ACE Newsletter
Summer 2005 Issue, Volume 15 No. 2
This could be the last issue of the ACE newsletter. Our board is shrinking away and this aging director is hoping for a younger replacement (free training offer to an aspiring director). Incoming checks are enough to pay for printing, mailing and computer maintenance (even the computer is aging). But who will put it together next time?
It’s been a wild ride from the beginning in 1990 when our group helped drive off the incinerator proposed for Alto. Even with the help of other environmental groups, the base was always local, those wonderful people who knew the value of what they had here - clean air, clean unpolluted land, clean water. They pitched in, put on the first state recycling conference, and we were off and running.
Every year someone will want to reduce the buffers, or sell off the water, or pave another road, or build one on a wetland. Someone must be on guard. “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty,”... but also the price of clean land and water. This year the proposed interstate, I-3, is the hot topic and an enthusiastic group has gathered from Georgia’s northern tier and North Carolina’s southern tier to start the campaign. In the present political climate, they will need all the help they can get. See the article below.
— Adele Kushner, ACE Executive Director
The Banks County landfill just won’t stop growing, and R&B, a subsidiary of Waste Management Inc., proposes to double the size by 482 acres. There’s never a shortage of garbage, the question is how to handle it to cause the least harm to the neighbors and the environment. Waste Management should know how to do it - it’s the biggest such corporation in the world, with a colorful history of mismanagement, Mafia connections, record fines paid for both civil and criminal crimes - the works.
Now it’s deja vu, a replay of the original zoning controversy, when the county mismanaged the advertising for the zoning meeting, and the court decision was that zoning was not in force for the original location, and the county owed something to the original owners. No fee was agreed on. That is like the sword of Damocles over the heads of the commission now that rezoning is again the issue.
In the meantime, neighbors of the landfill are subject to flooding from runoff, and air pollution from flaring off the landfill gases. Two-lane roads are crumbling from the daily pressure of garbage trucks after bringing in 700,000 tons of garbage from all over Northeast Georgia, North and South Carolina, since June 2004. The landfill gas itself is a hazard. It consists of about 50% methane plus carbon dioxide and a small amount of toxic gases. A New York study of 38 landfills found that women living near solid waste landfills where gas is escaping have a four-fold increased chance of bladder cancer or leukemia.*
In a long article in the Banks County News of last May 25, Jack Christian quoted Charlie Laws, Waste Management’s regional director, “The County can deny [the request] and it’ll end up in court. Then there will be bad blood on both sides... We feel [negotiating a higher tipping fee] is something we could and should do for the county... We know we’re asking the BOC to do something that is unpopular.”
BOC chairman Gene Hart is quoted also: “[The BOC] has got to weigh revenue versus quality of life and environmental issues associated with this... I’m going to do what is best for the county, despite what my own feelings are.”
The $700,000 in tipping fees paid to the county in 2005 is the county’s third largest source of revenue, behind property taxes and SPLOST.
The landfill failed inspection by EPD last spring, with seven violations, but is now approved. But the bigger the landfill, and the longer the time span, the bigger the possible contamination. The landfill is lined with a plastic layer the thickness of a credit card, and covered with plastic after closure. Plastic is always subject to cracking from abrasion and exposure to the elements as well as the mixture of household chemicals in garbage.
Because the county's Comprehensive Plan and Solid Waste Management Plan are both sadly out of date, the county is no longer eligible for any state grants or assistance. In addition, the land that would be used for the proposed expansion is still zoned agriculture/residential rather than industrial, so the landfill would be a nonconforming land use. The Georgia Mountains Regional Development Center (GMRDC) is definite that both plans must be updated by 2007, a long process that involves input from county residents and approval by both the GMRDC and the Dept. of Community Affairs. Then comes the rezoning process. All this is in DRI-BAN-810, the report prepared by the GMRDC in Gainesville. Their phone is 770-538-2626.
Peter Montague, of the Environmental Research Foundation, believes citizens could and should stand up against the landfill’s expansion. The waste in the landfill remains toxic and capable of contamination for hundreds of years. He said, “They’re not required to issue the permit. I hope they stand up and draw the line.”
You can have your say at the monthly Commission meeting scheduled for Sept. 13, Tuesday, at 7 PM in the courthouse. You can leave your message to the Commission at 706-677-6200, or ask for the form that will let you speak at the meeting.
“Investigation of Cancer Incidence and Residence near 38 landfills with Soil Gas Migration Conditions,” New York State 1980-89. NY Dept of Health (Atlanta, Ga, Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, June 1998) Available from the National Technical Information Service in Springfield VA 800-553-6847; request publication PB98-142144.
— “Landfills are Dangerous,” Rachel’s Environment & Health Weekly #617 Sept. 24, 1998 www.rachel.org/bulletin/index.cfm?issue_ID=1149.
Here’s another case of deja vu, in this case a replay of the Appalachian Scenic Parkway campaign of 1993-99.
It was a long drawn-out campaign against the proposal to connect I-85 and I-75 from Dalton to Lavonia. The result was good, connecting existing roads and widening some of them - possibly a model for this new proposal.
I-3 turned up quickly after a news release from Congressman Charlie Norwood’s office and almost immediately was opposed by local residents. It was to connect Savannah to Augusta, then come through North Georgia to Toccoa and follow the Highway 17 corridor, then turn north to go through Helen and Hiawassee — or maybe 441 through Clayton.
An appropriation for a “feasibility study” of the road, originally proposed by former Rep. Max Burns, is already included in the national highway spending bill, according to Mr. Norwood’s aide, Michael Shaffer.
Proponents claim the interstate is needed to relieve traffic around Atlanta and connect with other interstates to the west -- but also because the South has not received as much highway money as the rest of the country. Somehow opponents are not convinced. A look at the map shows that I-3 would connect the Savannah River Site in South Carolina, with its massive nuclear complex, would run not far from the Oconee Nuclear Station east of Toccoa, and terminate, not in Knoxville, but at the recently completed I-140 spur running from Maryville-Alcoa to the nuclear facilities at Oak Ridge, Tennessee.
Besides nuclear material, opposition centers around the damage to our land and water, erosion from construction, destruction of habitat, damage to clear-flowing streams, concentration of traffic, more air pollution from that traffic, and in general paving over the very attractions that bring tourists into our area, all at great cost. The cost is estimated at $25 million per mile — this is no small road. An interstate needs a width of 1000 feet.
One could conclude that that this nuclear connection is a key reason for the project. The nuclear weapons complex, concentrated in the Southeast, depends on transporting dangerous radioactive materials, including plutonium and tritium, on our highways. The new nuclear complex will have production facilities concentrated at Oak Ridge, TN, Watts Bar, TN, Savannah River Site, SC, and the Pantex facility in Amarillo, Texas.
Already large amounts of nuclear material are moving between Oak Ridge and SRS (Savannah River Site). (See www.nirs.org/factsheets/ashevillenuclearcrossroads2004.pdf). And the nuclear power industry, having no solution to the problem of providing safe long-term storage for nuclear wastes, seems to just want to move them around. Since the Yucca Mountain site in Nevada is having problems, SRS may be on the receiving end. The guidelines for routing I-3 as proposed by Mr. Norwood call for the interstate to run as “a direct, Savannah to Knoxville Interstate.” (www.house.gov/apps/list/speech/ga09_norwood/InterstatesUpdate.html)
The campaign against it is progressing, with commissioners of two counties, Rabun and Habersham, already on record as opposing the project. Large turnouts of citizens in Lumpkin, Towns and White counties have met opposing the project. Two counties in North Carolina are also active. For details on the campaign go to www.stopI-3.org.
Gas Shortage?
Petroleum industry representatives played a major role in shaping the administration’s energy policies, providing significant support to the federal Energy Task Force, which developed the country’s official position, though the public has never been allowed to find out who participated in the task force discussions.
In late June the New York Times revealed that a former oil lobbyist, Phillip Cooney, who was Chief of Staff of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers, abused his high post. In his job on the Council, wrote the Times, he was systematically doctoring White House scientific reports to delete or water down any references to climate change or global warming. Two days after the Times report, Cooney resigned from the council and was hired by Exxon to help maintain its close ties to the White House.
— “A Coming Energy Crisis is Being Ignored,” Tom Halsted, The Washington Spectator, July 1, 2005.
Farmers in Canada and Argentina growing genetically modified (GM) soy beans have big problems with herbicide-resistant weeds which have arisen through natural selection. Experiments in Germany show sugar beets genetically modified to resist one herbicide accidentally acquired the genes to resist another. This is called gene stacking and has also been observed in oilseed rape in Canada.
— www.guardian.co.uk/gmdebate/Story
Last year the insurance industry paid out a record $44 billion in losses caused by natural disasters - many linked to global warming. Four “extreme” hurricanes hit the Caribbean, and Japan suffered ten tropical cyclones. Thomas Loster, a research director with leading insurer Munich Re, was unequivocal about the climate change connection. “We don’t need more evidence, and we need to start acting now.”
— “As the World Warms,” Sierra, July/August 2005.
A new National Academy of Sciences report warns that fuel-storage pools at nuclear power plants in 31 states may be vulnerable to terrorist attacks that could unleash intense fires and deadly radiation. According to the panel of nuclear experts, neither the government nor the nuclear industry “adequately understands the vulnerabilities and consequences of such an event.” (See “Dangerous Liaisons,” May/June.)
— “Updates,” Sierra, July/August 2005.
Rumor has it that Ed Taylor not only grows organic produce, he is prepared to sell it from his Habersham County home. Call him at 706-754-7403.