hazardous Waste News

(NLNS)--On Tuesday, October 27, one week before his election as
President of the United States, Governor Bill Clinton of Arkansas gave the
final order to start burning dioxin in an incinerator in a residential area of
Jacksonville, Arkansas, a community of 29,000 people 15 miles northeast of
Little Rock. The incinerator was built in the residential neighborhood with
state funds for the purpose of burning 30,000 barrels of mixed hazardous
wastes abandoned in Jacksonville by a company called Vertac Chemical,
which manufactured pesticides and herbicides there from 1948 to 1986.
    The New York Times (Nov. 2, 1992 pg. B11) reported that the
Governor made the decision himself to start the burn: "Mr. Clinton, who
has overseen the investigation and cleanup at Vertac most of the last 13
years, gave final approvaI on Tuesday to a plan to burn the chemical wastes
in a incinerator...." The Times said (0ct. 28, 1992, pg. A14), "No other
environmental issue in Arkansas has so dominated the public debate during
Gov. Bill Clinton's 12 years in the Governor's Mansion as the chemical
contamination in Jacksonville and what to do about it."
    Over the years the Vertac site was used for manufacture of DDT,
aldrin, dieldrin, toxaphene and the chemical warfare defoliants 2,4-D,
Silvex, 2,4,5-T, and Agent Orange. In 1979 state and federal investigators
discovered dioxin on the Vertac property and in the soil and water several
hundred yards from the site. Official surveys subsequently found dioxin
from the plant in Jacksonville's central city park, making its once-popular
swimming and fishing lake off limits to the public.
    Almost immediately, citizens began pressing for a thorough, safe
cleanup of the Vertac site. In what has now become a familiar story, state
and federal authorities delayed cleanup. According to the New York Times,
"Since 1979... Vertac's toxic wastes and what to do about them have been
the source of considerable strife in the community and have dominated the
attention of Gov. Bill Clinton and his environmental advisers." (0ct. 30,
1992, pg A16)
    In 1986, Vertac declared bankruptcy and willed its 93-acre site to the
people of Arkansas. Vertac's executives abruptly left town and have never
been successfully traced. The New York Times said, "Vertac abandoned the
plant leaving behind roughly 30,000 barrels of chemical wastes, along with
acres of contaminated soil, tanks filled with toxic materials,and miles of
poisonous piping. The EPA [U.S. Environmental Protection Agency]
considers the site one of the country's worst hazardous waste sites, not only
because of [the] extent of the contamination but also because the plant is
only a few blocks from a day care center, a hospital, and hundreds of
houses." (0ct. 30, 1992, pg. A14.)
    By 1989 state and federal officials had made firm plans to build an
incinerator in a residential neighborhood of Jacksonville to burn some 22
million pounds of Vertac's dioxin-laced wastes.
    On at least two occasions a majority of the citizens of Jacksonville
expressed, through referendums and public meetings, that they did not want
the incinerator built. Many local people considered it a dirty, dangerous way
to "get rid of" the wastes. They pointed out that cleanup teams had already
packed the 30,000 barrels in special drums, which were not an immediate
threat. The real threat was the wastes already released into the community,
the ground and the groundwater. Incinerating the 30,000 barrels would be a
cosmetic gesture that did not address the residual problems. State and
federal officials ignored these expressions of sentiment and forged ahead
with their plan to burn the visible evidence, to make Jacksonville look clean
again. The real cleanup of soil and water would have to wait for a later time.
    In 1990, Marco Kaltofen, a chemical engineer with the National
Toxics Campaign, presented Governor Clinton with a White Paper outlining
alternatives to incineration, including chemical destruction (dechlorination),
and above-ground storage in steel-reinforced concrete buildings.(1)
Subsequently in 1991 the U.S. Office of Technology Assessment (an arm
of Congress) released a report called Dioxin Treatment Technologies, in
which they reported the successful destruction of dioxin-containing wastes
of chemical dechlorination processes. Chemical dechlorination occurs inside
a closed container, releasing nothing to the surrounding environment.
Jacksonville has two other Superfund dumps besides the Vertac site, and
OTA reported that a chemical dechlorination technology called BCD had
been shown to successfully detoxify soils from these other sites. "Test
results confirmed that BCD is a candidate technology for the cleanup of
halo-carbon-contaminated liquids and soils in an environmentally acceptable
manner (closed system)," OTA said.(2) The term "halo-carbon" in this case
referred specifically to 2,4,-D, Silvex, 2,4,5-T, and dioxins, which were
successfully destroyed by the BCD process. The U.S. Navy has selected
BCD technology to clean up its contaminated sites, and has built a BCD
decontamination machine which is in use now to clean up PCB
contaminated soils in Stockton, California. State and federal official in
Arkansas turned a blind eye to these alternative technologies.
    At public meetings throughout 1989 and 1990--some of which we
attended--state and federal environmental officials insisted repeatedly that
the Vertac site incinerator would emit zero dioxin into the surrounding
community.
    A trial burn was conducted during October, 1991. State and federal
officials examined the data and declared the incinerator a resounding
success. But Greenpeace chemist Pat Costner analyzed the trial burn data
and published her own analysis, showing that
the incinerator had not achieved the required 99.9999% destruction of the
wastes, but had in fact achieved only 99.96% destruction. This meant that
the incinerator was releasing 400 times as much dioxin as the regulations
intended.
    State and federal officials studied Costner's analysis and
subsequently admitted that she was right. Costner then calculated that the
incinerator would release somewhere between 150 and 800 grams of dioxin
into the community during the two-year burn. Is this a lot of dioxin? EPA
has established a "safe" level of dioxin as 0.000001 micrograms of dioxin
per kilogram of body weight per day. If you ate this much dioxin every day
for a lifetime and retained it all in your body, you would accumulate a body
burden of 1.79 micrograms, an "EPA safe" dose.
    If we say, somewhat arbitrarily, that 10 times this amount
repsesents an "EPA unsafe" dose, we can calculate that the Vertac
incinerator will emit somewhere between 8 million and 45 million "EPA
unsafe" doses of dioxin into the community of Jacksonville during the two-
year burn. State and federal officials say the proposed burn does not violate
any state or federal laws and thus should be allowed to proceed. One
Arkansas health department official excused the dumping of 150 to 800
grams of dioxin into the community saying, "You have to appreciate how
much dioxin there is in this community already." Pat Costner points out that
this will be the largest intentional release of dioxin that has ever been
executed.
    Officials of the Arkansas Health Department say they had nothing to
do with choosing incineration to get rid of the Vertac wastes. However,
they have made careful plans to take advantage of the experiment by
gathering data about dioxin levels in human
tissues in Jacksonville residents before and after the burn. The pre-burn
study of dioxin in blood and urine of Jacksonville residents will be released
some time during the next month or so. After the experimental burn is over,
new samples will be taken and comparisons will be made to see what levels
of toxins (if any) have lodged in the tissues of the human subjects of the
Jacksonville dioxin experiment. "I can say without fear of contradiction, we
will have the best database on [dioxin in tissues of] the general population
of the U.S. that has ever been developed," Dr. Morris Kranmer, principal
investigator of the study, told us. No long-term follow-up of health effects
in the community has been planned.
    Despite massive pressure from national environmental groups and
local community organizations, one week before the election, Bill Clinton
gave the final order to begin the Jacksonville dioxin burn experiment. The
New York Times noted, "Unfavorable publicity about the Vertac project
contributed to Mr. Clinton's reputation as a leader with a less than sterling
environmental record, his aides said. 'He's been beaten up pretty badly over
this,' said Kenneth L. Smith, Mr. Clinton's top environmental advisor."
(Nov. 2, 1992, pg. B11.)
    The Times went on: "The Vertac project has become typical of toxic
waste cleanups around the country in which costs escalate amid interminable
delays caused by Federal rules aimed at gaining public trust. Mr. Smith said
the Governor believed that unless changes were made in the rules and the
public began to accept some degree of risk, fewer toxic-waste cleanup
projects could proceed or ever larger sums of money would be siphoned
from the Government's budget for all environmental program."
    No sooner had the Governor given the go-ahead than a coalition of
five organizations--including the Washington-based Government
Accountability Project--sued in court to stop the experiment. Judge Stephen
M. Reasoner ruled October 29 that the experimental burn could go ahead for
three days, during which the state must test the incinerator's ability to
destroy dioxin with 99.9999% efficiency. If anything less than 99.9999%
is achieved, "the Court orders that the burning be stopped immediately,"
said
Judge Stephen M. Reasoner.
    The experimental burn occurred over the weekend, but by that time
Governor Clinton's attention had been swept up by other matters, namely a
nation to which he has solemnly promised that things will now be different.

(l) Marco Kaltofen and Sanford J. Lewis, *A White Paper on the Feasibility
of Alternatives of Incineration of Wastes at the Vertac Site in Jacksonville,
Arkansas" (Boston: National Toxics Campaign Fund, October 27, 1990).

(2) U.S. Congress, Office of Technology Assessment, Dioxin Treatment
Techologies--Background Paper [OTA-BP-O-93] (Washington, D.C.: U.S.
Government Printing Office, November, 1991).
Editor's note: this article is reprinted from Rachel's Hazardous Waste
News, no. 311, Nov. 12, 1992.
RHWN provides news and resources to
the movement for environmental justice. The publication is not copyrighted,
and the publisher, Environmental research Foundation, encourages
reprinting "so long as you send us a copy." ERF's address is P.O. Box
73700, Washington, DC 20056-3700 (phone [phone], fax 202-483-
5110). Subscriptions to RHWN cost $40 per year for individuals and
citizen groups, $15 for students and seniors with IDs.

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