Comment to "copper stain" book interview

https://www.krwg.org/post/fronteras-911-copper-stain-asarcos-legacy-el-paso-elaine-hampton

Comment: by mcmurray

"Google "asarco secret document

The authors were kind and gave me a copy of the book, and mentioned me as getting a document from US EPA.

Actually, after tedious unpaid months of work in 2006, the TX OAG contacted the US DOJ who then speedily got me a copy of the secret 73 page EPA ASARCO US DOJ 1998 "confidential for settlement purposes only" document. TO THIS DAY the government has not released the invoices listed in it to me, the local cleanup trustee or anyone

I fought years later to get all the USEPA documents that had remained hidden in CO. The US EPA REGIONAL DIRECTOR gave the over 20 boxes of documents to me after 2008. (Anyone can file a foia request for copy of those searchable disks!!!!). Hidden in the middle of a 500 page file of many documents was the ****1994 encycle whistleblower report.*** We had never seen it before. You can search for the link to it in my blog -as a reporter was kind enought to write about it.

It is great to see good information and stories documented in this book "copper stain"; but, frustrating that neither author had training in science research so some of the facts got lost, or changed by no fault of theirs

Only one worker spoke up in 2005 at the air permit hearing. One. The workers now regret it as they see how Asarco abandoned them: many to slow agonizing unusual deaths normally associated with toxic waste exposure.

As a former asarco supervisor of the steam electric plant said, he regretted it all when he watched children play in the dirt. All his staff was dead. He had illness. The water that ran thru that plant had been run hard thru a water distillation purification unit that failed to keep up. So when that water steamed it caused some toxins to turn into vapor. The supervisor said not to touch the pond that held that water--- or any of the ponds.

Later that uit caught on fire. Afterwards neithe EPA, tceq, the cleanup trustee--- no one would allow me to bend down 3 ft and double bag an official sample of that tiny scintillating piece of slag from the fire. That piece of slag contained the necessary link to economically protect our region from what happened/protect the workers. NO ONE BACKED ME UP. And more interesting, none of the government or clean up guys wanted to walk on that dirt--- they stayed way back on the pavement

I feel for the parents of the children born at county hospital with major organs missing, who had livd along the river in the 1990's downwind and downriver from the contop furnaces altered to run more stuff thru by asarco.

Parents mourn deaths of their babies from causes like that, forever and might blame themselves trying to wonder if baby would have survived had they done something differently.

I hope that any parent who experienced that back then will not punish themselves because such birth defects can be stringly associated with industrial chemical exposures."

God bless those babies in heaven, the nursing staff who remembered them and the families who lost the babies to lack of a brain, a liver, a spleen or worse, dying an agonizing slow death.

It has been 20 years. On this coming mothers day if just one mother realized she could not have done differently/not her fault, that would be a blessing.