Before the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, before the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, and before the Upper Big Branch mine disaster, there was the TVA coal ash spill in Kingston, Tennessee. It was at Kingston, during the early morning hours on December 22, 2008, that an earthen dam holding back a 40-acre surface impoundment burst, releasing one billion gallons of inky sludge. The Kingston coal ash spill taught the American public about the catastrophic costs that can accompany so many types of large scale energy development; its aftermath continues to teach us that instituting the necessary reforms for protecting people and the environment against similar catastrophes in the future doesn’t come easy or quick.
Today marks the one-year anniversary since the EPA released its proposed rule for controlling the disposal of coal ash, a toxic byproduct of burning coal to produce energy that contains harmful chemicals like arsenic, lead, and mercury. That announcement came fully six months after the EPA had sent an initial strong proposal (October, 2009) to the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs; OIRA then held the initiative, beyond its authorized time limit, conducting literally several dozen meetings, mostly with industry lobbyists, on the issue. When OIRA released the edited version and the EPA announced the proposal in May of 2010, CPR president Rena Steinzor lamented that the proposal—actually, a co-proposal of two strikingly different approaches to regulating the waste—seemed calculated more to “postpone[e] any definitive action for at least six months and, far more likely, a year or more” than to quickly and effectively resolve this looming threat to public safety and the environment. The circumstances of the past year have borne out this prediction; if anything, things may be far worse than anticipated.
Full textRobert R.M. Verchick recently completed a two-year stint with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and returned to his work at Loyola University in New Orleans, and, happily, to the rolls of active CPR Member Scholars. While at EPA, he published Facing Catastrophe: Environmental Action for a Post-Katrina World, and just a few days after returning to CPR, he's published two op-eds on disaster preparedness and recovery.
In the Christian Science Monitor on April 13, he asked whether Japan's recovery from the recent tsunami and nuclear disaster would be "heavy-handed or hands-off"? He goes on to contrast the recovery efforts in Japan after a 1995 earthquake laid waste to the city of Kobe with the ongoing post-Katrina recovery in Verchick's home town of New Orleans. In Kobe, Verchick says, strong-willed Mayor Kazutoshi Sasayama developed a master plan for reconstructing the city, and pursued it with iron determination. Verchick writes,
[P]rogress came at great cost. That “makeover” became for some a “takeover,” as residents of modest means saw their property downsized or expropriated. Japan’s emergency management office officially refused to allow government aid to go directly to residents (although some local governments ignored the edict), foisting hardship on the city’s elderly and disabled populations, as well as the working poor. Public hostility mounted. On the first anniversary of the quake, the city’s vice-mayor committed suicide. Eventually, city leaders reversed their previous stances and invited greater community involvement; but among some, resentment continues to this day.
By contrast, the New Orleans recovery has been marked, in Verchick's description, by a "light touch."
Full textRight about this time a year ago, Americans were learning about a massive explosion aboard an oil rig in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico called the Deepwater Horizon that had occurred the day before. Video footage of the flame-engulfed rig began splashing across television screens, and we were told that 11 workers on the rig were “missing.” (In fact, those workers had been killed.)
Also unclear or unrevealed was the extent of the environmental harm that was being done. In the day-after stories, BP and the federal government expressed the view that pollution was not much of a concern. Here’s what the New York Times article said,
Officials said the pollution was considered minimal so far because most of the oil and gas was being burned up in the fire. “But that does have the potential to change,” said David Rainey, the vice president in charge of the Gulf of Mexico exploration for BP, which is leasing the rig.
And change it did. The months-long ooze of crude oil from the well beneath Deepwater Horizon eventually came to be the largest oil spill in U.S. history.
Full textOne hundred years ago today, 146 people perished in one of the nation’s worst workplace tragedies – the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire in the heart of New York City. The story is gruesome, and each detail of exactly how so many people were trapped in a burning building was, and remains, a reminder of what can happen when worker safety is sacrificed in the name of profit.
Here’s the barest sketch. The Triangle Waist Factory in lower Manhattan relied on cheap, exploitable labor to produce women’s blouses – shirtwaists, as they were known. The factory occupied the 8th, 9th and 10th floors of a building at 29 Washington Place, and its employees were mostly young immigrant women, some as young as 14. They’d come to the United States for a better life, and found themselves working more than 50 hours a week, six days a week, in a non-union shop, laboring under sweatshop conditions. (This, of course, was before unions had essentially created the concept of “the weekend.”)
On March 25, 1911, at about 4:45 p.m., fire broke out on the 8th floor and spread quickly to floors above, fueled by piles of fabric scraps. The factory had no alarm system and no sprinklers, although such technology was available. Workers were quickly trapped, not just by the flames but by doors locked by company officials worried that workers would abscond with fabric if allowed to leave by any but the main door. The fire escapes did not reach to the ground, and eventually collapsed under the weight of the many escapees. A heroic elevator operator made several rescue runs but had to abandon the effort when the elevator’s guide rails buckled under the heat. Responding fire trucks lacked ladders that could reach the victims. Faced with the prospect of being burned alive, many of the workers chose instead to leap to their deaths.
Watching in shock that day was a young social worker, Frances Perkins, who would go on to champion a successful crusade for safer working conditions. (She would later become the first female Cabinet member, serving as FDR’s Labor Secretary.)
In a spot-on piece in Wednesday’s Washington Post, columnist Harold Meyerson observes that industry rose in opposition to Perkins’ proposed reforms, offering arguments that ring familiar even today. Proposed fire code reforms would cause “the wiping out of industry in this state,” said the Associated Industries of New York, and were “absolutely needless and useless,” said a lawyer for the Real Estate Board of New York City. The president of the Real Estate Board argued that, “To my mind this is all wrong….The experience of the past proves conclusively that the best government is the least possible government, that the unfettered initiative of the individual is the force that makes a country great and that this initiative should never be bound…”
Full textThe twin natural disasters that struck Japan this month, earthquake and tsunami, left a trail of devastation in their path. Entire villages were lost. The death toll currently stands at more than 8,000 but is expected to rise much higher (more than 13,000 are missing). Even as survivors struggle for shelter, warmth and food, the natural disasters are being rapidly overshadowed by the unfolding nuclear disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station. The key difference is that the nuclear disaster didn’t have to happen.
The earthquake, the tsunami, and the nuclear meltdown are all wrapped up together right now as one big human tragedy. But it is important not to blur the lines between risks that are inherent to living on planet earth, and risks that we have created for ourselves. Natural disasters like earthquakes, hurricanes or tsunamis are woven into the very fabric of the earth’s geological systems. There is no way to avoid them, though obviously we can take steps to minimize their impacts.
Anger after Hurricane Katrina was not directed at the hurricane for forming and coming ashore, but at the federal, state and local governments for failing to prepare and respond adequately, and at corporate priorities that devastated Louisiana’s (protective) wetlands in order to facilitate shipping. But for those human decisions—to channel the Mississippi in a fashion that prevented soil accretion; to cut channels through the marshes; to underinvest in the poorer parts of New Orleans; to neglect adequate evacuation planning—the natural disaster might never have become a human catastrophe.
Full textNot to be outdone by the Small Business Administration’s aptly named Office of Advocacy, the Chamber of Commerce has issued its own breathless report on how many jobs we could save if we did away with environmental, land use, and utility regulations. Crunching a bunch of dubious numbers, the SBA Office of Advocacy’s consultants, Nicole and Mark Crain, claim that regulations cost $1.75 trillion a year, a number several of my CPR colleagues thoroughly debunked in a report issued in February. Undeterred and not to be outdone, the Chamber’s feverish Project No Project, released yesterday, claims that citizen opposition to polluting plants combined with “excessive” government permitting requirements to deny the economy a “$1.1 trillion short-term boost” and “1.9 million jobs annually.”
The premise of the Chamber’s report is that if busybody neighbors and fussy regulators would just get out of the way, 333 proposed “solar wind, wave, bio-fuel, coal gas, nuclear, and energy transmission projects” around the nation could be under way pretty darn quick, and if they were, they’d produce loads of money for the Chamber’s members and local economies, and a raft of new jobs. “In aggregate, planning and construction of the subject projects would generate $577 billion in direct investment,” says the Chamber. “The indirect and induced effects would generate an approximate $1.1 trillion increase in U.S. GDP, including $352 billion in employment earnings.”
And hey, if we just got rid of child labor laws and worker safety requirements, imagine how much more profitable all those projects would be!
Let’s get real for a moment. All major manufacturing and power plants in the United States must get a variety of permits before they can start construction. Environmental permits are key, as are local government zoning approvals, and, in the case of electric utilities, approvals from state agencies that supervise this still largely monopolistic industry’s pricing structure. It’s no surprise that all these approvals annoy utility executives, who nevertheless managed to record strong profits last year, as part of an industry that can brag of having three of the top ten spots in the Fortune 500’s list of most profitable corporations.
Full textThis coming April 20 will mark the one-year anniversary of the first day of the BP Oil Spill – a three-month polluta-polluza that eventually became the largest accidental marine oil spill in the history of the world. That was the night that a long series of failures finally came to a head: failures aboard the Deepwater Horizon by BP and its contractors, failures in the enforcement of regulations intended to prevent such disasters or at least limit the damage from them, failures in the crafting of the regulations governing the process by which BP won approval to drill, and failures in the drafting of the legislation from which flowed the regulations.
For the 126 workers on the Deepwater Horizon that night, the sounds and images of those failures must have been terrifying beyond imagining. Eleven of them didn’t make it home alive, and another 17 were severely injured. The rest escaped in lifeboats or by jumping into oily seawater while a fire raged overhead. Nearly three months later, after an estimated 4.9 million barrels of oil had spewed into the Gulf of Mexico, the damage spanned hundreds of miles of shoreline and thousands of square miles in the Gulf. Clean-up efforts continue to this day, and will for some time, although oil along the bottom of the ocean is unreachable.
The BP Oil Spill was not just a really unlucky break, as the oil industry would like us to think it was, but was the product of corner-cutting by industry, with the tacit approval of government. If the agency then called the Minerals Management Service (MMS) had been serious about its job of reviewing safety plans to make sure they would work, BP might never have gotten approval to drill. But that wasn’t how MMS worked. It saw its role as helping to keep the oil flowing, not making sure that BP and the rest of the industry took their safety obligations seriously.
There were other regulatory failures, as well, and CPR Member Scholars have meticulously documented them in our October 2010 report, Regulatory Blowout: How Regulatory Failures Made the BP Disaster Possible, and How the System Can Be Fixed to Avoid a Recurrence. But there’s another failure, an ongoing failure, at work in the Gulf as well, one that’s making it harder for the victims of the BP Spill – the survivors, the relatives of those killed, businesses and employees who lost their livelihoods as a result of the damage, and others – to recover.
For years, the “tort reform” movement has worked to undercut the nation’s civil liability laws, making it more difficult for victims to sue the companies that have done them harm. In this movement, tort reform consists of limiting or rolling back existing opportunities for victims to sue in court, and the business trade associations behind the movement have had some success. As a result, the survivors and economic victims of the spill are confronted with significant constraints on their ability to seek compensation in court for the harm done to them.
A new report issued this morning by CPR, The BP Catastrophe: When Hobbled Law and Hollow Regulation Leave Americans Unprotected, notes that U.S. law relies on two complementary approaches to deter companies from taking the risks that led to the disaster in the Gulf: regulations establishing environmental and worker safety standards, and civil liability that serves both to discourage reckless corporate behavior and to compensate its victims. In the case of the BP spill, lax regulation and enforcement made the spill possible, and outdated, overly corporate-friendly statutes could significantly limit what victims can force BP to pay in damages.
Full textLizzie Grossman has a nice post over at The Pump Handle highlighting how the National Contingency Plan for major oil spills has significant gaps, which left government agencies and cleanup workers in the Gulf scrambling to figure out the right training programs and the best ways to protect workers' health and safety in the days, weeks, and months following the BP spill.
But, as Lizzie points out, one of the most powerful advocates for fixing the NCP -- the National Spill Commission -- has left the issue of cleanup workers' by the wayside:
Occupational health issues for responders are simply not [the] focus of the Commission's review: OSHA is only mentioned twice in the body of the report. The role of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) in the response is not described at all, nor is the health impacts roster maintained by the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals. The body of the report mentions neither the National Institutes of Health nor the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health.
Tens of thousands of people participated in cleanup efforts last summer. Despite the sweltering heat and some areas overrun with heavy equipment, no workers died and injury and illness rates were relatively low. Long-term health impacts of cleanup work will be more difficult to measure. But OSHA, NIEHS, and NIOSH deserve recognition for their work.
Full textOn March 23, 2005, the worst industrial accident in 15 years killed 15 workers and injured more than 180 others as highly flammable liquids from a distillation tower were vented directly to the ground and were ignited by a spark at the huge BP Corporation Refinery in Texas City, Texas. A two-year investigation by the Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board (CSHIB) concluded that the BP Texas City refinery was “an extremely dangerous workplace by any objective standard.” An “Independent Review Panel” that BP assembled to investigate the explosion and BP’s safety practices throughout all of its operations issued a similarly devastating critique.
The CSHIB also found that the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) had acted irresponsibly. The facility was subject to OSHA’s 1992 process safety management standard, but plant managers had failed to implement many of its requirements. The standard itself was out of date, but, lacking the resources to update it, the agency substituted ineffective guidance documents and voluntary outreach programs. Even though the BP plant was the third largest refinery in the United States, OSHA had never undertaken a comprehensive, planned process safety inspection at the facility. Indeed, between 1995 and 2005, the agency had undertaken only nine process safety inspections in the entire country, and none of those were at refineries.
The problem was by no means limited to the BP plant. Similar explosions had killed or seriously injured workers at five other refineries and chemical plants during the preceding seven years, but OSHA had lacked the resources to step up its enforcement efforts.
Indeed, for most of its 40-plus years, OSHA has lacked sufficient resources to protect American workers from irresponsible employers who all too often treat their employees as expendable pieces of equipment.
Full textOn Capitol Hill this morning, the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations is holding a hearing on what it describes as the “Views of the Administration on Regulatory Reform.” The star witness will be Cass Sunstein, head of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, better known as the “regulatory czar” of the Obama Administration.
As you might have read already in this space, last week the President launched a new regulatory initiative in which he directed the various regulatory agencies to comb through existing regulations looking “to root out regulations that conflict, that are not worth the cost, or that are just plain dumb.” Many of us think a new regulatory initiative is in order. But this version isn’t what we had in mind. Our currently regulatory structure is underfunded and overwhelmed, and the evidence is all around us: cars that have accelerated out of control, tainted food, the BP oil spill, toxic drywall, children’s “Happy Meals” that come complete with Shrek glasses tainted by toxic metals, and much more. But instead of launching an initiative to give regulatory agencies the mandate and the resources they need to genuinely protect health, safety and the environment, and to keep an eye on financial firms and health insurance companies, the President adopted the Republican frame for the discussion about regulations – that it costs jobs and is harming the economy. And with that, he launched his regulatory “look back.”
For having conceded half of the field on which the coming debate over regulation will be played out, the President will today collect his reward: faint and shallow praise from Republicans on the Hill, followed by calls for severe regulatory rollbacks, and a halt to future regulation. Republicans will tell us how regulations are choking off the economic recovery. They’ll talk about how costly regulations are without ever mentioning the benefits of regulation. I mean that literally. I’m no fan of the cost-benefit analysis that Sunstein and his colleagues at OIRA impose on regulatory agencies – it’s badly slanted in favor or industry’s interests – but a quick glance would tell anyone who cared to know that proposed regulations don’t make it out the door unless the monetized benefits exceed the costs. So for every regulation that industry and the GOP House majority complain about on grounds of cost, it’s important to remember that there are legitimate economic gains being made that exceed those costs – hospital visits not required because asthma attacks were avoided, workers’ compensation claims unfiled because on-the-job injuries were prevented, and so on. That’s how the system works, and while Republicans like to bandy about big numbers about the cost of regulation, you won’t hear them talk about the even larger benefits.
But there are other significant agenda items at work today as well. What the GOP really wants is to re-litigate the fights over many of the major laws protecting health, safety, the environment as well as laws designed to prevent too-big-to-fail financial powerhouses from wrecking the economy again. They lost most of those battles the first time around – for good solid policy reasons, I might add – and have never really gotten over it.
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