An explosion and release of gas at a pool and spa chemical plant outside Atlanta, Georgia threatens residents with long term environmental consequences, while the response to the incident is shining a spotlight on corporations’ influence over US regulatory agencies.
An explosion occurred Sunday at a facility run by the company BioLab, Inc. in the city of Conyers, Georgia, about 20 miles outside Atlanta city limits. A fire on the roof of the plant was extinguished, but a massive plume of smoke shot into the air after water from a malfunctioning sprinkler came in contact with a water-reactive chemical. Thousands of people in the surrounding area were ordered to evacuate while others remain under a shelter-in-place order.
Air quality data from a local meteorologist has since brought the government response into question; one reading suggested airborne chlorine was at 22 times the so-called “action level” for the US Environmental Protection Agency to investigate the matter.
Author and environmental organizer Tina Landis, who writes for the website Liberation News, joined Sputnik’s Political Misfits program Friday to discuss the incident.
“Chlorine gas is very dangerous, especially considering it's been lingering around for many days now in the Atlanta metro area,” Landis noted. “It's a skin irritant, eye irritant, obviously it irritates your respiratory system and leaves permanent damage to your lungs after prolonged exposure… especially, if you already have respiratory conditions. It can be deadly and for youth; for pregnant people, it's all more dangerous.”
“They don't actually even know how much is in the air at the moment,” she added, pointing out that nearly half of air monitoring stations located near the plant are not able to measure chlorine levels. “It takes much longer to disperse than other pollutants would… They put out an [evacuation] order, but there was no assistance for people to evacuate.”
Landis faulted media for downplaying the danger of the leak as well as local officials, who she claimed were more concerned with protecting local businesses than residents of the region.
“There's these shelter-in-place orders that are from 7pm to 7am,” Landis explained, “because they're worried more about the economy than they are about people's health because they want people to go to work as usual, go shopping as usual during the day. And also, these are low-income areas outside of Atlanta that, if you have older housing, your windows and doors do not seal airtight. So that chlorine gas is getting into people's homes.”
“There's just a lot of outrage right now in the area because of the lack of government response.”
The leak is the third documented accident at the BioLab facility since 2004. One news outlet reported that the US Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has cited the plant for 18 violations over the past two decades, with most of the infractions deemed “serious.” Yet the company has only been fined a total of $67,000 over 20 years; BioLab’s yearly revenue is estimated at some $3.5 million.
“The environmental regulatory system in the US was always flawed, but starting under [former US President Ronald] Reagan it's been slowly chipped away, the powers of the EPA and other organizations to actually protect people,” Landis claimed. “These fines that are given to industries for polluting and literally killing people in the communities around them are so minimal. They're just seen as an operating expense and they just increase the cost of their products to compensate for it.”
“So it's really not a disincentive for them to take the needed safety and maintenance actions that are needed to prevent these accidents,” she explained. “This is the problem of the capitalist system that protects the rights of corporations over human health and the health of our environment, right? It's so criminal.”
“The implications of what's happening right now in the Atlanta area there's no way to know, but it's potentially impacting millions of people's health long term. The soil and the water pollution and the pollution that's in the infrastructure, in the buildings, will be long lasting, similar to what happened with the train derailment in Ohio the other year. People are still living with those toxins in their environment, and no one really even knows the health implications of it. And this happens time and again in this country, because there just aren't the protections and the strong regulations that are needed.”