Bushwhacked_ Life in George W. Bush's America Large Print - Molly Ivins [53]
She told Martin about the thirteen neighborhood pregnancies that had ended in horrible birth defects, about children born with genitalia that were neither male nor female. She told him the EPA’s Brio report didn’t mention mercury, but she had found a Monsanto document that asked what had happened to the mercury.
Martin surprised her. He told her he was coming down to have a look at the site. When he called back to tell her the EPA wouldn’t pay for a plane ticket, Flickinger offered to buy him one. Martin suggested instead that they meet at an EPA conference in Dallas. Flickinger showed up in Dallas with a book of documents that convinced Martin the agency had failed.
“I own a newspaper, so I had an advantage few people have,” Flickinger said. But the Leader’s twelve-thousand-reader circulation and a small coalition of local activists were no match for the EPA. Without Martin there was no way to stop the agency’s plan to burn vinyl chloride, dioxins, PCBs, and a host of other toxins catalogued as “tentatively identified compounds.” The agency also didn’t know there was mercury in the Brio pits until Flickinger put Martin onto a Monsanto paper trail that led to a mercury-waste stream. “You can’t burn mercury,” Flickinger said. “You change it to a gas, but you don’t destroy it.
“They were going to do this in the middle of a community of seventy thousand people, near a hospital, near schools,” Flickinger said. “We were going to have to close the college [San Jacinto Junior College] down. Waste Management had built an incinerator. When Bob issued his report, that sucker was ten days from starting to burn waste. And they didn’t even know what was in the waste they were going to burn. The incinerator was torn down. It never burned a teaspoonful.”
Today the Brio site is sealed off behind a fifty-foot-deep concrete wall, covered with a gas containment layer and studded with air-monitoring devices and vents that capture toxic-gas eruptions. Standing water and groundwater is pumped and treated, which has lowered the level of toxins in the bodies of fish caught in Clear Creek. The creek had the highest trace amounts of volatile substances ever detected in fish tested in the United States. (We believe the greatest geographical misnomers in Texas are Clear Lake and Fort Bliss.) An elementary school and 677 homes that were also contaminated have been abandoned.
Brio was Martin’s first big case, and he used it to expand and define the powers of an office that was almost an experiment when he drew his first paycheck.
BY THE TIME George W. Bush appointed New Jersey governor Christine Todd Whitman EPA administrator, Martin had worked with EPA directors appointed by the elder George Bush and Bill Clinton. He had been at odds with all of them—most recently with Democrat Carol Browner over a controversial incinerator in East Liverpool, Ohio. It was all part of the job. As the Bush administration began to take shape, it was obvious that Whitman wasn’t a real player. Early on, she was so often blown away at cabinet meetings that secretary of state Colin Powell began to call her “the wind dummy.”* Eleven months after Whitman was appointed, she finally got her feet on the ground and made a decision.
She got rid of Bob Martin.
In November 2001 she ordered her deputy administrator to inform Martin that she was moving the ombudsman’s office inside the agency, where it would be under the control of the inspector general. A Government Accounting Office report issued months earlier had recommended greater independence for the office. The report was ignored.