Eugene

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FDA and DEQ currently meeting with W. Eugene & Bethel citizens about the state of the JH Baxter contamination (www.epa.gov)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by NapSnack to c/eugene

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Zooming in on this meeting right now, looks like some of the info is covered at the FDA website. It's still in the bureacratic/testing pipeline towards being declared a Superfund site. Interesting to see how these agencies work and make decisions in our community, in real time. It''s all moving shockingly slowly - apparently partially due to how long it takes for individual sample results to come back from testing (they're still waiting on data from March samples.) But they're currently guesstimating over 601,000 gallons of super toxic chemicals on site: pentachlorophenol, heavy metals, caustic chemicals. Lots of neighbors reporting still significant odors coming off the plant. (Took 40+ years of people complaining and dying of brain cancer before Baxter came onto DEQ's radar and they began fining Baxter for blatantly illegal practices.)

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[–] NapSnack 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

They're guessing based on labels on barrels, but admitted they want to test everything because they don't trust that the contents match the labels. It's ugly. They showed some photos - they'd stick the logs inside these huge pressure chambers to force the chemicals into the wood, then pull them out and let them drip dry over the ground. Where people walked through it, tracking it all over the site. That somehow people were complaining for 40 years and the EPA only got allowed on site in Dec 2022 is sobering. (DEQ fined them in 2020, but still, absolutely wild how blatant this was and frankly lacking in any sense of care for their workers or community. And I'm not impressed with the regulatory response. Like how did they not know this was happening?)

[–] kescusay 3 points 1 year ago

Makes me wonder how the owners slept at night, knowing they were poisoning the people they worked with and their own community.