Background
From November 9, 2005
**
ACTION ALERT **
Stop Congress From Rolling Back Clean Water & Other Vital
Protections
(Beyond Pesticides, November 9, 2005)
Hurricane Katrina Waivers bills refer to the rebuilding of areas of the Gulf Coast but are not just limited to that region. These bills would actually hurt, not help, the people of Louisiana and elsewhere. Under these bills, the President or U.S. EPA is given the right to waive any federal or state environmental, health, tax, or civil rights law without justification or public oversight that the waiver is necessary to protect public health and safety. With waivers in place companies applying pesticides for mosquito control could hire untrained workers to spray toxic pesticides. Other basic worker protections that enforce minimum wages, anti-discrimination, and workplace safety could also be overridden in the name of reconstruction. The bills also make available massive sums of taxpayer money for pork barrel projects that may benefit big business but have little or nothing to do with the Hurricanes and their aftermath. To name a few, these waivers could result in projects that: pump toxic industrial or petroleum chemicals into drinking water; disregard testing requirements to ensure water is safe for use; destroy essential wetlands needed to prevent future flooding; deregulate hazardous waste dumping; and allow oil drilling and construction of nuclear reactors in the gulf region. Among the taxpayer handouts, is $100 million for mosquito spraying that requires neither a detailed account of expenditures nor the use of protective and efficacious methods. (Mosquito abatement plans in most states typically range between less than $50,000 – $5 million per district. For example, Gov. Schwarzenegger recently granted $9 million to 75 agencies throughout California – an amount hailed as generous by most.)
For more information:
Hurricane Katrina Waiver Fact sheets
Organizations rallied against the Katrina Waiver bills and their letters to Congress
Grassroots
Letter to Congress against CWA roll backs and Katrina Waiver Bills (Senate)
(House)
Bill text, goto Thomas
and input the bill numbers as shown: S.1711, S.1765, S.1766 (Senate)
or HR.1749, HR.3958 (House)
“The
Public Health and Environmental Equity Act” introduced in
the House by Rep. Hilda Solis (D-CA) and Rep Alcee Hastings (D-FL) and
in the Senate by by Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) and Richard Durbin (D-IL)
For questions contact Josh Klein at the Clean Water Network at 202-289-2421.
The Clean Water Act is under attack concerning pesticides. Under the guise of the need for unrestricted West Nile virus mosquito spraying and protection for farmers from so-called frivilous lawsuits by environmentalists, Senator James Inhofe (R-Oklahoma) and House Representative C.L. "Butch" Otter (R-Idaho) respectively introduced a bill (S. 1269 and HR 1749) that would allow pesticides to be sprayed over, near or in local waterways without the oversight of the Clean Water Act (CWA). Although much talk about the bill is around the need for unencumbered chemical mosquito control, the language in the bill extends far beyond mosquito spraying to cover any pesticide use, including agriculture and forestry.
The justification for removing pesticides from the purview of the CWA is that pesticides are already regulated by the U.S. EPA under the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, Rodenticide Act (FIFRA) and therefore, additional oversight by the CWA of pesticide pollution of waterways is redundant. Supporters of the bills argue that before the pesticide label is approved, the EPA determines whether its use will pose an unacceptable risk to water or aquatic species. The truth is that most people do not understand the depth of inadequacies of FIFRA to provide sufficient protection from harm. EPA creates pesticide labels in a national context using manufacturer supplied data that is often missing information and probabilistic modeling that averages risk factors across the population while assuming full label compliance. Non-target impacts or pesticide drift are commonly not accounted for, and real life exposure scenarios are often bypassed. Clearly stated, federal labels do not take into account local conditions of specific waterways where there may be depleted aquatic organisms, endangered fish or other species, sensitive habitat, or drinking water contaminant exceedances or multiple pesticide residues that can be monitored locally under the CWA. Perhaps most disconcerting is the fact that under FIFRA there is no provision for citizens to file legal recourse for damage to waterways caused by pesticide applications as there is under CWA. As there is abundant information on integrated pest management and non-chemical solutions, provided even by EPA, the bill is a giant leap backwards.
For
more information:
Beyond Pesticides previous
Action Alert
Bill Text of the "Pest Management and Fire Suppression Act"
(S.1269 or HR.
1749)
Congressional testimony
by Beyond Pesticides
Grassroots Letter to Congress against CWA roll backs and Katrina Waiver Bills (Senate) (House)
For questions contact Beyond Pesticides, 202-543-5450.