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To the Editor,
What is there about this valley that attracts the most egregious environmental polluting industries? A hazardous waste incinerator located in East Liverpool a few decades ago. It was sold as "safe" because of cutting-edge technology. Yet, in one year alone, it had 50 illegal emissions into the atmosphere of heaven knows what.
At one time we had human excrement shipped in from New York to a local "landfill"- a sanitized word for a garage dump. Again, using the latest in technology to compost it. Yet, the smell was so bad and drifted so far into surrounding housing developments that a lawsuit was filed that successfully had it stopped.
Then there was a battery recycle operation that had so many environmental violations that it was run out of Georgia. Where did it try to relocate? You guessed it, here.
Folks in Belmont County, Ohio, are fighting to stop the reopening of an old landfill near the county airport.
The Shell Cracker plant in Beaver went on line in November of last year. Again, sold as environmentally safe because of all the latest technological bells and whistles, blah, blah, blah. It is already in trouble with the Pennsylvania EPA for exceeding its permissible VOC limits of 516 TONS a year. Think about that. A VOC is a volatile organic compound which means it weighs about as much as air and therefore easily mixes and disburses throughout the air we breathe. How much air does it take to weigh a ton? It is beyond my imagination! Multiply that by 516 and that is what the Cracker plant is allowed to spew into the atmosphere every year. Yet, they exceeded it by 141 tons in their first year of operation!
Another egregious polluter, the coke plant, now shut down thank goodness, was allowed to consistently disregard contemporary air pollution standards because it was "grandfathered." The people of Follansbee as well as the surrounding communities are just beginning to appreciate newly freshened air when, Empire Generation, the new owners of the old Koppers chemical site, decided they want to build a medical waste incinerator there. Really!
Do we have a sign on our backs that says, crap on us?
Blaise Hogan
Weirton