Scott Pruitt: Dirty Energy Koch Brothers' Sock Puppet & Chemical Industry Prostitute

STOP PRETENDING!


TEXAS BOUGHT & PAID FOR REPUBLICANS FAILED!

Scott Pruitt is a Dirty Energy Koch Brothers' Sock Puppet & Chemical Industry Prostitute!

QUOTING BREITBART?  What a TOOL!

This is not about protecting the health and safety of Texans affected by HURRICANE HARVEY'S FLOODED SUPERFUND SITES!

This is about Scott Pruitt destroying the EPA and protecting TEXAS REPUBLICANS who failed to PLAN and REGULATE....and prevented local communities from doing so.


TEXAS REPUBLICANS created a PUBLIC HEALTH CATASTROPHE because of their refusal to PLAN and REGULATE!

Texas Republicans are more focused on GERRYMANDERING to prevent dark complected folks from voting in order to protect their POWER.

Texas Republicans are more focused on DISTRACTING voters with inflammatory issues such as Gay Marriage, LGBT rights, abortion and so on.....than doing their jobs of protecting Texans.

Texas Republicans allowed construction in FLOOD-PRONE AREAS, allowed too much impervious surface [roads] with inadequate drainage to allow water run-off and continue to deny self-evident CLIMATE CHANGE.


STOP THE GOP RIGGED ELECTIONS & VOTE THEM OUT!



The Associated Press reported on September 2, 2017, the EPA had yet to inspect the superfund sites in Houston area already accessed by AP reporters. (photo: Jason Dearen/AP)

04 September 17 AM

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EPA Attacks News Agency, Reporter for Coverage of Flooded Texas Hazardous Waste Sites
Mark Hand, ThinkProgress
Hand writes: "A day after their boss essentially called reporters cowards for their coverage of Hurricane Harvey, the Environmental Protection Agency criticized an Associated Press reporter for his coverage of the agency's response to flooded hazardous waste sites in southeast Texas."
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The Associated Press reported on September 2, 2017, the EPA had yet to inspect the superfund sites in Houston area already accessed by AP reporters. (photo: Jason Dearen/AP)

Scott Pruitt's team cites Breitbart article to support accusations.

 day after their boss essentially called reporters cowards for their coverage of Hurricane Harvey, the Environmental Protection Agency criticized an Associated Press reporter for his coverage of the agency’s response to flooded hazardous waste sites in southeast Texas.

In a press release titled “EPA Response To The AP’s Misleading Story,” the EPA characterized the Associated Press’ decision to publish an article suggesting the agency was not being responsive to the effects of Harvey on Superfund sites as irresponsible, arguing it “creates panic and politicizes the hard work of first responders.”

The EPA accused Associated Press reporter Michael Biesecker, who co-authored the article, of “reporting from the comfort of Washington” and having the “audacity” to imply that the EPA was not being aggressive enough in inspecting the Superfund sites. However, the agency, in its press release, did not dispute any facts in the current version of the AP article.

During a visit to Houston on Saturday, President Donald Trump suggested the news media was too afraid to do dangerous reporting in the stricken area. And yet the Associated Press reported Saturday that it had accessed seven Superfund sites in and around Houston and found that all had been inundated with water, in some cases many feet deep. The Superfund program was established in 1980 to clean up hazardous waste sites left behind by industry.

Biesecker shared a byline on the article with AP reporter Jason Dearen. The news agency also noted that one of its writers, Jay Reeves, contributed to the report and that Biesecker reported from Washington. Dearen toured several flooded Superfund sites in the Houston area as part of his reporting for the article.

The EPA said in a separate press release Saturday that aerial imagery showed 13 of the 41 designated Superfund sites in the Houston area were flooded by Harvey and were “experiencing possible damage” due to the storm. Of these sites, the EPA said just two have been inspected and will not require emergency cleanup, although they plan to conduct additional sampling in the area.

The remaining eleven sites “have not been accessible by response personnel,” the EPA said. The Associated Press reported Saturday that its journalists used a boat to examine the condition of one flooded Houston-area Superfund site, and was able to check on other sites with a vehicle or on foot.

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Julie Pace 

✔@jpaceDC

EPA says this story was reported from "comfort of Washington." Photos, video, details in report suggest otherwise. https://apnews.com/27796dd13b9549b0ac76aded58a15122 …

1:49 PM - Sep 3, 2017

AP EXCLUSIVE: Toxic waste sites flooded in Houston area

HIGHLANDS, Texas (AP) — As Dwight Chandler sipped beer and swept out the thick muck caked inside his devastated home, he worried whether Harvey's floodwaters had also washed in po

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The Associated Press had not responded to a request for a comment from ThinkProgress on the EPA press release at the time this article was published. In a tweet earlier on Sunday, the news agency’s Washington bureau chief, Julie Pace, stated the “EPA says this story was reported from ‘comfort of Washington.’ Photos, video, details in report suggest otherwise.”

In its press release on the Associated Press’ article, EPA spokesperson Liz Bowman said “we have a team of experts on the ground working with our state and local counterparts responding to Hurricane Harvey. Anything to the contrary is yellow journalism.” Prior to joining the EPA’s communications team, Bowman served as director of issue and advocacy communications for the American Chemistry Council, the primary trade group for the U.S. chemical industry.

President Donald Trump is notorious for attacking individual reporters in his speeches and tweets as part of an effort to generate distrust of the news media among the American public. But it is very rare, if not unprecedented, for a federal agency to specifically target an individual reporter in a press release.

In the press release, the EPA also cited a Breitbart article to attack Biesecker about a previous article he authored about a meeting between EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt and Dow Chemical CEO Andrew Liveris. Using Pruitt’s schedule as a reference, the AP reported the meeting between Pruitt and Liveris lasted for about a half-hour at a Houston hotel. But in a correction, the AP noted that a spokesperson for the EPA told AP that the meeting listed on the schedule was canceled, though Pruitt and Liveris did have a “brief introduction in passing.”

http://readersupportednews.org/news-section2/318-66/45589-epa-attacks-news-agency-reporter-for-coverage-of-flooded-texas-hazardous-waste-sites

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The Public Health Crisis from Texas Republicans' FAILURES TO REGULATE & PLAN

NO REGULATIONS?

This is the tragic result.

Harvey Aftermath: A Public Health Crisis in the Making
Nicholas Kusnetz, InsideClimate News
Kusnetz writes: "From water contamination to diseases to mold in the walls, dangers continue long after the hurricane. These sorts of risks accompany climate change."
READ MORE

Matthew Koser looks for heirlooms in his grandfather's flooded house after Hurricane Harvey deluged the Houston area this week. (photo: Erich Schlegel/Getty) *

From water contamination to diseases to mold in the walls, dangers continue long after the hurricane. These kinds of risks accompany climate change.

he Gulf Coast faces an evolving public health crisis in the wake of Hurricane Harvey that's likely to unfold over months or even years. Health officials are concerned about everything from immediate injuries and exposure to germs and toxic chemicals to more insidious and long-term threats, including mold in the walls of flooded homes and mental health problems.

Many of those public health concerns match what experts have been warning we'll see more of as climate change brings more severe weather.

When storms hit, they can tip the vulnerable over the edge of danger. A New York Times interactive of requests for help from Houston-area residents offers a snapshot of the wide range of problems that can arise in the midst of a storm, from "on last oxygen tank," to "no food and babies have no milk," to simply "neck deep in water.

"You have to worry about immediate effects like drowning, you have chemical exposures from the refineries around Houston, as well as chemicals from households," said Peter Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College. "You also have to worry about infectious diseases."

Chris Van Deusen, a spokesperson for the Texas Department of State Health Services, said it's too soon to know if bacterial diseases are spreading in the floodwater. But in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported clusters of Staphylococcus aureus and Vibrio vulnificus—two skin infections—as well as diarrheal diseases and vomiting among evacuees.

The next concern, Van Deusen said, comes as people collect in shelters. "Shelter operations are going to be going on for an extended period of time," he said. "Anytime you have that many people in close proximity, you're at risk for communicable disease."

Porfirio Villarreal, a spokesman for the Houston Health Department, told the Times that the risks from the floodwaters themselves were obvious.

"There's no need to test it," he said. "It's contaminated. There's millions of contaminants."

While that's true of floodwaters from any storm in an urban area, the waters may prove to be particularly dangerous in Southeast Texas, a center of the nation's oil refining and petrochemical infrastructure.

Early Thursday morning, Harris County officials reported two explosions at a chemical facility full of organic peroxides. The company had warned that explosions could be imminent, and county officials had already ordered the evacuation of people within 1.5 miles. The smoke can cause respiratory and skin irritation, as well as dizziness and nausea. Arkema Inc. said in a statement that "the best course of action is to let the fire burn itself out."

Petrochemical Industry Adds a Toxic Brew

As the storm approached, energy companies began shutting refineries to protect their operations—emitting toxic gases in the process. Facilities have reported releasing more than 2 million pounds of hazardous chemicals into the air since the shutdowns began last week, according to an analysis of state regulatory filings by the Environmental Defense Fund. That equals nearly 40 percent of all the releases from the facilities in 2016.

"On a good day, there's already a high risk of cancer," said Luke Metzger, director of Environment Texas, an advocacy group based in Austin. "This amount of pollution in such a short time just makes that risk even higher."

In one of the largest releases, the Chevron Phillips Chemical Cedar Bayou plant estimated that it emitted 28,505 pounds of benzene, a carcinogen, as part of its total release of more than 750,000 pounds of hazardous chemicals.

Importantly, these figures are just estimates. State officials shut down air monitors in the area ahead of the storm to protect them, so it's impossible to know what exactly nearby residents were exposed to. But people reported smelling foul chemical odors.

Facilities are continuing to release more pollutants even as the storm has moved out of the region. On Wednesday, Kinder Morgan's Pasadena Terminal reported that the roof of a tank holding gasoline had been partially submerged. The company estimated that more than 12,000 pounds of hazardous chemicals were released.

Elena Craft, a scientist with the Environmental Defense Fund, said the incidents revealed poor planning on the part of the region's petrochemical infrastructure and the need to rebuild to a higher standard for larger storms. "The reality is these are happening more regularly and they're larger in magnitude," she said. "We can't keep doing our disaster management using the same information we have been for years."

Harris County also has at least a dozen federal Superfund sites that may be leaking, and scores of other industrial facilities.

Flooding, Sewage Threaten Drinking Water

Then there's the threat of failing sewage systems contaminating not only floodwaters, but drinking water too.

As of Thursday afternoon, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality was reporting:

• 21 inoperable wastewater systems.


• 52 inoperable public water systems, serving at least 115,000 people.


• 18 wastewater and sanitary sewer overflows, including in the City of Corpus Christi and at Shell's Deer Park manufacturing complex.


• 184 active boil-water notices covering at least 189,000 people.

Risks Extend Inside the Home 

Power outages can lead to the spread of foodborne illness and heat stress as people go without air conditioning and refrigeration. As of Thursday morning, the U.S. Department of Energy reported 200,522 customer outages in Texas and 11,969 in Louisiana. One of the biggest dangers, according to public health officials, is carbon monoxide poisoning when people fire up generators or propane heaters in poorly ventilated areas.

In the aftermath of hurricanes Katrina and Sandy, mold spread through homes and other structures. Inhaling spores can cause both acute and chronic health problems, from toxic poisoning to allergies and asthma. In parts of storm-hit New York, residents continued to report mold problems four years after Sandy.

A national Climate and Health Assessment published last year by the U.S. Global Change Research Program said that climate change presents a "significant threat" to Americans' health, with the effects already showing. One of the top concerns, the report said, is more frequent severe weather events, which it said killed more than 5,000 people from 2004-2013.

Already, the report said, "the intensity, frequency, and duration of North Atlantic hurricanes, as well as the frequency of the strongest hurricanes, have all increased since the 1980s."

What About Mosquitos and Disease?

One emerging area of concern, where climate change may play an additional role, is the spread of mosquito-borne illnesses.

Scientists are continuing to study the impact of hurricanes on mosquito populations, but one study of areas hit by Katrina found that incidence of West Nile Virus initially dipped in the weeks after the storm, but then surged over the next year. "In the immediate aftermath of Katrina, it looks like the floodwaters washed away a lot of mosquito breeding sites," Hotez said. But along the Gulf Coast, transmission can extend well into the fall, he said, and as floodwaters receded, the cases began to rise.

Since 2005, however, Texas has seen the introduction of several new diseases carried by mosquitos, including Dengue fever, Chikungunya virus and, most recently, Zika virus, though there's no known active transmission in the area right now.

Hotez said that while scientists are still studying why these diseases are spreading northward, climate change is likely playing a role. With these diseases only recently emerging in the state, he said there's no way to know how Harvey may affect their spread. "We learned a little from Katrina, but that was pre-Zika, pre-Chikungunya and even pre-Dengue," he said. "It's all bets off now."

 http://readersupportednews.org/news-section2/318-66/45535-harvey-aftermath-a-public-health-crisis-in-the-making

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Texas' DISGRACE! This is why regulations matter!

This is REPUBLICANS in action!

TEXAS FLOODING was caused by POOR PLANNING and LACK OF REGULATIONS.

30 August 17 PM

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A MOMENT TO HONOR THOSE WHO SUSTAIN RSN - The problem of people who use Reader Supported News but will not contribute is so serious that it often overshadows the efforts of those who are quite willing to help sustain the organization, and there are many. We are a long way from finished for August. Let’s take a moment, however, to sincerely thank our sustainers, large and small, each and every one. In solidarity. / Marc Ash, Founder Reader Supported News

Sure, I'll make a donation!

Houston's Toxic Superfund Sites Are Underwater and Leaking
Samantha Page, ThinkProgress
Page writes: "Houston is the heart of the Gulf Coast oil industry. The so-called 'chemical coast' is home to numerous petrochemical refineries and processing plants. As such, it is also home to more than a dozen Superfund sites - areas of serious toxic pollution designated by the EPA to need remediation."
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Conception Casa and his friend Jose Martinez check on Rhonda Worthington after her car became stuck in rising floodwaters in Houston. (photo: LM Otero)

Meanwhile, the EPA's budget for emergencies has gone down.

t least 20 people have died and hundreds of thousands have been evacuated in unprecedented flooding this week in and around Houston, Texas. Federal officials have already said that recovery from Hurricane Harvey will take years.

Houston is the heart of the Gulf Coast oil industry. The so-called “chemical coast” is home to numerous petrochemical refineries and processing plants. As such, it is also home to more than a dozen Superfund sites — areas of serious toxic pollution designated by the EPA to need remediation.

After Harvey, though, many of those sites have gone underwater.

The risk to people and the environment is both immediate and long-term. Kids are reportedly swimming in waters that might be passing through Superfund sites or state-designated toxic sites. But even after the flood waters subside, it’s impossible to know how far the toxins may have spread.

“If the water picks up contaminated sediment from sites, that may get deposited in areas where people frequent — residential properties, parks, ballfields — that were never contaminated before. We can’t say for sure it will happen, but it’s certainly a possibility,” Nancy Loeb, director of the Environmental Advocacy Center at Northwestern University’s Pritzker School of Law, told the Washington Post.

The water could also leach into groundwater sources from nearby wells.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration is planning to overhaul the Superfund program. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt — who has decided to personally lead the program — says his approach will reduce costs and speed clean-up, but a task force report from July offered such vague recommendations as “Establishing an ‘Administrator’s Top Ten’ list which will get his weekly attention” and “Finishing sites where construction is completed or nearly completed in order to transition the site from ‘Remedial Action’ to ‘Ready for Reuse’ to Deletion, as appropriate.”

And — along with many other EPA programs — the Superfund program is facing significant budgetary cuts if the Trump administration has its way. The EPA’s proposed budget cut total Superfund cleanup funding by $330 million dollars, a more than 30 percent reduction. The program had already been cut from FY16 to FY17, so the proposed new budget is less than two-thirds what it was two years ago.

The program’s emergency response funding, critical before and after events such as Houston’s flooding, has also been cut by 30 percent over the past two years.

New toxins transmitted via water and air also present serious public health risks to Houston residents. At least one of ExxonMobil’s local oil refineries was damaged and leaked chemicals. Another damaged plant released large volumes of sulphuric acid into the air.

http://readersupportednews.org/news-section2/318-66/45507-houstons-toxic-superfund-sites-are-underwater-and-leaking

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RSN: Dan Rather | Our Fellow Americans Are Hurting

30 August 17 PM

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Reader Supported News

A MOMENT TO HONOR THOSE WHO SUSTAIN RSN - The problem of people who use Reader Supported News but will not contribute is so serious that it often overshadows the efforts of those who are quite willing to help sustain the organization, and there are many. We are a long way from finished for August. Let’s take a moment, however, to sincerely thank our sustainers, large and small, each and every one. In solidarity. / Marc Ash, Founder Reader Supported News

Sure, I'll make a donation!

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Dan Rather | Our Fellow Americans Are Hurting 
 
Dan Rather, Dan Rather's Facebook Page 
Rather writes: "As the horror continues to unfold in South Texas, we see this spirit come to the fore, from public officials and private citizens. These are heroes who seek not attention or reward, other than the knowledge they are helping their fellow human beings in a time of desperation." 
READ MORE

Putin's Spokeman Confirms Trump's Lawyer Sent an Email About Moscow Project 
Greg Price, Newsweek 
Price writes: "Russia confirmed Wednesday that one of President Donald Trump's personal lawyers did indeed send an email asking for help in getting a Trump Tower built in Moscow but that the subject was never brought up to Russian President Vladimir Putin, according to Reuters." 
READ MORE

Net Neutrality Comment Deadline Is Tonight; 21.9 Million Comments in So Far 
Jon Brodkin, Ars Technica 
Brodkin writes: "There are 21.9 million filings on the FCC's 'Restoring Internet Freedom' docket already, blowing away the four million received before the 2015 decision that imposed net neutrality rules. Many comments are apparently from spam bots and form letters, but Chairman Ajit Pai's proposal to undo net neutrality rules has received massive attention." 
READ MORE

Philadelphia Sues Sessions Over Sanctuary City Ban 
Reid Wilson, The Hill 
Wilson writes: "The city of Philadelphia has filed a federal lawsuit against Attorney General Jeff Sessions over the Trump administration's proposal to add new restrictions to grants for local governments in order to block sanctuary city policies." 
READ MORE

ICE Plans to Destroy Records of Abuse, Sexual Assault in Immigrant Detention Centers 
Kimberly Lawson, VICE 
Lawson writes: "According to the ACLU, the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), is considering allowing ICE to destroy documents related to detainees, operations, and more based on various timetables." 
READ MORE

Guatemalan Protesters Demand President's Ouster Over Corruption 
Press TV 
Excerpt: "Protesters in Guatemala have demanded the ouster of President Jimmy Morales over his attempt to expel a UN official probing corruption charges against him." 
READ MORE

Houston's Toxic Superfund Sites Are Underwater and Leaking 
Samantha Page, ThinkProgress 
Page writes: "Houston is the heart of the Gulf Coast oil industry. The so-called 'chemical coast' is home to numerous petrochemical refineries and processing plants. As such, it is also home to more than a dozen Superfund sites - areas of serious toxic pollution designated by the EPA to need remediation." 
READ MORE

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