How to receive all notices and updates for the Asarco El Paso Facility

20070300
In your earlier email you indicated that you had submitted a written hearing request for permit #4151.  Submitting comments or a hearing request in writing on a particular pending permitting action places you on the mailing list for that specific permit. I have confirmed with the Chief Clerk's office you are on the mailing list for the pending renewal #4151.

 

In order to be placed on a mailing list for ANY pending permitting action you must submit in writing either comments, a hearing request, a public meeting request, a request to be placed on the mailing list for that pending permit action or a request to be placed on the permanent mailing list for the specific permit.

 

If you are interested in receiving all future notices for the El Paso Asarco facility, I would recommend that you submit a written request to be placed on the "permanent mailing list " for the specific Asarco permit numbers that you are interested in.

 

You can find the permit numbers by searching the Air Permit database at

http://www2.tceq.state.tx.us/airperm/

 

Submit your written request to

 

Attn: Chief Clerk MC 105

TCEQ

PO Box 13087

Austin, Texas 78701

 

Sincerely, 

The Office of Public Assistance

Asarco Ore Handling Permit #4151

[2006, April 11] No NOA/Preliminary Decision or written response to Comments has been received as of 2007, June 06

The Office of Public Assistance (OPA) is responsible for responding to the public on pending permitting actions therefore your email has been forwarded to OPA for a response.

The Asarco permit renewal application #4151 is seeking authorization to continue operation for the ore handling and storage facility. Within this permit application there are two projects that apply; 120312 and 121726. Any action on an operating permit or any other permits that this facility holds will be handled separately.

The renewal (#4151) is still under technical review. Your hearing request has been received and you are the mailing list for the renewal. You should receive confirmation of receipt of your hearing request soon. Once the technical review is complete and if the application meets the rules, the applicant will be required to publish the Notice of Application and Preliminary Decision. This notice will be mailed to you and all others on the mailing list. Please note that the technical review typically takes several months to complete. Because contested case hearing requests were received off of the first notice, the Notice of Receipt and Intent, the comment period remains open throughout the technical review process. At the end of the review process, staff will compile a written Response to Comments to all timely filed comments. This will also be mailed to you.

If you have any further questions, please contact OPA via email or at 800/687-4040.

Sincerely,

The Office of Public Assistance

Don't touch the Dust...

Mago Orona - Celestial Girl mural, Douglas Elementary School, El Paso

They say: my sister's baby was born without a brain,
My neighbor's baby has a fused skull,
My friend is missing a limb

Heart defects in kids are rampant
My young friend has a scarred head
brain tumors at 21
3 dead at a school from cancer behind the eyes

It is allergies they say
As their noses bleed
As the dust stirs in the heavy wind
and lungs find it difficult to breath

The children are born with rashes
Skin with lumps and bumps
bones with cancers

Don't drink the water a young mother is told
Don't breathe the air, an elder is told
Don't touch the dust, a child is told.

Don't touch the dust.

Anapra, N.M., the most lead contaminated spot in New Mexico (see smelter down-river in the background), per the April, 28, 1982 Washington Post article (Leon found this) ... "the 102 folks who live in Anapra, N.M. are peeved with their Texas neighbors in El Paso. It seems that Anapra has the highest lead contamination readings in the state and the New Mexico officials claim the cause is a copper and lead smelting plant owned by Asarco Inc. in El Paso."

Anaprans (Sunland Park Environmental Group) want the responsible environmental officials to step down and for cleanup to begin. Anapra, N.M. is two miles from the smelter.

Asarco Texas Smelter Secretly Burned Toxic Waste for Nearly a Decade

NATIONAL | October 11, 2006
Copper Plant Illegally Burned Hazardous Waste, E.P.A. Says
By RALPH BLUMENTHAL
A bankrupt copper giant facing billions of dollars in pollution claims across the nation pretended for years to recycle metals while illegally burning hazardous waste, according to an E.P.A. document.

see a copy of the document, posted at
http://archives.newspapertree.com/Asarco/asarco_1998_memo.pdf

Sham Recycling Creates Sham Decision?

Interview with Physiologist about Lead poisoning

YouTube:
Lead Poisoning - Evelyn A. Mauss - ECU #518

VERY GOOD! She is a consultant with the NRDC

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tl5NV6EHBl8

By Marilyn Berlin Snell
From the May/June 2006 issue of Sierra magazine

http://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/200605/goingforbroke/page1.asp

Asarco El Paso Smelter Cemetery 12/05

2004 Texas Observer article on Asarco El Paso

http://www.texasobserver.org/article.php?aid=1766

The New Wave of Border Activism

Social Movements Crossing Frontiers

by Kent Paterson

"....

Reality Tourists in a Border City

Another highlight of the BSF was a "reality tour" of low-income Ciudad Juarez neighborhoods and industrial sites. Halting on the banks of the Rio Grande in the Felipe Angeles colonia, reality tour guests peered directly across the river at the mothballed Asarco copper smelter located in El Paso but also only a couple of miles from the southern New Mexico city of Sunland Park. The old smelter is a rusting emblem of how environmental issues affect communities on both sides of the border.

Shut down in 1999, the plant is at the center of a fight between Asarco's owner, Grupo Mexico, and environmental groups and political leaders from Mexico and the United States over the company's plans to renew its Texas state environmental permit and restart production. The Carlyle Group associated with George Herbert Walker Bush is a principal investor in Grupo Mexico.

Asarco opponents maintain that a revived smelter will degrade an already polluted binational airshed, and they blame the transnational company for decades of lead, arsenic and other heavy metals contamination of neighborhoods in El Paso, Ciudad Juarez and Sunland Park — a problem the company denies was its fault. Immediately preceding the BSF, the Sierra Club [well, it was a Sierra Club member, but the actual news came from EPGTLO and SPEG] released a memo from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) it obtained through the Freedom of Information Act that reported Asarco had been illegally incinerating hazardous wastes during the 1990s. The document did not spell out exactly what Asarco burned.

Mariana Chew, the Sierra Club's El Paso–Ciudad Juarez field organizer, retorted during the reality tour that the environmental organization wants answers about what was burned and why the information was concealed from the public. "They knew it and they didn't tell us," Chew affirmed, adding that the Sierra Club demands the permanent closure of the Asarco site and the cleanup of its environs.

In a press statement, Asarco minimized the incineration revelation, contending that the company had merely recycled materials and had cleared up the matter with the EPA years ago. But Jacqueline Barragan, a member of the Students Against Asarco group at the University of Texas El Paso, which is situated behind the old plant and afflicted with "hot spots" of lead contamination, was aghast at the news of the EPA memo. "I felt violated, and actually it wasn't a surprise either that the city has covered this up and that these environmental agencies that are supposedly out there to watch out for our health aided in covering up this terrible secret," Barragan fumed....."

see:
http://newspapertree.com/politics/1094-epa-memo-adds-fuel-to-asarco-fire

MEXICAN AMERICAN WOMEN THROUGH FAMILY PHOTOGRAPHY

LENSES INTO THE PAST: RECOVERING THE HISTORY OF
MEXICAN AMERICAN WOMEN THROUGH FAMILY PHOTOGRAPHY
SMELTERTOWN, TX 1915-1950

Monica Perales
Summerlee Foundation Research Fellow for the Study of Texas History, 2006-2007

Smelter Vocational School students, ca. late 1920s.
Luz and Lorenzo Personal Photograph Collection, in the possession of the family, El Paso, TX

http://www.smu.edu/SWcenter/PeralesBB.htm

The U.S. Department of Justice demanded Monday that mining company Asarco LLC...

Portfolio Media, New York (June 5, 2007)--The U.S. Department of Justice demanded Monday that mining company Asarco LLC, which filed for Chapter 11 in 2005, address pollution at a group of its mines in California as a condition of its reorganization.

The DOJ's brief, filed on behalf of the acting Assistant Attorney General for environment and natural resource, added that the costs associated with compliance ought to be given administrative priority in Asarco's reorganization plan, which is due in...

http://energy.law360.com/Members/ViewArticlePortion.aspx?Id=26121&ReturnUrl=..%2fsecure%2fViewArticle.aspx%3fId%3d26121