President Trump’s shakeup of the EPA is receiving emotional reviews with very few people being in the middle of the road. Some believe this marks the end of our clean air and water while others see the EPA has just another corrupt bloated Federal organization that needs to go.
I have worked with, against, and around this organization for much of my career and am telling you that the EPA is both of what it is accused of being.
- The prescribed standards of the Clean Water Drinking Act make the EPA our guardian angel. Their selective refusal to unforce it makes them our nemesis.
- The EPA stance on prohibiting the use of toxic chemicals protects our health. Their selective permission to allow certain entities to use these chemicals diminishes EPA credibility
- The extensive catalog of environmental laws aims to help the EPA protect us. The lack of prosecution of major executives who violate these laws continues to disappoint us.
In Flint, Michigan, no high-ranking officials were prosecuted or fined, even though they had legal responsibility to provide safe drinking water. The same thing happened in East Palestine, Ohio with a train derailment that spilled toxic chemicals into the local environment.
The EPA accidentally poured 3 million gallons if chromium-containing waste into the animus river, jeopardizing millions who get drinking water from the Colorado river. To my knowledge nobody at the EPA was fined, arrested or fired.
Imagine the uproar in the national news if a manufacturing company did this. But because the EPA did it, we heard nothing. What else has the EPA done to hurt us?
Northern Pike have been eating rainbow trout along the Davis River. Rainbow trout fishing provides tourism revenue, so the pike are considered undesirable. The EPA has twice decided to inject a toxic substance called Rotenone into the water to kill the pike. While this substance is derived from natural plant sources, it has been shown to cause a whole host of health problems from sinus irritation to Parkinson’s. In 1983 a study by M. Gosalev demonstrated carcinogenesis on test rats1
Now, in my book, I don’t want to have any contact with this stuff. Is it carcinogenic? To me, yes, but I guess we can each make that decision for ourselves. This seems scary to me.
This issue I have is that while Northern Pike are predatory threat to the trout, they are not a threat to the environment. They are certainly not a threat to mankind. So other than profits, why is the EPA even involved in this? When I hear things like this, I have to say that I favor gutting the organization.
On a final note, several years ago I was asked to design a system to remove chromium from industrial rinse water. The company manufactured mobile homes and did chrome plating for the decorative trim. When I arrived and took samples, I discovered that the chromium content in the wastewater was lower than the chromium content that was in the tap water. As it turned out, the local EPA had a more stringent chromium limit on effluent waste than it did on the water coming into the plant.
When we learn of these kinds of inconsistencies and flat-out failures at the EPA we surely must all agree that it is time to shake this institution down to its foundation.
