And now:Ish <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (A. I. McCombs)
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Subject: EarthWINS Daily #4.7 [excerpt]
CANADA: Health and Safety at Voisey's Bay
Topic 136 CAN: Health and Safety at Voisey's
DEBRA hrnet.indigenous 11:37 PM Feb 11,
1999
(at OLN.comlink.apc.org) (From News system)
Edited/Distributed by HURINet - The Human Rights Information Network
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## author : [EMAIL PROTECTED]
## date : 10.12.98
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The Voisey's Bay Environmental Hearings are over and people are now trying
to absorb all the information - Excerpt from presentation on Occupational
Health and Safety.
Key Words: ["Homer Sagan" Occupational Health and Safety]
Media: CFGB-FM Reporter: BILL HALL
Date: 11/17/98, 6:47:00
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Bill Hall: Well, the Voisey's Bay environmental hearings are over, but the
people who took part are probably still trying to absorb all the
information that came up. If we asked them to recall a particular session,
it might be difficult. One presentation about a month ago at the hearings
did strike a nerve with some people. It was all about occupational health
and it was given by Homer Sagan who spent 45 years working for Inco in
Sudbury. He's also a critic of the company's health and safety record.
Here is an excerpt of his analysis about the situation at Voisey's Bay.
Homer Sagan: More people die in Inco operations from diseases than
accidents, ten times more. I can prove it. The company is inspired to do
something about accidents because accidents they can't hide and they got to
pay compensation and it's cheaper for them to prevent accidents. So
generally the safety aspect . . . the safety and health has always sat
together, but health is always forgotten. And because they never get
caught on health, you know, diseases because they come years later, they
think they can escape it. And in Voisey's Bay, most of the diseases takes
ten years to see the ***, they'll be gone.
Bill Hall: Homer Sagan is a former employee of Inco. His presentation was
commissioned by the Innu Nation.
Last week Inco filed a response to Homer Sagan's presentation on
Occupational Health and Safety during the Environmental Assessment Hearings
- Interview with Christine Cleghorn.
Key Words: ["Christine Cleghorn" Innu Nation, Voisey's Bay]
Media: CFGB-FM Reporter: JULIE GREEN
Date: 11/17/98, 6:48:00
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Bill Hall: Last week Inco filed a response to Homer Sagan, but they
refused to do an interview about it. Christine Cleghorn of the Innu Nation
has been through the response and she spoke with our reporter Julie Green
about what she found.
Julie Green: Christine, the company says all of life is risky and that
includes work at Voisey's Bay. What do you think of that?
Christine Cleghorn: Well, all of life is risky and that's why we
takeprecautions in life. That's why we wear life jackets when we go
swimming.
And that's why, I think, when you're planning a project like this you need
to take those risks and hazards into account right from the start.
Julie Green: It seems that there's no basic agreement here on what the
risks are. Is nickel a carcinogen? I mean, Homer Sagan thinks it is but
it doesn't look like the company does.
Christine Cleghorn: Well, not being a geochemist I can't answer that. I
think the main thing to look at here is that Homer is saying, look, you
know, nickel has been proven to be a problem in Sudbury and Thompson. And
if Inco is saying in its response that because it's in a different form in
Voisey's Bay that's great, but we still don't know the answer to one of
Homer's most basic questions, which was what's in the ore? What kind of
contaminants are in your ore and how are you going to deal with them?
Julie Green: So you're saying that you don't have good information from
Voisey's Bay Nickel about that?
Christine Cleghorn: Right.
Julie Green: What do think is in the ore?
Christine Cleghorn: Well, in the EIS there's a rather vague table that
tells us that up to 10% of the ore may contain the following list of
ingredients, which includes things like arsenic, which . . . obviously a
flag goes up when you hear that, you know. But we want to know, well, what
percentage of arsenic is in the ore and how is Inco planning to make sure
that that's not floating around in dust in the mill or that workers in the
open pit are going to be exposed to it and what not.
Julie Green: Right. How far in the end does the company's response go
toward answering Homer Sagan's questions and recommendations?
Christine Cleghorn: I think it goes . . . it seems to me that in their
response a lot of effort is focused on sort of broadly why a lot of Homer's
concerns don't need to be addressed from Inco's perspective. For example,
you know, Homer says that a lot of miners have lung cancer. Well, Inco
says, yeah well a lot of miners smoke. So it's not really something that
we consider to be a problem because we can't separate cancer that they
might have gotten from smoking versus cancer that they might have gotten in
the course of their working day. But what, I think, he would have liked to
have seen in the response is things like, to address some of the
suggestions and recommendations that Homer made. Instead of being, you
know, negative about everything, let's try to build towards something more
positive here.
Julie Green: Homer Sagan made a point about diesel saying that it should
be used underground, that there are alternatives, electricity, canola, and
so on. Is there any commitment here that Voisey's Bay Nickel will look at
alternative sources of fuel underground so that that improves air quality?
Christine Cleghorn: They do discuss diesel emission evaluation program,
which tries to look at diesel, particularly in mining operations, and to
look at "cost effective control strategy" for diesel emissions. What we
know is that in Sudbury they are mixing canola oil with diesel in an effort
to reduce those, you know, the emissions, what's coming out of the end of
the pipe, and monitoring what repercussions it has throughout their
operation. So is this helpful throughout or is this not helpful throughout
or what not? They've never mentioned in the course of the EIS how they're
going to take what they've learned already with the deep program in Sudbury
and apply it in Voisey's Bay and nor have they said, you know . . . at the
very least it would have been nice to learn how they were going to move
maybe what they're doing in Sudbury to a phase two at Voisey's Bay.
There's no learning curve and there's no application of what they already
know. And if their position is that they haven't learned enough from
Sudbury to be able to apply it in Voisey's Bay, well, at some point in
Sudbury there must have been a recognition that there was a problem, which
would have created this whole deep program to begin with. So when you go
back to those problems that they were encountering in Sudbury, are those
same circumstances going to be replicated in Voisey's Bay?
Julie Green: Do you see anything there that speaks to the whole question
you raised initially about precautions, taking precautions?
Christine Cleghorn: No, to be honest, which is disappointing.
Julie Green: What would you like to have seen?
Christine Cleghorn: Well, I think that, first of all, recognition that
there . . . you know, because the company has recognized off the start that
life is full of hazards. Well, let's recognize that there are hazards
associated with mining. It comes with the business. There are hazards
associated with farming. There are hazards associated with fishing. There
are hazards associated with mining. Miners are in situations where their
exposures to things are higher than they would be otherwise. So with that
as the starting point, let's talk about how we can make this a better mine,
a healthier mine. And if that means ventilating the open pit, commit to
ventilating the open pit. I hope that the panel makes strong
recommendations in this area and I'm glad that right from the get go
there's been this sort of voice and dialog about health and safety because
ultimately it's going to be the folks in Nain, the folks in Natuashish who
are, and the employers, employees rather, at Voisey's Bay who are, you
know, breathing in this dust and who have to deal with it.
Julie Green: Thanks very much for talking to me Christine.
Bill Hall: Christine Cleghorn worked as an advisor to the Innu Nation
during the environmental assessment hearings.
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4. U.S. Our Right-to-Know is under siege
Date: Mon, 15 Feb 1999 13:10:27 -0500
Sender: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Precedence: bulk
From: "Michael R. Meuser" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
HI - Our right-to-know is under siege. Congress is considering limiting
the placement of publicly funded unclassified information about toxics
in our communities on the internet. Please do all you can to prevent this.
An article on ZDNet, Intenet edition says,
Ever since the appearance of www.scorecard.org, a Web site showing
pollutants in communities, Cray added, the chemical industry has been
shocked "that people had that much easy information."
I have more than a passing interest in communicating the potential threats of
toxics in our communities through maps on the internet. In 1995 I placed my
Santa Cruz TRI on the internet. It was inspired by the toxic maps FOE had
done in the UK and was the first map of its kind in the U.S. My dream was
that these web maps would encourage other communities to do the same.
More recently I was contacted by EDF and our family business contracted to
do the interactive maps for EDF's chemical scorecard. Since then we have
done several other toxic mapping websites
( http://www.mapcruzin.com/projects/ ) including our most recent prototype,
Multiple Toxic Point Sources in Santa Clara and Santa Cruz counties
( http://www.mapcruzin.com/allfacmap2/index.html ). This was done to go
beyond TRI and get a better picture of the toxics we are exposed to -- a
vague idea of what the worst case scenario data that our lawmakers and the
chemical industry is so afraid of would look like. It's important to note
that
we mapped approximately 24,000 TRI facilities for the EDF Scorecard. The
worst case scenario (RMP) data includes 60,000 + facilities.
Yet, this still would only account for the hundreds of thousands of facilities
around the US.
If you'd like to read more about this issue I've collected quite a bit of
information at http://www.mapcruzin.com/rtkmorenews/cep02011.htm
Here are a few more quotes from the article. You can read the entire article
at http://www.mapcruzin.com/rtkmorenews/cep02151.htm
Lawmakers on Wednesday weighed a question that could significantly
impact what government information is released on the Internet: Should
unclassified data that could be used by terrorists be kept off the Net?
It's being cited as "an emerging national security threat" by Rep. Thomas
Bliley, R-Va., and others, who called the hearing before members of the
House Commerce Committee.
That threat, they add, is "the potential posting of sensitive and
nationwide
chemical disaster information - including locations of materials and
potential deaths from worst-case accident scenarios - on the World Wide
Web."
Mike
http://www.mapcruzin.com/
for Right-to-Know
News, free GIS, maps and data,
Community Mapping Resources
Michael R. Meuser
GIS and WWW Mapping Application Development
Mapping for Community Right-To-Know
"making data make sense"
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
5. Fwd: PUBLIC MEETING: EPA STRATEGY ON PRIORITY TOXIC CHEMICALS
Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: Mon, 15 Feb 1999 10:09:36 EST
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sender: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Try as I might, I haven't been able to convince the sender of this message:
[EMAIL PROTECTED] (Pranas Pranckevicius) of the EPA that notices
like this should appear on Wisc-eco. For those of you who would like to see
or get these in a more timely manner, try signing up for the Great Lakes
Information Network (GLIN) list server by going to: www.great-lakes.net. If I
remember correctly, there are a number of lists available to conservation and
environmental activists and professionals. The GLIN-announce server is the
one that the message below came from.
Dave Blouin, Mining Impact Coalition of Wisconsin
email:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
PUBLIC MEETING TO BE HELD IN CHICAGO ON EPA STRATEGY ON PRIORITY TOXIC
CHEMICALS
The EPA will be holding a public meeting to obtain public comment on two
major initiatives addressing persistent bioaccumulative toxic (PBT)
chemicals in
the environment.
The first initiative the Agency is seeking comment on is the draft
documents developed as part of the Agency’s PBT strategy. The two draft
documents are “A Multimedia Strategy for Priority Persistent,
Bioaccumulative and Toxic (PBT) Pollutants” and the “EPA Action Plan for
Mercury”. <www.epa.gov/pbt/pbtstrat.htm>
The second initiative the Agency is seeking comment on is the proposed rule
to add PBT chemicals and lower the threshold for these chemicals currently
on the Toxic Release Inventory (TRI) list. The proposed rule
<www.epa.gov/fedrgstr/EPA-TRI/1999/January/Day-05/tri34835.htm>
will lead to greater reporting of environmental releases of a number of
PBT chemicals including dioxin and mercury and further expand the public’s
right to know.
Day/Date:
Tuesday, February 23, 1999
Time:
9 a.m - noon - session for the PBT pollutant strategy
1 p.m. - 4 p.m. - session for the TRI proposed rulemaking
Location:
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
Metcalfe Federal Building
77 West Jackson Blvd.
Room 323
Chicago, IL
Attendance:
Those wishing to speak at the meeting should pre-register; pre-registration
is not required if attending only to listen.
Contacts:
To pre-register contact the Emergency Planning and Community Right-to-Know
Hotline, toll free at 1-800-535-0202.
Information:
For more information
on the PBT Strategy
contact Sam Sassnet, 202-260-8020
e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
on the proposed TRI rulemaking
contact Daniel Bushman, 202-260-3882
e-mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
****************************************************************************
EarthWINS Daily is a publication of Mining-exchange.
DISCLAIMER
** NOTICE: In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material
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Tsonkwadiyonrat (We are ONE Spirit)
Unenh onhwa' Awayaton
http://www.tdi.net/ishgooda/
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