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Female Or Male Homeowners from the Love Canal Neighborhood

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Female Or Male Homeowners from the Love Canal Neighborhood Witness Profile Female or male homeowners from the Love Canal neighborhood Background Picture this: back in the 1970s you and your family had been living happily in a quiet neighborhood near Niagara Falls, N.Y., for roughly 20 years. The neighborhood of Love Canal had around 800 homes, many with families just like yours. Life was great, aside from the strange odors that sometimes came from the ground near the playground or the neighborhood yards. After many complaints, the city finally hired an investigator to assess if there was any problem. What they found was chilling to you – there were high levels of toxic chemicals found in the canal, the soil near the canal and the sump-pump in your basement. What you know Suddenly you began to question the health of your child (who has been sickly since they were born), the seemingly higher level of cancer in your neighborhood and the many miscarriages your family has had since you moved to the neighborhood. Concerned that the chemicals found might be related to the health problems, you immediately contact the school board and request that your child be transferred to another school, but your request is denied. Soon other neighbors start to ask similar questions and a course of events is set in motion that will change your life forever. The city offers to buy the homes of the Love Canal residents who are closest to the cancel site, but yours is not one of them. You form a community action group to demand justice. Eventually the city agrees to purchase all the homes in the neighborhood and everyone moves away. Unfortunately, the nightmare isn’t over, since you and your family still have to deal with the effects the toxic chemicals had on your body. Because of the disaster and the community organization around it at Love Canal, the EPA creates the Superfund. What you feel You feel angry at the companies who irresponsibly dumped the toxic waste. You are also angry at the city and the government for not taking the complaints seriously for years while you and the people in the neighborhood became sick from exposure to the chemicals. You felt helpless to solve the problem at first, but now you feel proud about your role in prompting the creation of the Superfund, so it is less likely that others will have to go through the same nightmare you and your family did. What you want to have happen You would like to see even more being done by the government to combat the problem of toxic waste management. You also feel that the companies who dumped the toxic waste deserve enormous fines and should be forced to pay for the clean-up process until the Superfund site is safe once again. Evidence you will share with the class During your testimony you will share the New York Times video on the Love Canal. It is 11 minutes long. Watch it prior to class to learn more about your background and the disaster at Love Canal. The Love Canal Disaster: Toxic Waste in the Neighborhood from the NY Times http://bit.ly/1fKNvfT Other suggested resources to help you prepare: Center for Health, Environment and Justice: http://bit.ly/1ideDaR Witness Profile Average U.S. teenager #1 & average U.S. teenager #2 Background You are an average teenager living in the United States. You get average grades at the high school that you attend and think that school is “okay”. You have a pretty decent car and boyfriend/ girlfriend. You’ve been using computers and cell phones for as long as you can remember and can’t imagine life without them. They aren’t just for your personal life either – your teachers expect you to turn in work that is typed or emailed in. You used to like Facebook until your parents started using it and now you think it’s lame. Instead you use Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat, and recently you helped your Mom get on Pinterest. You spend a lot of time on your iPad since your little sister always wants to play games on the family computer. What you know You would probably die without your phone. You rarely talk on it a lot, but you are always texting and are on social media with your friends 24/7. You have to do your assignments on your computer or your teachers take off points. When you grow up you know you’ll be using a computer for everything, and businesses will expect most programs to be second nature to you. You recycle and bike to school so you feel like you your part to support the environment. You have no idea that the production of the microchips inside your phone and computer created waste so toxic that it can cause birth defects, injure and even kill people who are exposed. What you feel If someone were to ask you to give up your computer and your phone you would ignore them no matter the reason why. In the larger picture of the environmental health of the U.S., you feel helpless. Plus you aren’t a scientist, you didn’t directly cause the problem yourself and you feel like there really isn’t anything that you can do that will make a difference. What you want to have happen You would like to be able to have electronics that don’t create toxic chemical byproducts. You might even be willing to pay a tiny bit more for the product if it could prove it didn’t hurt the environment while being made. You would also like to find a way to help improve the environment in your own community. It would be empowering to know that you could make a difference now. Evidence you will share with the class Show them your phone and something you created on a computer (paper, website, etc.) Witness Profile EPA Superfund expert Background You work for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) as the lead spokesperson for the Superfund program. You have a background in engineering and environmental science and are a pretty good teacher when it comes to explaining what a Superfund is. What you know about Superfund: What is a Superfund? Superfund is the name given to the environmental program established to address abandoned hazardous waste sites. It is also the name of the fund established by the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act of 1980, as amended (CERCLA statute, CERCLA overview). This law was enacted in the wake of the discovery of toxic waste dumps such as Love Canal and Times Beach in the 1970s. It allows the EPA to clean up such sites and to compel responsible parties to perform cleanups or reimburse the government for EPA-led cleanups. How a Superfund works The Superfund cleanup process is complex. It involves the steps taken to assess sites, place them on the National Priorities List and establish and implement appropriate cleanup plans. This is the long-term cleanup process. In addition, the Agency has the authority to: conduct removal actions where immediate action needs to be taken enforce against potentially responsible parties ensure community involvement involve states ensure long-term protectiveness What you know about the overall situation Waste begets waste. At every step along the trail, treatment leaves behind a new batch of waste that needs to be shipped somewhere else. At one stop, a plant in Wisconsin creates more waste than it takes in. Treatment creates new hazards. The superheating used to release toxic chemicals in Kentucky gives way to an equally alarming danger that isn’t monitored: dioxins. After they escape the plants, dioxins can build up in the food supply and have been linked to cancer and birth defects. The system is highly inefficient. For every 5 pounds of contaminants pulled from the ground, roughly 20,000 pounds of carbon dioxide are produced from continually running pumps, cross- country treks and treatment plants that produce as much greenhouse gas as municipal power plants. Cleanup at the Silicon Valley site, and others like it, isn’t working. Over the past decade, the pollution there has remained stagnant despite constant pumping. In some cases, the treatment is actually increasing the pollution in the water. The costs of treating the waste are enormous. To continue cleanup at sites like this, the EPA estimates taxpayers will spend between $1.2 billion and $3.6 billion over the next 30 years. That doesn’t include the untallied billions more spent by private companies tasked with cleaning up their past messes. What you feel You feel very proud of the work you do. It may not be a perfect solution, but it’s the best system out there to identify dangerous Superfund sites and to attempt to clean them up. You are aware that there are major drawbacks to the current program, see above, but again, it’s better than nothing and you would welcome more funding that would allow for more research on the effectiveness of the currently recommended method and novel treatments that haven’t been tried out yet. What you want to have happen You would like more people to share the responsibility for the problem – it shouldn’t all rest on the EPA. You anticipate new environmental research to improve clean-up of Superfund sites in the near future and would like more resources for the EPA to deal with the current 1,300 Superfund sites around the country. Evidence you will share with the class B. There's a map showing all the Superfund sites in the country.
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