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jlf1961 -> RE: Environmental Disaster in North Carolina (3/1/2014 10:34:44 PM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: cloudboy
Not sure why you seemed determined **not go get it.**
The State Agency in charge of environmental enforcement was gutted by the NC leadership (Activist, unopposed Republicans) and employees who tried to enforce protections were committing fireable offenses.
Glad to know you're OK with that and don't want to assign any responsibility or blame for it.
Weak regulatory enforcement played a key role in our economic meltdown and in Deepwater Horizon's massive leak in the Gulf of Mexico.
Its not a good idea to have polluting industries enabled by politicians.
Where did I say they were blameless?
I never denied their fault in this, I just pointed out that the poor construction of those ponds was going on long before the GOP took over, or doesn't that matter at all?
I also never said I was okay with any part of the state's actions in the matter prior to the disaster.
Now, I am going to ask you again.
If the practice was to build poorly designed retention pools before the GOP grabbed the state house and governorship, just what party was in charge?
If this practice had been going on for years, why did no one in previous administrations catch it?
Lets leave this one for a second, I want to bring up another environmental disaster in North Carolina.
Back in the 80's and 90's people down river from the champion paper mill in Canton NC, a small town outside of Asheville filled a number of lawsuits concerning water quality of the Pigeon river. For one thing, the water was a dark brown downstream from the mill while upstream it was crystal clear.
Upstream, no traces of the cancer causing compound dioxin. You see the river was just not large enough or had enough flow to dilute the effluent from the plant so the river was basically poisoned, and this had been going on since 1908.
Now during the 80's and 90's when I lived there, North Carolina was predominately democrat. Again the state was responsible for enforcing the federal clean water act.
Now clearly they were not doing that.
So was the GOP responsible for that disaster?
Die plants routinely discharged chemically polluted waste water into the rivers of the blue ridge mountains. Champion Dye and finishing where I worked routinely overloaded the effluent pipe to the city waste water treatment center, and that waste water went into the French Broad river. This was pretty much common until the year before I left, when the city stepped in and flat out told the plant managers that production would stop if the effluent pipe to the city plant was over loaded. This was after a larger effluent pipe line to the waste water treatment plant had been built.
You see, Champion sports wear saw they were no where near using the capacity of the new effluent pipe line, so they put in newer and bigger dye jets, raising production by more than double the previous levels, so once more, the plant was dumping dye and chemically polluted waste water into the river.
It was not the state people that came down on Champion Sports wear, it was the federal boys, the state dudes kinda sat on their collective thumbs and looked at the sky.
Champion was so badly hit by fines that within a year, it was bought out by the investment fund that owned Sarah Lee.
GOP controlled inspectors had nothing to do with that, it was all Democrat.
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