The Real World Story of Human Lives Sacrificed at the Altar of Deregulation

I went to one of those “poisoned citizens” meetings the other night. It was a community meeting called by a couple of outside law firms that have just sued a number of corporate polluters for freely releasing their deadly environmental cargo upon unsuspecting and vulnerable neighbors. The community gathering was held in a Spartanburg, South Carolina hotel. Cannon’s Campground residents were there in force. They’re proud, hard working and contributing members of society and, thanks to repugican-enabling destruction of unions and wages, don’t have the proverbial pot to piss in. What a great number of them do have is cancer.
Many of their number are sick as dogs with existing cancers, leukemia, tumors and other physical insults caused by living too close to a certain kind of manufacturing facility; the kind that pollutes your water, property, possessions and loved ones while the state of South Carolina, its elected representatives and the governor look the other way…and have for decades!
The first couple I met included a husband who has suffered, really suffered, from lung cancer. He’s had a lung removed and, frankly, doesn’t look too good. He told me a half-dozen of his fellow workers and neighboring friends have died of cancer.
During the meeting, a man of about 50 told of battling thyroid cancer, repeated kidney stones and having half a lung removed. The lady sitting two seats down is currently battling a serious cancer. It seemed every other seat was occupied with somebody that either had cancer, lived next door to a sufferer or lost somebody near and dear to them to lung cancer or leukemia or whatever other health effect death-ray carcinogens can bring.
I’d say every resident of the affected area in attendance had been impacted by illness and death almost certainly caused by chemicals originating at the plant site in question, a former Hoechst Celanese manufacturing site. Hoechst sold off the the most offensive site and a number of companies have come and gone from the compressed cluster of sites in the last decades. The suit covers the time span from 1967 to the present time. Most of the corporate occupants are included in the suit, being accused of leaving a deadly trail of deadly stuff in their wake.
January 7 of this year, a couple of law firms decided to file the class action suit in the United States District Court for the District of South Carolina. The action makes for 92 pages of interesting, if grotesque, reading. I commend it to you. You’ll be stunned by the repeated and dangerous and, most likely, deadly ineptness.
It’s what progressives are talking about when they bitch about pollution and its impact on populations. Here is the best reasoning for the action taken from the lawsuit, itself.

“For over 40 years, numerous corporate entities have polluted the groundwater of the Cannon’s Campground community and the surface water of the nearby Pacolet River and its tributary creeks by improperly handling and disposing hazardous chemicals that were either components or by-products of the polyester manufacturing process conducted at what is commonly referred to as the Hoechst-Celanese manufacturing plant and its neighboring facilities
The extent of the pollution poses an imminent and substantial endangerment to the health of the members of the community and to the environment itself and was carried out—and is still being carried out—by the owners of the plant in violation of federal and South Carolina law.”

The defendants, with Hoechst Celanese as their centerpiece, are mostly in the polymer manufacturing business and are from far-flung regions of the globe, many corporately intertwined with Celanese. You see, not only does the U.S. send their s**t polluters overseas, other countries return the favor. There are so many mergers, spinoffs and ownership changes, that getting much of anything from these outfits will be an incredible challenge.
The section on violating state and federal law is a stretch since state regulations and their enforcement or punitive action by the South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control (DHEC) is laughable to the point of embarrassment. At many stages, Celanese self-reported to the state. What they and DHEC didn’t do in far too many cases was any followup or warnings.
The state, its agencies and elected and appointed officials currently do everything possible to kiss corporate butt even when it means sacrificing human life. Oh, they’ll make promises. DHEC keeps promising to check this and that; sometimes they do, sometimes not. They run phony studies and often proclaim that the accused corporations hands are clean, when the immediate residential and surrounding areas are filthy with carcinogenic chemicals.
A recent study example exposed by a former resident, was a combined DHEC and federal EPA study that found no cancer clusters adjacent to the sites. Of course they expanded the study area to the entire zip code, well beyond the immediate areas of the plant to dilute and distort the results.
In one case DHEC was told of 20 private wells that were at risk. Apparently, none of the owners were ever notified whether anything was done. Residents of a mobile home park ACROSS THE STREET from a plant were not told of chemical problems years ago. In another case, a company estimated a release of 1,4-Dioxane, claiming 11,200 pounds one year. The actual figure, 52,743 pounds.
A Celanese spokesman was quoted in the paper as saying “There was no connection between contaminated groundwater at the site and the groundwater in the communities because the areas are separated by streams acting as discharge boundaries.” He ignores overwhelming evidence that local citizens are surrounded by deadly cancer-causing chemicals above them, below them, in their well water, streams, even in the bedrock. The community is one big concentration camp of dire health risks.
A piece of bad news is that in terms of “smokestack” pollution, it’s very difficult to pin its consequences on one company. All that mixture of crap don’t you know. And on an individual basis, for lung cancer sufferers, the first question out of the corporate lawyers mouth: “DO YOU OR HAVE YOU EVER SMOKED?”
Then there are time considerations. The defendants will try to get the suit tossed. If unsuccessful, they’ll employ every delaying tactic known to the legal profession. A decade to a decision is not out of the question followed by a year or two for the miniscule payout.
I looked over the crowd at one point. Politically, they weren’t my people. I doubt they suffered the gay population kindly. There was faux-camo garb everywhere. Theirs were multi-gun homes and the men were mostly tough looking customers hardened by decades of hard labor. If they voted, they almost certainly followed tea party directives.
These are people who need to be Democrats. Maybe a few will realize what great harm tea party policies are bringing to them and their families.