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November 5,
2000
WTI: Al Gore's
Most Noxious Lie
Shattered Promises
Toxic Town, Sick Kids
The first environmental promise Al Gore made in
the 1992 campaign, he soon shattered. It involved the WTI hazardous
waste incinerator in East Liverpool, Ohio, built on a floodplain
near the Ohio River. The plant, one of the largest of its kind
in the world, was scheduled to burn 70,000 tons of hazardous
waste a year in a spot only 350 feet from the nearest house.
A few hundred yards away is East Elementary School, which sits
on a ridge nearly eye-level with the top of the smokestack.
On July 19, 1992,
Gore gave one of his first campaign speeches on the environment,
across the river from the incinerator, in Weirton, West Virginia,
hammering the Bush Administration for its plans to give the toxic
waste burner a federal air permit. "The very idea is just
unbelievable to me", Gore said. "I'll tell you this,
a Clinton-Gore Administration is going to give you an environmental
presidency to deal with these problems. We'll be on your side
for a change." Clinton made similar pronouncements on his
swing through the Buckeye State.
Shortly after the
election, Gore assured neighbors of the incinerator that he hadn't
forgotten about them. "Serious questions concerning the
safety of the East Liverpool, Ohio, hazardous waste incinerator
must be answered before the plant may begin operation",
Gore wrote. "The new Clinton/Gore administration will not
issue the plant a test burn permit until all questions concerning
compliance with the plant have been answered."
But that never happened. Instead, the EPA quietly
granted the WTI facility its test burn permit. The tests failed,
twice. In one trial burn, the incinerator eradicated only 7 percent
of the mercury found in the waste, when it was supposed to burn
away 99.9 percent. A few weeks later the EPA granted WTI a commercial
permit anyway. They didn't tell the public about the failed tests
until afterward.
Gore claimed his
hands were tied by the Bush Administration, which had promised
WTI the permit only a few weeks before the Clinton team took
office. But by one account, William Reilly, Bush's EPA director,
met with Gore's top environmental aide Katie McGinty in January
1993 and asked her if he should begin the process of approving
the permit. In this version of events apparently McGinty told
Reilly to proceed. McGinty told him to proceed. McGinty said
later that she had no recollection of the meeting.
That evasion was demolished on October 31, when
former EPA administration Reilly testified before EPA's ombudsman
Robert Martin that he was approached by by McGinty and told that
Gore had had a change of heart on the incinerator and wanted
the test burn permit granted. "McGinty said it was the wishes
of the new incoming administration to get the trial burn permit
granted and get the decision made before they took office,"
Reilly testified. She [McGinty] said the vice president-elect
has had second thoughts about his position, had concluded that
he should not interfere in the regulatory process and that the
transition team would be grateful, the vice president-elect would
be grateful if I simply made that decision before leaving office."
Gore has persisted
in maintaining that there was nothing he could do about it once
the permit was granted. A 1994 report on the matter from the
General Accounting Office flatly contradicted him, saying the
plant could be shut down on numerous grounds, including repeated
violations of its permit.
"This was Clinton
and Gore's first environmental promise, and it was their first
promise-breaker", says Terri Swearingen, a registered nurse
from Chester, West Virginia, just across the Ohio River from
the incinerator. Swearingen, who won the Goldman Prize in 1997
for her work organizing opposition to WTI, has hounded Gore ever
since, and during the 2000 campaign she was banned by Gore staffers
from appearing at events featuring the vice president.
The decision to go soft on WTI may have had something
to do with its powerful financial backer. The construction of
the incinerator was partially underwritten by Jackson Stephens,
the Arkansas investment king who helped bankroll the Clinton-Gore
campaign. According to EPA whistleblower Hugh Kaufman, during
the period when the WTI financing package was being put together
Stephens Inc. was represented by Webb Hubbell, who later came
into Clinton's Justice Department and was indicted during the
Whitewater investigation, and the Rose law firm, to which Hillary
Clinton belonged. Over the ensuing seven years, the WTI plant
has burned nearly a half-million tons of toxic waste, 5,000 truckloads
of toxic material every year, spewing chemicals such as mercury,
lead and dioxin out of its stacks and onto the surrounding neighborhoods.
The inevitable illnesses have followed. CP
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