Toxic Chemicals

Seattle Becomes 6th City To Sue Monsanto Over PCB’s

January 31, 2016 Lorraine Chow, www.ecowatch.com Resist! Monsanto, PCB's, Seattle, Toxic Chemicals

By Lorraine Chow for EcoWatch. Seattle joins the growing list of cities in the American West that has slapped Monsanto with a PCB lawsuit. PCBs, or polychlorinated biphenyls, is a highly toxic chemical that the company manufactured decades ago. The complaint, filed on Monday with the U.S. District Court in Seattle, alleges that Monsanto knew that the chemicals were polluting the environment and causing harm to people and wildlife, said Seattle City Attorney Pete Holmes. Monsanto has faced a spate of PCB contamination lawsuits over the decades and several this year alone. In 2015, the cities of Spokane, San Diego, San Jose and Oakland also sued the company over PCB-contaminated sites. It has been reported that Monsanto allegedly knew that PCBs were toxic well before the 1979 ban but continued production of the profitable compound anyway. Think Progress reported: "In a 1970 internal memo, agrochemical giant Monsanto alerted its development committee to a problem: Polychlorinated Biphenyls—known as PCBs—had been shown to be a highly toxic pollutant."

EPA Sued Over Toxic Pollution From Drilling & Fracking

January 25, 2015 Sharon Kelly, www.desmogblog.com Organize! Drilling, EPA, Fracking, Toxic Chemicals

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has been sued over toxic chemicals released into the air, water and land by the oil and gas industry, a coalition of nine environmental and open government groups announced today. The extraction of oil and gas releases more toxic pollution than any other industry except for power plants, according to the EPA's own estimates, the coalition, which filed the lawsuit this morning in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, noted. But the industry has thus far escaped federal rules that, for over the past two decades, have required other major polluters to disclose the type and amount of toxic chemicals they release or dispose. The Toxic Release Inventory (TRI) is a federal pollution database, established under the Emergency Planning and Community Right to Know Act, and can be used by first-responders in the event of a crisis as well as members of the general public.

WVA Chemical Spill Not A Freak Occurrence

June 1, 2014 Molly M. Ginty, www.inthesetimes.com Educate! Chemical Spill, Environment, toxic chemical spill, Toxic Chemicals, Water

Charleston residents are baffled— and indignant—that MCHM leached into their water so easily. (“We want answers,” read one placard at a protest at the state capitol building. “Prosecute the poisoners,” read another.) But the spill in West Virginia was not a freak occurrence. The United States sees more than its share of industrial accidents. Consider the 2008 spill of 1 billion gallons of coal-ash slurry in Kingston, Tennessee, which coated the surrounding land in a 6-foot-deep layer of sludge that cost an estimated $1.2 billion to clean up. Or the 2013 ammonium nitrate explosion at a West, Texas, fertilizer plant. That catastrophe—at a facility that federal inspectors had not visited for 27 years—injured more than 300 people and claimed 15 lives. No single government agency is responsible for tracking and verifying chemical spills, so their exact number is unknown. But the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) puts the figure at “thousands” each year, while Bloomberg Businessweek counted 3,885 in 2013 and CBS identified more than 6,500 in 2010.

The Toxic Chemical Spill Crisis in West Virginia Will Happen Again. Here’s Why (video)

January 16, 2014 Dennis Trainor, Jr., www.PopularResistance.org Resistance Report Chemical Spill, Corporatism, Environment, Food and Agriculture, Freedom Industries, Resistance Report, Toxic Chemicals, West Virginia

When a massive chemical spill happens that contaminates the water supply and leaves over 300,00 people in West Virginia without water to drink, bathe or even brush their teeth - when a dangerous event that throws a whole area of the country into an existential crisis happens, one wants to believe that state and local officials in every part of the country are paying close attention to learn from this crisis to see to it that it be averted in their communities. I mean, there is no way that a corporation, Freedom Industries in this case, would be allowed to handle a toxic foaming agent used as part of the coal preparation processing unless their facility was in tiptop shape, unless the plant processing these toxic chemicals could have the adjective “good” ascribed to it.

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