Environmental Justice Now!

Kettleman City is a small town in the southwestern San Joaquin Valley. The city is next to the I-5 Interstate Highway and is the site of the largest toxic waste dump in the western United States. About 200 residents held a march and rally on Saturday to protest a cluster of birth defects that have recently been exposed. Maricela Mares-Alatorre is a mother and has lived in Kettleman City for 31 years. She also helped organize the march. Mares-Alatorre said “in the past we have fought a lot of issues with our local toxic land fill, which is the largest in California. Currently they are in the process of an expansion, but what we are asking for is a moratorium on all of those permits until there is an investigation as to why there are so many children being born with cleft palate. We have had a cluster here - in a 14 month period from 2007 to 2008 five children have been born with cleft palate. We just found out this morning that there is another woman who is pregnant who will also have a child with cleft palate and we believe that until that is investigated and they know why it is happening that there shouldn’t be any more permits issued.”

Maura Alatorre is one of the mothers whose child was born with a cleft palate. Alatorre said she was at the rally because “it is in honor of the children that were born with these deformities and thanks to the attention that everybody is putting into this rally, there will be attention put to the problem in Kettleman City and that will help.”

On Friday Kings County health officials said they were on a fast track to investigate the high incidents of birth defects in Kettleman City. The US Environmental Protection Agency also released a statement on Friday saying that they will be working with the county and the state to determine if the incidents are related to environmental factors.

But, Dr. Benjamin Hoffman, chief medical officer for Waste Management, the corporation that runs the toxic waste dump in Kettleman City said “I’ll make a guess that you’ll not find that cluster, that it does not exist.” Bradley Angel, the executive director for Green Action for Health and Environmental Justice, one of the groups who helped organize the march, responded to Hoffman’s statement by saying “this so called medical spokesperson had the outrageous nerve to say there is no cluster of birth defects and dead kids here. This is outrageous. It is so outrageous that this morning a number of the parents, some of whose children had died, confronted the local Chem Waste representative. She was shocked and told the parents and myself that her own company statement was insulting to Kettleman City. We are demanding a retraction.”

After the rally, marchers headed for the main business district in Kettleman City, many of them holding signs demanding environmental justice and green flags from the Center on Race, Poverty, and the Environment, another group that helped organized the march and rally. Bradley Angel said they were there to end environmental racism. He said “this rally here today is to oppose the expansion of the largest hazardous waste dump in the western United States, run by Chem Waste, to oppose the proposed Avenal Power Plant which would be the second biggest air polluter in the southern San Joaquin Valley and oppose the environmental racism that is associated with this. We are also here to plea for the government agencies to stop the dumping on this community due to all of the dead kids we have in Kettleman City, all of these kids with birth defects. Enough is enough!”

Groups like Greenaction and the Center on Race, Poverty, and the Environment have joined strategic alliances with residents in rural San Joaquin valley communities to improve water and air quality, as well as confront problems such as this cluster of birth defects. Together they are demanding that no new expansions take place at the toxic waste site until it is determined what is causing the birth defects.

For more information, see: http://www.greenaction.org and http://www.crpe-ej.org/


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