No records on plant: ‘Breathe deep the gathering gloom’

Listen up, Fayette County! You’ve got a problem. And it may be bigger than you could have realized.

You now know from the front page of this edition that Georgia Environmental Protection Division cannot account for a single annual report on waste products accepted by the treatment plant on Ga. Highway 92 just inside Fulton County since Philip Services Corp. bought the place in 1997.

But that’s just the beginning. It’s much worse. EPD says it has no annual reports of the waste that was brought in to the plant. That’s no reports since Fulton County sold the plant and it became a private business with the first Solid Waste Handling Permit issued in 1990.

As for Fulton County, they sold the old wastewater treatment plant to the waste industry rather than just shutting it down.

You now know that Fulton County’s required records only call for the most vague information to be listed, including documentation that does not list the component constituents in the chemicals received for processing.

Of course, that’s better than EPD, since Fulton does have documentation containing such innocuous labels as “wastewater” and “wash water” and “sludge waste,” whatever these are supposed to mean.

What good are regulations if they are just a shell game for government to do the bidding of companies that do what they want?

So what does this mean? Despite their uplifting words on behalf on PSC and the other companies that have owned the facility since 1990 and those who have sent their “non-hazardous” waste to the Spence Road facility, the fact remains that the Environmental Protection Division (also known as Environmental Plundering Division) and Fulton County cannot begin to account for what has come into the plant on Hwy. 92.

Nor can EPD and Fulton County account for any air-borne vapors that have escaped the plant since it began private operations in 1990.

That’s 16 years that you and your children may have been breathing some of the chemical vapors that may have escaped the facility.

Some chemicals, such as volatile organic compounds, break down quickly in the environment. Others do not.

What came to light more than three months ago as residents from Fairburn to Fayetteville and Peachtree City began smelling what most believed were those same wild onions turned out to be the fact that they were inhaling a brew of chemicals, apparently including the pesticide Mocap, an organophosphate that causes the manifestation of symptoms identical to those experienced by people and domestic animals in the affected areas.

Some of those include uncontrollable headaches, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, muscle twitching, kidney problems and all kinds of breathing problems. Your newspaper has chronicled many of their cases on these pages since early July. There are many others, hundreds of others.

The responsibility for this regulatory atrocity lies squarely at the feet of the Georgia EPD by virtue of its negligence in administering the solid waste handling permit.

But they are not the only ones. What about Fulton County, with whom PSC has a pre-treatment permit? Fulton can’t tell you what is going in or coming out of the plant?

What about U.S. Environment Protection Agency in terms of supposedly harmless waste transferred interstate?

What about the Georgia General Assembly, whose elected members were responsible for EPD’s mission, its funding and the pitifully few staff on the payroll charged with monitoring, compliance and enforcement?

Maybe some of your elected “officials” were too busy taking campaign contributions from waste companies to provide oversight to EPD and to the plight of what could easily become more than 1,000 affected residents.

But it goes further, much further. Where are some of the local doctors who would not take their patients seriously after being told that the onion smell was perhaps linked to their illness?

Where are the independent testing labs that declined to take soil samples in the area on behalf of the community task force because it might hurt their future business with EPD?

Where are the majority of the state and federally elected officials that represent you?

Except for a few, their silence in the past few months has been deafening. And where has the local and regional media been, refusing until now to go after the stories we’ve been telling you about for months?

Is any of this starting to add up? Hidden in laws and regulations, Georgia is and has been a dumping ground for waste of all kinds. From rural Georgia to metro Atlanta, Georgia is squarely in the bulls-eye of those who would transport and “process” waste in your back yard, your communities and your state. All with legislative approval.

But legislators can now be righteously indignant over the mass of people affected. It seems to be the American way: they turn their back and you pay the price.

Those in Fayette and Fulton who are not caught up on current events need to wake up. This problem is a chemical, monetary and regulatory Medusa that stretches in and out of the halls of power from Fulton County and the state of Georgia to Washington, D.C., and filters down to those that profit in waste.

There was a time not too long ago when the small group of people and this newspaper were viewed as alarmists, or fools. Those days are long gone.

“Breath deep, the gathering gloom...”