A SEcond Update 7/21/03
Yes, we struggle with WMI off and on to keep them from storing garbage
inside the huge transfer station at Julia Street in Elizabeth, NJ. Recently
we complained about odors to our county DEP team and the bin was cleaned out
for the first time July 12. It is to be cleared every Saturday night,
according to its operating criteria. It is building up garbage again
already.
Of course, what we really want is to close the transfer station, but the NJ
regs do not apparently allow that to happen. We have taken in half a
million tons of NYC garbage annually since November 2000 when Fresh Kills
was closing in Staten Island.
WMI buys off our city administration with lucrative contracts giving the
city $ for allowing their garbage work to continue. I think the city gets
around $400,000 per year, but property values have declined in the houses
surrounding the site probably fifty times that amount. And that
neighborhood now has a 20 percent adult asthma rate, about four times the
national average; children here have even higher asthma rates.
I was at one time in contact with Dick Righter in Dayton, Ohio, in about
2000 who was struggling with WMI also; he had a website expressing their
troubles with WMI in the title as I recall; righterwmx@aol.com is his email
address. Someone working in conjunction with him in Dayton and writing a
waste news bulletin called "Trash Talk" was Beth at email address
Lermanwmi@aol.com who also knew Sally Clark SalClark@COS.Coloradotech.edu in
Colorado also in dialogue with WMI over their excesses. Sally had emailed
me as well about a WMI proposed site in Crystola, CO, as I recall.
Hope this is helpful.
Peace,
Joe
NJ Environmental Watch
Elizabeth, NJ
On February 11, 1994, an Executive Order was issued by the President that included the phrase, "All communities and persons across this Nation should live in a safe and healthful environment." The environment in Elizabeth, New Jersey, is neither safe nor healthful due to the huge new import of mountains of putrescent garbage from New York City. What does this Executive Order really have to do with our health and well-being?
Seven eighteen-wheelers unloaded their slimy cargo between 6:24 and 6:39 PM on December 7 into the garbage bay of the Waste Management Inc.'s waste transfer station on Julia Street in Elizabeth. Trucks sit on the side of Julia Street idling their black diesel fumes in order to get their latest cargo dumped into this once modest transfer station designed for the local garbage of Elizabeth, population 110,000. Now garbage from the 7.5 million populating New York City suddenly appears out of nowhere, bombarding the surrounding black and low income community with waves of smells and a rising mist that never go away.
What is it like to breathe the particles of fermenting garbage and diesel trucks? Is that healthful? One person who came to the Elizabeth community meeting a block away on December 7 said she had permanently developed asthma while she was working at a nearby garbage transfer station, and her transfer station coworker had broken out with boils from head to toe. She no longer works at the transfer station, but her asthma never has lessened and indeed has gotten worse.
Workers today at the WMI Elizabeth transfer station pick up by hand the thin netting laid across the top of each of the monster garbage trucks as they walk the gangplanks of death above the big rigs. They wear absolutely no face mask or other protective respiratory gear, breathing in the turpidtudinously stenching smells and its concomitant viruses, bacteria, fungi, and, well, guess what else they have to dodge: raccoons and rats!
Yes, last Sunday at our church about ten blocks away from the transfer station we had to chase out a raccoon in our cemetery in the heart of midtown Elizabeth, the first ever seen there. The raccoons hide in the New York City garbage trucks of the big haulers now outfitted with New Jersey plates, and the fortunate ones escape with their rodent friends out into the surrounding neighborhoods, spreading blocks and blocks away. One wonders when the rabid ones will appear? This time is the closest to one of the plagues of Old Testament Egypt yet witnessed. But it's roaches now in place of locusts.
The transfer station has erected fifteen foot corrugated metal barriers on one side so the surrounding neighborhood on that side cannot see the tragedy going on a few dozen feet from their living rooms. But the thud of garbage boxes being dropped all during the night reminds them that what they can't see still can kill them. The church just down the street has barricaded its driveway and parking lot to keep the ferocious rigs at bay.
What once was a modest size "city yard" now has surreptitiously ballooned into a colossal dumping ground for hundreds of millions of tons of exported garbage from the Big Brother next door. No required public hearings were held to approve the transfer station expansion.
Staten Island is only about half a city block across the Arthur Kill waterway from Elizabeth. That borough started sending its garbage across the Goethel's Bridge into Elizabeth three weeks ago, now generally avoiding Exit 13 on the New Jersey Turnpike in order to circumvent the truck safety inspection blockade the Elizabeth police have been operating. The trucks jump onto the Turnpike and get off at either Exit 13A in Elizabeth or even Exit 14 in Newark to get to Routes 1 and 9 and other local streets in Elizabeth in order to escape detection by the local authorities. It is a cat and mouse masquerade, with real mice on board. The only New Jersey State Police vehicle yet seen stopping any garbage truck was spotted fifty miles down south at Exit 7A on the Trenton side of the exit.
The governor apparently knows how to keep her neighborhood free of the smells--no transfer station in Trenton dare off-load NY City garbage. Of course the Manhattan, Queens, and Brooklyn trucks are also mostly coming through the Holland and Lincoln Tunnels, so they easily escape Elizabeth police detection by using the northern Newark and Elizabeth exits off the Turnpike, and by also using Routes 1 and 9 through Jersey City, Newark, and Elizabeth. So far no one seems capable of stopping this huge environmental injustice. The governments wince their sympathies, but say they are just too helpless.
The one Union County court hearing led to complete dismissal of the effort to stop the tragedy. Another hearing is scheduled for January 31 at the Union County Courthouse, but hopes for that one are also essentially non-existent. It has become a political charade. So far the government at levels above the city of Elizabeth have shown complete incompetence in the face of the onslaught. In fact the Governor championed the occasion by sending out a press release giving free reign to have this deadly "interim" garbage plan go on for three years. Even in the New York City Council hearings the Commissioner of the Department of Sanitation did not suggest such a long drawn out plan. In fact he left the impression it would only last a few weeks or months. New Jersey's governor has merely thrown the stench to the next governor to follow her before her three year mandate on doing nothing expires.
A hundred or so New York people demonstrated at the entrance to the Holland Tunnel December 7 as well. What ends up in the poor communities of Elizabeth and Newark must first exit the big rotten Apple via the overburdened communities surrounding the two tunnels or two bridges to New Jersey. No way will the northern or eastern communities of New York State allow the garbage to come their way; they have played their political cards wisely. What joy now to hear the constant ringing of the oversize bells signaling at rush hour that yet another garbage eighteen-wheeler has been packed far too high to safely enter the tunnels on the way to the Garden, or is it Garbage, State.
Sooner or later a tragedy will occur in one of the monstrous traffic jams at rush hour, even though the New York Commissioner of Sanitation vowed publicly that no garbage would be sent through at rush hour. The whole city will one day be clogged by its own garbage. But still the state and federal governments do not get the picture of what is going on, or do not want to see what fury they have unleashed on a tiny number of communities.
Burning garbage has been banned in the big bad Apple, but somehow no one realizes that the humongous burner in Newark burning New York's garbage spews its deadly dioxins, furans, and heavy metals right back into Manhattan, Queens, and Brooklyn. What goes out must come down, and cancers will burgeon again in the Number Two cancer city of the nation. There are dark sides of being the Big tumororous Apple.
And joy of all joys, the one of five persons in Elizabeth and Newark who have asthma will at least have comparable Big Apple brothers and sisters joining the sitting rooms of the pulmonary doctors in New York. "We will never have to worry about having enough patients," one lung specialist muttered aloud at a public meeting in Elizabeth. There is surely no joy in the respiratory or oncology waiting rooms in New York either. The enormous public costs of incineration and breathing diesel fumes are again linguistically minimized by hauling and burning garbage upwind across the Hudson. And the blatant and egregious environmental racism seems comfortably far away. Where are you EPA? And what weight does a Presidential Executive Order have when the office exit seems so near?
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