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Viewpoint: A Reader Writes: Another’s success can be our map |
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Written by truth
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Tuesday, 02 January 2007 |
Here is a story of how 1,100 residents of Kettleman City, in California’s San Joaquin Valley, defeated Chemical Waste Management, the nation’s largest toxic waste disposal company, which tried to build a toxic waste incinerator. At the time, Chemical Waste already had in Kettleman City one of three Class I toxic dumps in the state. The other two were in Buttonwillow and Westmorland. All three were in rural, agricultural, poor and mostly Latino towns. Kettleman was 95 percent Latino, Westmorland was 72 percent and Buttonwillow 63 percent. The white elite of Kings County generally ignored Kettleman City’s residents, of whom 40 percent spoke Spanish.
When Chemical Waste built its dump four miles out of Kettleman City in the late 1970s it did not bother informing the town’s residents. It followed the same pattern to burn toxic waste. In 1988, the company scheduled a hearing in town for the proposal. The residents didn’t know about it until that day when a representative from Greenpeace, an international environmental group that fights polluters, called Esperanza Maya, a town resident, and asked if she knew about the meeting. Maya and a few friends showed up and were stunned to learn about the plan to burn 108,000 tons of toxins every year. That’s 5,000 truckloads annually, plus the rigs that rumbled into town to dump toxic trash.
The residents of Kettleman City formed El Pueblo para el Aire y Agua Limpio (People for Clean Air and Water). They found out the San Joaquin Valley had the second worst air in the state, after Los Angeles. They discovered a 1984 taxpayer-funded report suggesting placing waste facilities in rural, poor, low educated, highly Catholic communities with less than 25,000 souls who worked in agriculture, mining or timber.
El Pueblo discovered that the company had toxic dumps across the nation, and all located in areas with large African American and Latino communities. Even worse, it was a major polluter, routinely breaking the law. It had paid at that point $50 million in fines. Fines were pennies to this toxic behemoth. Even the San Diego District Attorney’s office warned its board of supervisors to use “extreme caution” in dealing with it.
Chemical Waste’s environmental impact report ran 300 pages, with 700 pages of appendices. El Pueblo launched an all-out attack. Supporters wrote 120 letters to the newspaper and 200 opponents showed up to denounce the plan before the planning commission. Before voting to approve the EIR, commissioners refused to allow speakers to use a Spanish translator.
Why would county officials welcome a toxic waste incinerator? The county would get 10 percent of gross revenue through a hazardous waste facilities tax. The toxic dump brought in 8 percent of the county’s revenue and the incinerator would double that. In segregated Kings County, most of the money was spent in white communities.
El Pueblo went on the offensive. It filed a lawsuit appealing the planning commission’s vote to the all-white Board of Supervisors It launched a postcard campaign that netted 5,000 responses. A petition drive garnered 17,000 signatures. Leaders appeared at rallies, conferences, on local radio, and national television. Finally, a judge ruled in their favor, saying the EIR did not adequately address impacts on air quality and agriculture. The judge also stated Latinos had not been truly included in the public process. The county refused to appeal and in 1993, after a 6-year struggle, Chemical Waste withdrew its petition.
If you treasure your family’s health this David and Goliath tale is Niland’s — and Imperial Valley’s — road map to victory to stop the sludge plant. You can read the nine-page story I have summarized in “Luke W. Cole and Sheila R. Foster, From the Ground Up: Environmental Racism and the Rise of the Environmental Justice Movement” (New York University Press, 2001), p. 1-9. You can order it at Fifth Avenue Bookstore in El Centro.
>> Benny Andrés Jr. is a history professor at Imperial Valley College.
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