A Devil to Big corporations

by Marlon Crump

" I might be an angel to communities that fight against environmental issues, but I'm a devil to big corporations, developers, and governmental agencies."

These powerful words by Green Action for Health and Environmental Justice Director, Bradley Angel at a panel on global warming at Golden Gate University, immediately snapped me out of what felt like a hypnotic trance.

Angel was just one of the many prominent environmental directors present at the session, as well as one of the many speakers. There was also a scientist and manger from the Environmental Protection Agency (E.P.A.), as well as a few note-taking journalists and concerned residents from San Francisco and Richmond.

As I stepped off the elevator on the second floor, I walked into a corporate conference world, with only over twenty in a populated attendance, rectangular shaped tables, a wine-colored carpet, and projector slid show of each speaker's proposals. My reluctance at attending the conference subsided and I relaxed a little, as I took out my notebook preparing to take notes- until I did a 360degree quick turn of everyone and saw I was the only man of African Descent present. I suddenly felt like an alien but tried to shrug it off and began to listen to the speaker.

Peter M. Strauss, President of PM Strauss & Associations produced what appeared to be a timeline from the 19th century to present day. I battled through an approaching migraine to absorb the vital information Strauss produced, as he talked about radium nuclides that were buried in the Hunter's Point Shipyard, in the Bayview. Strauss also discussed the 1980s and El Nino and the severity of it's aftermath, nationwide.

According to his background on the item agenda sheet, Strauss was involved in numerous project sites in the Bay Area: The IBM Superfund Site in San Jose, Concord Weapons Naval Station, Alameda Naval Air Station and Hunter's Point Naval Shipyard..

Sitting alongside with Strauss was United States Environmental Protection Agency Region 9 Manager, Harold A. Ball. They began to take questions, and a couple of them immediately caught my ear. An activist gave both a question and a comment directed towards Ball, regarding the corporate interests of land developers and the EPA's neglect or refusal to stop the hazardous wastes exposed to the public.

Ball responded to the question by the activist, stating that he totally understood his concern and agreed, but he doesn't control what the agency does, entirely.

Sherry Padgett, a resident of Richmond, California gave an all too familiar concern of the levees in that city. "Over the past ten-fifteen years, our levees have been breached and no one from any governmental agency has took the time to investigate. What can we do as a community, as a people do to prevent any further damages?"

I practically knew the answer to this, myself, before Ball answered. " That would a something that the state or federal government would have to do, and get involved," he said. I immediately thought about the aftermaths of Hurricane Rita and Katrina and all the poor communities that were displaced.

The last two forum speakers were Jane Williams, executive director of California Communities Against Toxics, and Bradley Angel, executive director of Green Action for Health and Environmental Justice. Miss Williams gave an eloquent, often humorous, thorough presentation, as she discussed how developers try to worm their way around the chain of liability, by avoiding the costs of removing hazardous wastes, even abusing the Polanco Act.

" It's very common for public agencies to restrict, deny, or delay the process of releasing information surrounding environmental health hazard issues," she said. She also joked, &quotNowadays, it's like greek gods battling, so it's the same between developers, corporations, and the public into getting government into legislating laws around these issues."

Bradley Angel really caught my attention when he spoke about the lengths, struggles and hardships, many people face just to get state and federal government from protecting land developer's financial interests and hold them accountable for not complying with environmental regulations.

He mentioned a small town in Santa Barbara, and the horrendous lengths the community there had to go through simply to get rid of a company that produced deadly waste materials. They exposed hazards to such a degree, that after being falsely promised by the state government that it would remove the company, they literally had to take matters into their own hands and physically take over the entire plant.

According to Angel, " Even after taking that major risk, the company wasn't even shutdown for another two years." He talked about one instance of Midway Village, apartment complex in Daly City where tenants were duped into cruelly believing they had " died and gone to heaven" when they received housing there. However, what the poor residents didn't realize was they were leasing on toxic polluted soil.

I couldn't help but think back to all my really early years, at age 16, working in many industrial factory plants, in my native town of Cleveland, Ohio. In 2002, I worked at my most dangerous job to date, called Ferrous Processing Transfer (F.P.T Cleveland). At the time I was twenty-four, and didn't care about the dangers of an outside production scrap yard line, as long as I made decent earnings.

It required six ten-eleven hour days of standing inside a very filthy booth and wearing a hard hat, safety glasses, boots, and a mask. This equipment didn't stop anyone from being exposed to fiberglass, debris, foul odorous fumes, and God only knows what else was in those crushed car parts that raced on the conveyor belt, from an ancient old mill. Me and another partner of mine, sorted through scrap metals, rubbers, steel bars, and coppers day after day.

I was the fastest scrap conveyor belt picker they ever saw, especially when it came to copper, going over the average of one metal bin a night, to having three filled a night. I remember our quota, or in our case, over quotas, prompted the plant president to come out in the near-dead of the night, thanking me and my partner for doing a good job, every night. Then on an August summer evening, EPA got complaints of the huge blackened dust storms that hit the neighbors, and forced us to shutdown for one day. Looking back, had I not left after nearly a year later during the winter season, there is no telling how I might have turned out, today. I decided no job is worth my exposure to their environmental health hazards.

Giving the past situation, of my employment of nearly a lifetime in Ohio-based factory plants that were a carrion of hazardous material exposures, and the current situation, regarding the current crisis in the Bayview Hunter's Point area, I couldn't help but think of all the residents’ longevity in spite of the inhumane environmental condition caused by the Miami-based housing developing firm, Lennar Corp at the command of Mayor Newsom.

There is a very common and thin line for wanting to " change " or " renew " a large populated area of decent people, regardless of a status quo they may not have, and making false promises of " rebuilding their lives " with better homes. The way I see it, if and I do mean IF, there was a true solid genuine, good-natured effort of caring for the poor people's housing situation by the Newsom Administration, with no intentions of gentrification, then why no effort to rid the toxic wastes that's plagued the community for over half a century?

To say the least, people can't afford to be an angel in the face of seemingly domineering demons. In order to successfully prevail, you got to be the devil in defending all the threats to your homes and environments.