The New Plant Manager, Bob Litle writes an opinion piece in the Sunday paper (El Paso Times) and coincidently the EP Inc. (Nov.4-11) releases the first news about the GAO investigative report, which says that nothing wrong ever happened -- it was all a paperwork error. Amazing that the Federal Dept. of Justice and the Environmental Protection Agency and also ASARCO felt it necessary to keep this "paperwork error" secret from the Paso del Norte community and the world for eight years!
No one has explained why we have never gotten a copy of the chemical-analysis of the Encycle material(s) or the old ASARCO lake's "new" water, or the pond mud that got railed/trucked clear-back to Corpus Christi's TX US Ecology dump. No one explains the 20010628 meeting-memo that lets us know the EPA and TCEQ are hiding something from us, likely a metal.
Bob Litle writes, "The opposition to Asarco is not about the environment, it is about the land." And all he will talk about is lead (Pb) in the dirt - not any other metals. None at all.
http://www.elpasotimes.com/opinion/ci_7362521
I don't know about anyone else but I know that my opposition is not about land. It is about the WATER, and about getting an honest answer to the question "what is it?". What is poisoning us from the almost-decade of burning untracked/unmanifested toxic wastes in the ConTop furnaces? Why did the consent decree tell Asarco to pave streets for six years, not five or ten years? Why did the consent decree require that all materials going out of Encycle have spectrometer analysis after that? Why, when the ConTop was designed to burn sludge (dirt) has no one talked about NORM waste? WHAT ARE THEY CONTINUING TO HIDE?
Mr. Litle writes "Wouldn't it be great to have an additional $2.2 million in tax revenue every year to curtail the raising of taxes and help our schools?"
In reply, I can't help but think, "wouldn't it be nice to have 24 million dollars from Asarco to clean up the huge Arsenic plume beneath our drinking water (the old american canal) so that the 70+ year old canal might be replaced?" Wouldn't it be nice if the El Paso City schools got the money from Asarco to clean up Asarco's waste in the old schools?
If years of toxic waste burning was a "paperwork error" then how can we trust the paperwork figures from Asarco telling us how much poison is in our Paso del Norte environment from their illegal waste disposal? When Asarco removes 2 inches of dirt from Anapra yards and says that they are cleaned up, and in Maryland a smelter removes two feet of dirt before deciding that they cleaned-up enough -- what are we to believe? What are we to believe when the Fox tells us that the chickens are safe?
In my opinion the simultaneous release of these El Paso Times and EP Inc. pro-Asarco articles is suspicious, and leave a lot out --- when we get to see the full analysis of the ENCYCLE dirt that caused the EPA and the DOJ to slap a five-state multi-million dollar settlement on Asarco, then we might be getting closer to the truth.
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