Toxic Public Housing. Some 870,000 of the 1.9 million (46 percent) housing units for the poor, mostly minorities, sit within about a mile of factories that reported toxic emissions to the Environmental Protection Agency.
Toxic Schools. More than 600,000 students in Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, Michigan and California were attending nearly 1,200 public schools that are located within a half mile of federal Superfund or state-identified contaminated sites.
The "Poster Child" Case of Environmental Racism
The UCC report profiled a case in Dickson, Tennessee and tagged it the "poster child" for environmental racism. Dickson is located some 175 miles down the road from Memphis. The culprit is the Dickson County Landfill-suspected of poisoning the African American Holt family's wells and drinking water with the toxic chemical trichloroethylene (TCE), a suspected carcinogen. The landfill has created a toxic nightmare on Eno Road. The Holt's homestead is located just 54 feet from the landfill property line. It is ironic that barrels containing toxic chemicals were dumped in Dickson's mostly Black Eno Road community in 1968-the same year that Dr. King was killed in Memphis.
TCE was found in the Holts' wells as early as 1988 and later on in the early 1990s. But government officials informed the family in letters that their water was safe. TCE was later found in private wells and is believed to be the cause of severe illnesses, mostly cancer. TCE contamination has rendered water from wells and springs as far as two to three miles from the landfill unfit for human consumption.
All levels of government failed the Holt family. It is ironic that generations of Holts and their relative in the Eno Road community survived the horrors of post-slavery racism and "Jim Crow" segregation, but may not survive the toxic assault and contamination from the Dickson County Landfill.
In 2003, the Holt family sued the city and county of Dickson, the State of Tennessee, and the company that dumped the TCE. The family is represented by the New York-based NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, Inc. (LDF). The case is still pending.
Earlier this month, the Natural Resource Defense Council (NRDC), a national conservation group, Sheila Holt Orsted and her mother Beatrice Holt, filed a federal lawsuit against the City and County of Dickson, Tennessee claiming local governments have not done enough to control toxic wastes around the contaminated landfill. The lawsuit alleges that TCE , an industrial chemical disposed at the Dickson Landfill that has been linked to neurological and developmental harm and cancer, poses an imminent and substantial endangerment to human health and the environment. The lawsuit seeks to get the water contamination cleaned up.
The Dickson County solid waste department currently operates a recycling center, garbage transfer station and a Class IV construction and demolition landfill at the Eno Road site, where 20-25 heavy-duty diesel trucks enter the sites each day, leaving behind noxious fumes, dangerous particulates, household garbage, recyclables and demolition debris from around Middle Tennessee. Residents have continually called for operations at the landfill to be shut down and the site cleaned up.
After drinking contaminated water at least since 1988, many family members are struggling with cancer and other illnesses. The family patriarch Harry Holt died of cancer in January 2007. Forty-six year old Sheila Holt Orsted, his daughter, is currently undergoing treatment for breast cancer. Her mother, Beatrice Holt, suffers from cervical polyps.
A Call to Action
Because of the urgent environmental health disaster created by the leaky Dickson County Landfill and government inaction, the UCC report called for the following actions:The Dickson County Commissioners immediately close all solid waste operations (recycling center, garbage transfer station and Class VI Construction and Demolition landfill) at the facility on Eno Road.
The State of Tennessee institute a moratorium on the siting and permitting of waste facilities and other polluting facilities in the Dickson Eno Road community.
The federal EPA and the State of Tennessee clean up the contamination caused by the Dickson County Landfill under the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA) Corrective Action Program, a law passed by Congress compelling responsible parties to address the investigation and clean-up of hazardous releases themselves.
The U.S. Congress hold hearings on the EPA handling of the Dickson County Landfill and the treatment of black and white families whose private wells and springs were contaminated by the leaky landfill.
The U.S. EPA Office of Inspector General (OIG) conduct an independent study of the Dickson County Landfill Superfund site evaluation and hold hearings on the treatment of the Holt family and the African American community on Eno Road in Dickson, Tennessee, per EPA’s requirements under the 1994 Environmental Justice Executive Order 12898.
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