lymphoma
‘It’s just too close’: People living near fracking suffer as Pa. and local governments fail to buffer homes
A Pennsylvania bill that would limit fracking near homes and schools was shelved this summer right before a scheduled committee vote. In a small town in shale country, accounts of misery and discord show the stakes.
Pennsylvania residents call for action after study links fracking to asthma and lymphoma
A “bombshell” set of studies that linked fracking exposure to lymphoma, asthma and low birth weight is making waves in Pennsylvania and prompting calls by some for a ban on fracking in the state.
Pennsylvania residents call for action after study links fracking to asthma and lymphoma
Residents and scientists had called for research on health risks for years, while industry campaign denied links.
A Pennsylvania study suggests links between fracking and asthma, lymphoma in children
Researchers in heavily drilled Pennsylvania are adding to a body of evidence suggesting links between the natural gas industry and certain health problems.
Receding floodwaters expose long-term health risks after Harvey.
Benzene churns through Houston’s economy. The clear, sweet-smelling chemical is found in the crude oil processed in the region’s refineries and is used to make plastic, pesticides and other products.
Receding Floodwaters Expose Long-Term Health Risks After Harvey
By Jennifer A Dlouhy
Scores of wastewater, sewage discharges reported since storm
Air monitoring reveals benzene plume near Houston refinery
Members of the Texas National Guard walk the streets of Orange as Texas slowly moves toward recovery from the devastation of Hurricane Harvey on Sept. 5. Photographer: Spencer Platt/Getty Images
Benzene churns through Houston’s economy. The clear, sweet-smelling chemical is found in the crude oil processed in the region’s refineries and is used to make plastic, pesticides and other products.
It’s also a carcinogen whose cancer-causing properties illustrate the risks that will linger for southeast Texas long after the floodwaters of Harvey have receded. Thousands of homes were submerged in murky water that may have been tainted with benzene and other runoff from an area that boasts the nation’s largest concentration of refineries and petrochemical plants.
"This is going to be an ongoing concern, because some chemicals, when they get in water, become active and volatile," said Christine Todd Whitman, a Republican who led the Environmental Protection Agency from 2001 to 2003. "There are some major areas of problem."
EPA officials are still trying to access and inspect 11 federal Superfund sites that were swamped by the storm to determine whether contaminants escaped, including such cancer-causing agents as benzene, cadmium and trichloroethene.
Residents near a still-submerged wastewater treatment plant in west Houston were warned Wednesday that the risk of migrating sewage makes it unsafe to drink untreated water from private wells.
More: Vacant Government Posts Hamper Harvey Aid as Irma Set to Strike
At least 94 spills of sewage and wastewater have been reported to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality since Hurricane Harvey hit the state. Among those releases: a discharge of unknown amounts that Kinder Morgan Petcoke LP reported reaching the San Jacinto River and 100,000 gallons that Sasol Chemicals USA said had been discharged from its Green Bayou plant.
There are no reports of benzene reaching waterways in Harvey’s wake, but initial disclosures don’t detail specific chemicals, and extensive water testing is still needed, said ecologist Shaye Wolf, the Center for Biological Diversity’s climate science director.
Valero Energy Corp. is mopping up oil at one of its refineries after a tank roof partially collapsed, releasing an estimated 6.7 pounds of benzene. After local residents complained about the odor, health officials and representatives of the Environmental Defense Fund detected high amounts of benzene in air around the facility. Measured concentrations reached as high as 324 parts per billion, according to the Houston Health Department -- well above the level at which federal officials recommend workers don respiratory masks and protective gear.
Valero spokeswoman Lillian Riojas said the oil that leaked "was quickly contained and has been confined to the corner of the containment area where clean-up is well underway."
More: Irma Lashes Caribbean as Florida Braces for Powerful Storm
The EPA said in a statement it was working with city and county officials on the benzene plume, identified near Houston’s Manchester neighborhood. The agency also said it was coordinating with the U.S. Coast Guard on a large oil spill in the Houston area.
Hurricane Harvey’s 130 mph (209 kph) winds and drenching rains caused tens of billions of dollars of damage, leaving residents sifting through sodden belongings, ripping up water-soaked carpet and tugging wet drywall to heaping piles of refuse that stand as monuments to the carnage. But environmentalists and public health experts are warning about an array of unseen dangers that may threaten residents after the storm debris is hauled away.
"These are long-term chronic exposures," said Elena Craft, a toxicologist with the Environmental Defense Fund. "We don’t know what’s going to be in the mud that’s in people’s houses. We don’t know what’s going to be in the water of private wells."
And it will take time to determine the extent of the risks.
Superfund Sites
So far, the EPA says there’s no indication that Harvey released hazards from 28 Superfund sites in the area that were spared damage or excessive flooding. And the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality said that assessments at 12 of 17 state Superfund sites in hurricane-affected areas have documented "no issues."
But the picture is more complicated at 13 federal Superfund sites that were flooded; response personnel have so far only been able to access and confirm that two of those do not require emergency cleanup.
"Teams are in place to investigate possible damage to these sites as soon as floodwaters recede and personnel are able to safely access the site," EPA spokesman David Gray said by email.
The EPA says it has 185 personnel supporting Hurricane Harvey response efforts, and the agency is coordinating with local, state and other federal officials to address human health and environmental concerns, Gray said.
It could be days before the EPA is able to fully inspect the San Jacinto River Pits, a former dumping ground for pulp and paper-mill waste in the 1960s that’s full of cancer-causing dioxin and furans associated with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, respiratory cancer and soft-tissue sarcoma.
Divers Scheduled
With most of the site still submerged, the agency is planning to deploy divers to inspect an underwater cap of plastic, soil and gravel that’s meant to prevent the migration of hazardous material, said Sam Coleman, an EPA acting regional administrator. Based on predicted river conditions, that inspection is expected to take place Monday.
It can take weeks -- or longer -- for some storm-provoked leaks even to be detected. For instance, it took months to discover a breach in the cap at the San Jacinto Waste Pits after flooding two years ago.
At the U.S. Oil Recovery Superfund site in east Houston, where benzene lurks at a former wastewater treatment plant, tight-fitting black tarps covered red containers holding toxic sludge and sewage on Monday. Aerial surveillance showed floodwaters never reached the containers, EPA’s Coleman said.
At the nearby Highland Acid Pit, a vegetation-covered soil cap appeared undamaged, indicating the pollution under the surface was unaffected by Harvey, Coleman said, though a check of on-site monitoring wells in coming days is necessary to confirm that preliminary finding.
Ongoing remediation efforts have helped make some Superfund sites more resilient during storms, including the construction of berms to contain runoff, said Neil Carman, a former field inspector for the state’s environmental commission who visited more than 200 plants annually.
Soil Sampling
"They’ve done a lot of things to try and contain this material," Carman said, but even so, "I would expect to find a problem at several of them."
Even if sites appear sound after visual inspections, ongoing water monitoring and soil sampling will be necessary to verify floodwaters or underground leaks haven’t carried contaminants far away -- into neighboring yards, homes and private water wells.
"These waters have gone all over these residential areas," said Kara Cook, toxics program director with the U.S. Public Interest Research Group. "It could be in the soil, where your kids play, where they’re putting stuff in their mouths."
Flooded homes may have been bathed in contaminants, said Erik Olson, director of the health program at the Natural Resources Defense Council.
Previously: Harvey’s Cleanup List: Toxic Plumes, Dead Animals, Debris
"We are very concerned about the toxic chemicals in the water," Olson said. "Once the water recedes, that mud is not just mud. It’s going to be petrochemicals, it’s going to be toxic chemicals."
Some fears may never be realized. After Hurricane Katrina ravaged Louisiana in 2005, New Orleans residents braced for a "toxic gumbo" of chemicals, with "the potential for unparalleled exposure to toxics and contaminants," but the National Academy of Engineering reported in 2008 that those initial concerns weren’t borne out.
"Although floodwaters did contain significant short-term biological hazards that posed risks to stranded residents and relief workers," the engineering academy said, "they did not contain chemical toxicants at levels" that would lead to long-term impacts beyond a similar volume of city storm water.
— With assistance by Ari Natter, and Jack Kaskey
Keep reading...Show less
Time to clean up the San Jacinto waste pits.
The federal government bears responsibility for Superfund sites like the San Jacinto waste pits, and it falls on Pruitt to uphold his part of that covenant.
Time to clean up the San Jacinto waste pits
Recovery from Harvey should include cleanup of the San Jacinto waste pits
Published 5:07 pm, Monday, September 4, 2017
Photo: Michael Paulsen, Staff
A sign warns the public about the EPA Superfund Site not to eat contaminated seafood caught from the water along Interstate 10 near the San Jacinto River east of Houston in Channelview. (Houston Chronicle file photo)
After Noah survived the great deluge, God placed a rainbow in the sky as an everlasting covenant with man, promising to never again punish the Earth with such a deadly flood.
Any rainbow sheen you may see today across the Gulf Coast floodwaters is no godly doing. Runoff from chemical plants, petroleum pipelines and at least a dozen Superfund sites risks transforming the destructive rain into a putrid stew filled with lead, arsenic and other toxic and carcinogenic chemicals.
So you can't help but worry when looking at the pictures of the Vita Bella assisted-living center during Hurricane Harvey - an elderly woman calmly knitting in the Dickinson nursing home while the brown waters swirl around her feet.
They could have used an ark.
The image was shocking enough to hasten a rescue, but the damage may have already been done. After all, some of the worst flood hazards can't be picked up by photograph.
"There's no need to test it. It's contaminated. There's millions of contaminants," Porfirio Villarreal, a spokesman for the city of Houston Health Department told the New York Times as to the floodwaters.
Nowhere is the risk more worrisome than the San Jacinto waste pits, which sit between the communities of Highlands and Channelview. One of the San Jacinto waste pits, covered by a temporary armored cap, was partially submerged in the river even before Hurricane Harvey. Now they're totally engulfed.
Last year, the Army Corps of Engineers predicted the protective device might not be reliable "under very extreme hydrologic events which could erode a sizable portion of the cap."
Harvey - which has been called a 1,000-year-flood - would certainly qualify. Now we have to worry that the cap was damaged and the toxic mess has spread downriver to Galveston Bay.
As part of the recovery efforts, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt should make time to visit the submerged pits, which were designated a federal Superfund site in 2008.
Pruitt has said he plans to create a "top-10 list" of key Superfund sites and target sites where "the risk of human exposure is not fully controlled."
The pits fit the bill: They've been ravaged by weather and contain dioxin, a highly toxic chemical that increases the risk for several cancers, including lung cancer and non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, and has been linked to birth defects, liver damage and dermatological disorders.
The EPA actually proposed a solution to the pits last year: Remove about 202,000 cubic yards of contaminated material at cost of nearly $100 million. Of course, the cost and nature of the remediation may have changed depending on whether the armored cap has been damaged.
Regardless, Pruitt should cut through the bureaucratic red tape that has slowed the cleanup of this site and act boldly in holding companies responsible for past contamination.
This site has been unsafe for over 60 years - longer than many Texans have been alive. It is time to finally clean up our river. Any Harvey recovery bill must fund this sort of ecological repair alongside the economic and infrastructure needs.
"For years our communities and local government have told the EPA it is not a matter of if, but when, a storm devastates the pits," Jackie Young, executive director of the Texas Health and Environment Alliance, told the editorial board.
The federal government bears responsibility for Superfund sites like the San Jacinto waste pits, and it falls on Pruitt to uphold his part of that covenant.
Keep reading...Show less
Dick Gregory, 84, dies; found humor in the civil rights struggle.
Dick Gregory, the pioneering black satirist who transformed cool humor into a barbed force for civil rights in the 1960s, then veered from his craft for a life devoted to protest and fasting in the name of assorted social causes, health regimens and conspiracy theories, died Saturday in Washington. He was 84.
Dick Gregory, 84, Dies; Found Humor in the Civil Rights Struggle
By CLYDE HABERMANAUG. 19, 2017
Continue reading the main storyShare This Page
Photo
Dick Gregory in 2016. He believed that within a well-delivered joke lies power. Credit Brent N. Clarke/FilmMagic, via Getty Images
Dick Gregory, the pioneering black satirist who transformed cool humor into a barbed force for civil rights in the 1960s, then veered from his craft for a life devoted to protest and fasting in the name of assorted social causes, health regimens and conspiracy theories, died Saturday in Washington. He was 84.
Mr. Gregory’s son, Christian Gregory, who announced his death on social media, said more details would be released in the coming days. Mr. Gregory had been admitted to a hospital on Aug. 12, his son said in an earlier Facebook post.
Early in his career Mr. Gregory insisted in interviews that his first order of business onstage was to get laughs, not to change how white America treated Negroes (the accepted word for African-Americans at the time). “Humor can no more find the solution to race problems than it can cure cancer,†he said. Nonetheless, as the civil rights movement was kicking into high gear, whites who caught his club act or listened to his routines on records came away with a deeper feel for the nation’s shameful racial history.
Mr. Gregory was a breakthrough performer in his appeal to whites — a crossover star, in contrast to veteran black comedians like Redd Foxx, Moms Mabley and Slappy White, whose earthy, pungent humor was mainly confined to black clubs on the so-called chitlin circuit.
Advertisement
Continue reading the main story
Though he clearly seethed over the repression of blacks, he resorted to neither scoldings nor lectures when playing big-time rooms like the hungry i in San Francisco or the Village Gate in New York. Rather, he won audiences over with wry observations about the country’s racial chasm.
Continue reading the main story
Advertisement
Continue reading the main story
He would plant himself on a stool, the picture of insouciance in a three-button suit and dark tie, dragging slowly on a cigarette, which he used as a punctuation mark. From that perch he would bid America to look in the mirror, and to laugh at itself.
“Segregation is not all bad,†he would say. “Have you ever heard of a collision where the people in the back of the bus got hurt?†Or: “You know the definition of a Southern moderate? That’s a cat that’ll lynch you from a low tree.†Or: “I heard we’ve got lots of black astronauts. Saving them for the first spaceflight to the sun.â€
Some lines became classics, like the one about a restaurant waitress in the segregated South who told him, “We don’t serve colored people here,†to which Mr. Gregory replied: “That’s all right, I don’t eat colored people. Just bring me a whole fried chicken.†Lunch-counter sit-ins, central to the early civil rights protests, did not always work out as planned. “I sat in at a lunch counter for nine months,†he said. “When they finally integrated, they didn’t have what I wanted.â€
Mr. Gregory was a national sensation in the early 1960s, earning thousands of dollars a week from club dates and from records like “In Living Black and White†and “Dick Gregory Talks Turkey.†He wrote the first of his dozen books. Time magazine, enormously powerful then, ran a profile of him. Jack Paar, that era’s “Tonight Show†host, had him on as a guest — after Mr. Gregory demanded that he be invited to sit for a chat. Until then, black performers did their numbers, then had to leave. Time on Paar’s sofa was a sign of having arrived.
Newspapers in those days routinely put Mr. Gregory on a par with two white performers, Mort Sahl and Lenny Bruce, anointing them a troika of modern satire. Just as routinely, he was later credited with paving the way for a new wave of black comedians who would make it big in the white world, notably two talents of thoroughly different sensibilities: the reflective Bill Cosby and the trenchant Richard Pryor.
It was Mr. Gregory’s conviction that within a well-delivered joke lies power. He learned that lesson growing up in St. Louis, achingly poor and fatherless and often picked on by other children in his neighborhood.
“They were going to laugh anyway, but if I made the jokes they’d laugh with me instead of at me,†he said in a 1964 autobiography, written with Robert Lipsyte. “After a while,†he wrote, “I could say anything I wanted. I got a reputation as a funny man. And then I started to turn the jokes on them.â€
Photo
Mr. Gregory, then a candidate for president, before speaking in Norfolk, Va., in October 1968. Credit Associated Press
He titled that book “nigger,†lowercase N. The word — typically reduced these days to “the N-word†— figured prominently in his routines, even as he shunned the obscenities that casually littered the acts of other comedians.
Advertisement
Continue reading the main story
“I said, let’s pull it out of the closet, let’s lay it out there, let’s deal with it, let’s dissect it,†he said in a 2000 interview with NPR. “It should never be called ‘the N-word.’ â€
In 1962, Mr. Gregory joined a demonstration for black voting rights in Mississippi. That was a beginning. He threw himself into social activism body and soul, viewing it as a higher calling.
Arrests came by the dozens. In a Birmingham, Ala., jail in 1963, he wrote, he endured “the first really good beating I ever had in my life.â€
He added: “It was just body pain, though. The Negro has a callus growing on his soul, and it’s getting harder and harder to hurt him there.â€
In 1965, he was shot in the leg (the wound was not grave) by a rioter as he tried to be a peacemaker during the Watts riots in Los Angeles.
Increasingly, he skipped club dates to march or to perform at benefits for civil rights groups. Club owners became reluctant to book him: Who knew if he might fly off to Alabama on a moment’s notice? As the ’60s wore on, the college lecture circuit became his principal forum.
“Against the advice of almost everyone, he decided to risk his career for civil rights,†Gerald Nachman wrote in “Seriously Funny: The Rebel Comedians of the 1950s and 1960s†(2003). Some pillars of the movement, like Whitney M. Young Jr., executive director of the National Urban League, who died in 1971, believed that Mr. Gregory was more valuable to their cause onstage than in the streets. To which Mr. Gregory replied, “When America goes to war, she don’t send her comedians.â€
In 1967, his head now ringed with a full beard and bushy hair — no more the thin mustache of earlier years — he ran for mayor of Chicago, more or less as a stunt. The next year he ran for president on the Freedom and Peace Party ticket, getting by his count 1.5 million write-in votes. The official figure was 47,133.
Advertisement
Continue reading the main story
There seemed few causes he would not embrace. He took to fasting for weeks on end, his once-robust body shrinking at times to 95 pounds. Across the decades he went on dozens of hunger strikes, over issues including the Vietnam War, the failed Equal Rights Amendment, police brutality, South African apartheid, nuclear power, prison reform, drug abuse and American Indian rights.
And he reveled in conspiracy theories, elaborating on them in language that could be enigmatic and circuitous. Hidden hands, Mr. Gregory insisted, were behind everything from a crack cocaine epidemic to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001; from the murders of President John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and John Lennon to the plane crash that killed John F. Kennedy Jr. Whom to blame? “Whoever the people are who control the system,†he told The Washington Post in 2000.
His fasting led to a keen interest in nutrition. Working in the 1980s with a Swedish health food company, Mr. Gregory developed a weight-reduction powder called Slim-Safe Bahamian Diet. The partners had a falling-out, and the business swooned.
Still, Mr. Gregory remained a fervent health-food advocate. In late 1999, he learned he had lymphoma but rejected chemotherapy, relying instead on vitamins, herbs and exercise. The cancer went into remission.
Photo
As the civil rights movement was kicking into high gear, whites who caught Mr. Gregory’s club act came away with a deeper feel for the nation’s shameful racial history. Credit Reg Innell/Toronto Star, via Getty Images
His activism came at a price, however. For one thing, the cascade of cash that he had once enjoyed turned into a trickle. His family paid, too.
Mr. Gregory moved to Chicago to build a comedy career in the late 1950s. There he met Lillian Smith, a secretary at the University of Chicago, and they were married in 1959. They had 11 children, one of whom, Richard Jr., died in infancy.
In 1973, when cash was still rolling in, they bought a 400-acre farm near Plymouth, Mass. (Why Plymouth? “I think the white folks is coming back, and I’m going to get a handful of Indians and stop ’em there this time,†Mr. Gregory said.) But by the early 1990s, the strapped Gregorys had lost the farm and moved into an apartment in Plymouth.
Over more than five decades of marriage, Lillian Gregory said, she understood her husband’s need — some called it an obsession — to wander off on behalf of this or that cause, typically earning nothing except attention, and sometimes not even that. But Christian Gregory, a chiropractor in Washington, said to The Washington Post in 2000: “He told his 10 children that the movement came before the family. It was a hard pill to swallow.â€
Advertisement
Continue reading the main story
Father absenteeism was a familiar phenomenon for the man born Richard Claxton Gregory in St. Louis on Oct. 12, 1932. He was the second of six children. His father, Presley, disappeared after the birth of each child, and finally left for good. The Gregory children were reared by their mother, Lucille, who scraped by on welfare and a meager income as a maid.
“Kids didn’t eat off the floor,†Mr. Gregory said of their Depression-era poverty. “When I was a kid, you dropped something off the table, it never reached the floor.â€
Information about Mr. Gregory’s survivors was not immediately available.
Mr. Gregory graduated from Sumner High School in St. Louis, then attended Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, Ill. At both schools he was a track star and enjoyed local fame.
Not that the acclaim was free of complications. In 1961, by then a national figure, he received the key to the city from the mayor of St. Louis. Yet in his hometown he was denied a room at a leading hotel. “They gave me the key to the city,†Mr. Gregory said, “and then they changed all the locks.â€
He left college in 1954 and joined the Army, where he was able to work on comedy routines while attached to Special Services. He then returned to college, only to give it up again without graduating.
In 1956 he headed to Chicago, where he worked in small-time clubs at night and at odd jobs by day. He even tried running a club of his own, but that venture failed.
In one part-time job Mr. Gregory sorted mail in a post office. His pattern, he later said, was to toss letters destined for Mississippi into a slot marked “overseas.†That job did not last long.
His real break came in January 1961, when he was asked to fill in for the comedian Irwin Corey, who had canceled a gig at the flagship Playboy Club in Chicago. On the big night, club managers had misgivings; the house was packed with businessmen from the Deep South. No matter, Mr. Gregory said. He insisted on performing.
“I understand there are a great many Southerners in the room tonight,†he began his act. “I know the South very well. I spent 20 years there one night.†He so won over the crowd that Playboy’s Hugh Hefner signed him for three more weeks, then extended the contract.
Advertisement
Continue reading the main story
Despite having sworn off nightclubs in 1973, saying he could no longer work in places where liquor was served, Mr. Gregory returned to them on occasion in later years, a thin presence wreathed in white hair and beard. Though his best days were well behind him, his approach never seemed to waver from principles that he set for himself when starting out. He put it this way in his autobiography:
“I’ve got to go up there as an individual first, a Negro second. I’ve got to be a colored funny man, not a funny colored man.â€
Correction: August 20, 2017
An earlier version of this article misstated the year of the Sept. 11 attacks. They were in 2001, not 2011.
Mel Watkins contributed reporting.
Continue reading the main story
What's Next
Loading...
SITE INDEX THE NEW YORK TIMES
Site Index Navigation
NEWS
World
U.S.
Politics
N.Y.
Business
Tech
Science
Health
Sports
Education
Obituaries
Today's Paper
Corrections
OPINION
Today's Opinion
Op-Ed Columnists
Editorials
Contributing Writers
Op-Ed Contributors
Opinionator
Letters
Sunday Review
Taking Note
Room for Debate
Video: Opinion
ARTS
Today's Arts
Art & Design
Books
Dance
Movies
Music
N.Y.C. Events Guide
Television
Theater
Video: Arts
LIVING
Automobiles
Crossword
Food
Education
Fashion & Style
Health
Jobs
Magazine
N.Y.C. Events Guide
Real Estate
T Magazine
Travel
Weddings & Celebrations
LISTINGS & MORE
Reader Center
Classifieds
Tools & Services
Times Topics
N.Y.C. Events Guide
Blogs
Multimedia
Photography
Video
NYT Store
Times Journeys
Subscribe
Manage My Account
NYTCo
SUBSCRIBE
Home Delivery
Digital Subscriptions
Crossword
Email Newsletters
Alerts
Gift Subscriptions
Corporate Subscriptions
Education Rate
Mobile Applications
Replica Edition
Site Information Navigation © 2017 The New York Times Company HomeSearchAccessibility concerns? Email us at accessibility@nytimes.com. We would love to hear from you.PrivacyTerms of Service
Site Information NavigationSite MapHelpSite Feedback
Keep reading...Show less
ORIGINAL REPORTING
MOST POPULAR
CLIMATE
