Puerto Ricans, disgusted with the Environmental Protection Agency’s “willful dereliction” of its oversight of the island’s toxic landfills, are demanding that the head of the agency close them, saying they have lost faith in an EPA deputy in charge of the territory.
The citizens’ advocacy group Puerto Rico Limpio, which means Puerto Rico Clean, is clamoring in a letter for EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy to enforce federal laws by closing the “toxic landfills.”
Their Sept. 1 letter spells out a “shocking pattern of willful dereliction of federal responsibility” by EPA Regional 2 Administrator Judith Enck, who in newly released documents was dismissive of the group’s concerns, saying the agency took care of the problem over the last decade.
Puerto Rico Limpio and other citizens’ groups say several of the island’s 27 landfills aren’t abiding by federal regulations that require devices to prevent toxic liquids from flowing out of the dumps and contaminating drinking water.
Observers in Washington say the issue raises questions over why the agency, which has been aggressive in enforcing regulations in the U.S., has been almost nonresponsive to the plight of Puerto Ricans.
The citizens group gained access to EPA internal documents, acquired through a Freedom of Information Act request. The group’s co-founder, Hiram Torres Montalvo, compiled the findings in a report it released late last month, showing the agency has “systematically failed to protect the people of Puerto Rico from imminent and substantial danger” at the island’s landfills, which are not complying with federal law.
But the report’s findings have gotten the group nowhere, prompting Montalvo to appeal to McCarthy directly to take their concerns seriously, especially as Congress returns from its summer break.
Montalvo said the EPA’s Region 2 director, who has direct authority over issues affecting Puerto Rico, was “dismissive and evasive” when confronted by a Republican congressman in June, citing correspondence he obtained between Enck and Rep. Dennis Ross of Florida, who is the House senior deputy whip. He raised the landfill concerns in a letter to Enck.
“In her reply, she ignored the urgency,” Montalvo told McCarthy. Enck listed actions the agency had taken in the past decade against nearly a dozen landfill operators. But Montalvo said the actions were incomplete and many of the landfills returned to their previously wayward practices and ill maintenance.
Eight out of the 10 facilities that Enck listed in her response “are still open, still receiving waste and operating out of compliance” with the law. “We have twice as many toxic landfills that have faced no action from EPA and threaten our people to this day,” Montalvo said.
“The people of Puerto Rico can no longer put their faith and confidence in Judith Enck to provide the federal protection that every American citizen is entitled to.” He requested that EPA headquarters take over with immediate action, Montalvo added.
Last month he raised the specter of the landfills making the Zika virus outbreak several times worse and asked why the EPA has ignored an impending public health hazard. Almost 14,000 people in Puerto Rico have gotten Zika, which causes a mild infection in most people but can lead to birth defects for pregnant women.
“It is vital that you take immediate action to put an end to the widespread danger that mostly disadvantaged communities in Puerto Rico are being forced to suffer under,” he told McCarthy in last week’s letter, citing Illinois Democrat Rep. Luis Gutierrez, who gave a speech in June that denounced the landfill crisis as an affront to low-income communities of color who “are always paying the price when it comes to environmental injustice.” Gutierrez is a leading advocate for immigration reform and border security.
EPA spokeswoman Melissa Harrison could not respond to the claims raised by the letter, but confirmed that it was received and will be reviewed.
Montalvo sent the email to a number of senior Republican and Democratic lawmakers, including the chairman and top Democrat on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, which oversees the agency. Sen. Jim Inhofe, R-Okla., is the chairman of the panel and a leading critic of the agency’s regulatory agenda. On the other hand, Barbara Boxer, the top Democrat, from California, is an environmental stalwart and a key defender of the the agency. However, she has been known to be tough on the agency when justified.
Montalvo warned in his email that the agency’s environmental justice goals under its EJ2020 Action Agenda “will have no credibility if so many American low-income communities of color in Puerto Rico are once again subject to EPA’s inaction, negligence and blindness to its responsibility to protect the public.”
The criticisms of EPA’s neglect in Puerto Rico follow major scandals in the U.S. over the last year, including the lead water crisis in the ailing city of Flint, Mich., where an EPA region director resigned after it was found out that the agency knew about drinking water contamination in the town for months but deferred to the state rather than warn the town’s people itself.
More recently, a town in Indiana is struggling with high levels of arsenic and lead in its pipes, and the EPA may be to blame.
Michael Dorsey, an appointee on the EPA’s National Advisory Committee, wrote a guest column for the Orlando Sentinel in May called, “Do toxic dumps in Puerto Rico portend the next Flint tragedy?”
He wrote that while the “landfills may not grab headlines like the current debt crisis rocking the island, the damage and the injustice of the overlooked landfill waste are very real.”
“With so many sites in violation over so much time, one has to wonder if Puerto Rico is the next Flint — yet the residents are simply waiting to receive the attention of the nation before it’s too late,” he added. “We can and must do better.”
