Our community welcomes the move by the Alabama congressional delegation to investigate complaints about the Environmental Protection Agency’s cleanup of PCBs in Anniston. For far too long, our area has suffered from the ravages of not only PCBs, but also lead and mercury contamination. It is high time that drastic steps be taken to clean up the mess and it is a despicable thing that it has taken so long for government agencies to take notice of the situation.
The delegation, however, should look beyond the EPA to the agency in Alabama that is charged with safeguarding the health of the people and the environment, the Alabama Department of Environmental Management.
Sure the EPA has been slow to act. Authorities have known that we had a serious PCB problem here since the early 1970s yet the EPA did not come into Anniston in force until 1999.
But that is because ADEM was fighting like mad to keep the agency away all the while. Of course, it can also be argued that EPA should have long ago shoved the state agency out of the way once it was clear ADEM was doing next to nothing.
After all, state environmental agencies such as ADEM are charged with carrying out federal environmental law in the states and can be and have been overruled by the EPA.
But officials at the federal agency were not bold enough to do that. Not that there were no individuals with the agency who saw clearly that this community was being abused by ADEM.
EPA’s arrival in Anniston in 1999 marked the first real progress in our efforts to assess the overall problem and get a plan in place for a major clean up operation.
It is only a pity the agency did not arrive a decade or so earlier to rescue us from the ravages of ADEM.
With the EPA absconded in offices in Washington and Atlanta we were left with an agency, paid for by the taxpayers of the state of Alabama, whose mission it is to manage environmental problems.
For years ADEM officials concerned themselves with a tiny area around the Monsanto (Solutia) plant. It was not, we were told so many times, in ADEM’s mandate to venture out into the neighborhoods of western Anniston.
Then there is the long and complicated episode of the Alabama Department of Health officials who had the sense to realize that the people of that part of town needed to be tested for possible contamination.
For convoluted bureaucratic reasons the health department had to approach ADEM for permission to test in the area. But a tragic-comic Catch-22 situation followed which delayed testing for years.
And of course there is the sorry business of ADEM’s predecessor, the Alabama Water Improvement Commission. Officials of that so-called agency actually urged Monsanto officials not to tell the press about high levels of PCBs found in local waterways.
So while our own state agency and Monsanto were keeping mum, folks all up and down Choccolocco Creek were fishing, swimming, wading, canoeing, splashing, and eating fish.
It was, all in all, a thoroughly sickening display of inept and complacent behavior on the part of the state agency with more than a hint of collusion.
The delegation, then, should demand the answers from the EPA. But the members should also be aware of the real bad boy here. And for once EPA officials should open up and say what they really think of the Alabama Department of Environmental Management and its pitiful leadership.
