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Saturday, August 20, 2005

Environment - Several stories today

NWI Medical Waste. "Residents say no to med waste in Gary, East Chicago" is the headline to this story today in the Gary Post-Tribune. Some quotes:

CROWN POINT— Repeating the same objections they have voiced to state and city officials for four years, local activists, elected officials, clergy and residents told Lake County officials that Lake County does not need medical waste processing plants.

At one of the best-attended meetings of the Lake County Solid Waste Management Board in recent memory, residents voiced their concerns Thursday about a medical trash sterilizing operation in Gary and plans to open another in East Chicago.

Speakers at the meeting lodged now familiar complaints about potential pollution, health hazards and claims of environmental racism — pleas that did not keep state officials from licensing a facility in Gary earlier this year.

Testimony and remarks from the plant operators at a meeting next month will be used by the solid waste board to determine the local need for a medical waste facility. * * *

Representatives for Midwest Medical Waste did not attend Thursday’s hearing and won’t go to the second, said owner Russ Karlins. “We’re not going to participate in that,” he said. “The bottom line is the district does not have the authority to make that determination ... this has nothing to do with need (for a processing plant). This is Lake County politics.”

In January, Karlins was granted a state license that made his plant near Interstate 65 in Gary the first commercially operated medical waste processing plant in the state. The plant, and the one proposed for East Chicago, uses steam-powered autoclaves to sterilize hospital trash ranging from bloody bandages to contaminated office paper. Once it’s treated at the plant, the waste can be dumped in an ordinary landfill.

Despite a June ruling by a Lake County judge that said local solid waste boards — and not the state — should have final say on the location of facilities, Karlins has never had to shut down his waste transfer or processing operations. Even if county waste officials deny his plant, the state Department of Environmental Management already has given him a license.

County officials will head to court next Friday to try and block a stay that allows Karlins to run the waste sterilization part of his operation until the solid waste board reaches a decision. Midwest Medical Waste has used the site as a transfer station since 2000.

Karlins said he will win an appeal of Judge Robert Pete’s ruling — and Karlins said he will sue the county, the city and individual members of the solid waste board. “They’ve cost my business $300,000,” he said. “It’s going to cost them a lot of taxpayers’ money — more than it cost them to fight me.”

Despite an outcry from East Chicago residents, a technicality allowed Abrade Technologies to get a special use permit to operate a similar plant, which would use steam-powered autoclaves to sterilize medical trash. The company is awaiting IDEM approval to open a 12,000-square-foot facility on Canal Street.

Power Lines. "State agency nixes power line through Daniel Boone Forest" is the headline to this story today in the Evansville Courier& Press. Some quotes:
FRANKFORT, Ky. - A power company will not be allowed to run a 4.8-mile power line through the Daniel Boone National Forest near Morehead after the Kentucky Public Service Commission rejected the request.

The commission, in an order issued Thursday, said East Kentucky Power Company should have considered routes along existing rights of way as an alternative to crossing through the forest.

Mega-Dairies. "How to Poison a River" was the title of a strong editorial yesterday in the NY Times
New York is increasingly a state of mega-dairies, and when things go wrong with such operations, they go wrong in a mega-way. The Marks Farm near Lowville, N.Y., has a herd of some 3,000 dairy cows. Their milk is trucked away regularly, but their liquefied manure is stored in a reservoir with earthen walls. How much manure? Before Aug. 11, the reservoir at the Marks Farm contained some three million gallons. Sometime in the next day, one of the walls blew out and released most of that waste into the Black River, a popular fishing stream and a water source for towns downstream. In case you have trouble visualizing it, three million gallons of liquid manure is roughly equivalent to the water in six Olympic-size swimming pools.

The result has been a major fish kill and the loss - at least temporarily - of all recreation on the river. The mess has been gradually diluted and will finally make its way into Lake Ontario, where it will do the fish there no good.

With any luck, what this spill will leave behind is a resolve to place new limits on concentrated animal feeding operations - as these mega-farms are known - in New York. As always, advocates of industrial farming argue that the increase in the number of large dairies and the inevitable loss of small ones are just a result of market forces and economic efficiency. But this has always been nonsense.

Mega-dairies, like huge hog confinement operations, are all too often forced upon local communities against their will. Some New York towns have tried to restrict the expansion of industrial farms nearby. But whenever that happens, the State Department of Agriculture and Markets has sued, or threatened to sue, under the state's Right to Farm Law.

That law made sense when farms were smaller and incapable of causing serious air pollution or a manure spill of massive proportions. Farmers still need to be protected against frivolous lawsuits, but the state needs to get out of the business of forcing industrial farms on communities that don't want them. And when farms operate at the scale of Marks Farm, they need to meet far stricter environmental standards than currently prevail. This disaster should never have had a chance to happen.

Water contamination. Another NY Times story has this headline: "Tainted Water at State Park Claims Victims in 20 Counties." Some quotes:
State health officials said yesterday that the number of people who contracted a severe intestinal illness from a play area with sprinklers at Seneca Lake State Park in Geneva, N.Y., has soared to more than 1,700.

The outbreak of the disease, a parasitic waterborne infection called cryptosporidiosis, began about two months ago among visitors to the state park but went unnoticed until earlier this week, health officials said.

Almost all those who were infected had spent time at a popular water attraction, the Sprayground, and were exposed to tainted water.

As of yesterday, the illness had quickly spread to at least 20 counties and sickened 1,738 people, far surpassing the roughly 500 cases that are seen annually and becoming one of the largest outbreaks of cryptosporidiosis in the state's history.

Chicago Medical Waste. The Chicago Tribune reported last Monday, Aug. 15:
Gov. Rod Blagojevich is taking credit for shutting down the last hospital incinerators operating in the Chicago area, but deals with the state will let two hospitals burn trash and emit toxic waste for another five years.

The fine print of agreements brokered by the Blagojevich administration will allow Loyola University Medical Center in Maywood and Hinsdale Hospital to keep their incinerators running until 2010, according to documents obtained by the Tribune.

Officials at both hospitals have complained that they invested millions of dollars in recent years to upgrade their incinerators with pollution controls. They say they need time to wind down use of their trash burners to avoid financial hardships. * * *

Opponents want the incinerators shut down much sooner, noting that most hospitals stopped burning their waste in the mid-1990s, after the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency ordered incinerators to reduce toxic air pollution.

Before nearly all of the incinerators burning municipal garbage and hospital waste nationwide were dismantled, trash burners were among the top sources of cancer-causing dioxins contaminating fish in the Great Lakes. They also release two toxic metals: mercury and cadmium.

Most hospitals took steps to reduce their garbage and hired contractors to truck syringes, blood products, IV bags, body parts and other waste to landfills. Incineration opponents contend there is no reason why other hospitals shouldn't do the same. * * *

The governor has stopped short of calling for a total ban on incineration in Illinois. He has said a commercial medical waste burner near Downstate Clinton can keep operating.

Posted by Marcia Oddi on August 20, 2005 09:21 AM
Posted to Environment