STOP: BUTTONWILLOW
LISTEN/DOWNLOAD [MP3]
SB CUE Buttonwillow-McKittrick
NB CUE 58/Buttonwillow/McKittrick
SITE
Clean Harbors Buttonwillow Landfill
View LANDSAT Map
LOCATION
2500 West Lokern Road, Buttonwillow
THREATS AND CONTAMINANTS
PBT chemicals, air, ground, and water toxic waste releases, radioactive waste
VOICE
Luke Cole of The Center on Race, Poverty & the Environment
Originally founded by Miller and Lux Enterprises in 1885, the low-income, predominantly Spanish-speaking farmworker community of Buttonwillow has a population of approximately 1,300. Located a few miles outside of the town center on 320 acres is California's second largest Class I toxic waste site (the state has three total). The site is owned and operated by Clean Harbors, one of North America's largest operators of hazardous waste facilities, with more than fifty sites including the state's third largest Class I, located in Westmorland in Imperial County.
According to the EPA's California Toxics Release Inventory Fact Sheet from June 2004, Clean Harbors Buttonwillow (formally Laidlaw Environmental Services Inc. and Safety-Kleen Corporation) is listed as the second top facility for total on- and off-site releases of all chemicals in California, contributing 2.6 million pounds. It is also listed as the third largest contributor for both total on- and off-site releases of PBT chemicals (persistent, bioaccumulative and toxic chemicals such as lead, mercury, PCBs, dioxin) and total on- and off-site releases of lead compounds in California.
Over an eight-month period in 1992, two babies were born with neural tube birth defects to mothers from Buttonwillow. The occurrence of two cases in one year created a rate twenty-five times higher than expected for Kern County, according to the California Birth Defects Monitoring Program (CBDMP). Area residents suspected that the Laidlaw facility (the operator at the time) was responsible for the defects, and attempted to force the dump's closure through community participation in the permitting and permit appeals processes.
The Center on Race, Poverty & the Environment (CRPE) represented the Padres Hacia una Vida Mejor (a Buttonwillow community activist group) in a series of civil litigations that eventually forced Safety-Kleen to stop accepting radioactive waste that it had been illegally accepting from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, from remediation of a former Manhattan Project production facility in upstate New York, but were unable to close the dump, which has since expanded.
LISTEN/DOWNLOAD [MP3]
SB CUE Buttonwillow-McKittrick
NB CUE 58/Buttonwillow/McKittrick
SITE
Clean Harbors Buttonwillow Landfill
View LANDSAT Map
LOCATION
2500 West Lokern Road, Buttonwillow
THREATS AND CONTAMINANTS
PBT chemicals, air, ground, and water toxic waste releases, radioactive waste
VOICE
Luke Cole of The Center on Race, Poverty & the Environment
Originally founded by Miller and Lux Enterprises in 1885, the low-income, predominantly Spanish-speaking farmworker community of Buttonwillow has a population of approximately 1,300. Located a few miles outside of the town center on 320 acres is California's second largest Class I toxic waste site (the state has three total). The site is owned and operated by Clean Harbors, one of North America's largest operators of hazardous waste facilities, with more than fifty sites including the state's third largest Class I, located in Westmorland in Imperial County.
According to the EPA's California Toxics Release Inventory Fact Sheet from June 2004, Clean Harbors Buttonwillow (formally Laidlaw Environmental Services Inc. and Safety-Kleen Corporation) is listed as the second top facility for total on- and off-site releases of all chemicals in California, contributing 2.6 million pounds. It is also listed as the third largest contributor for both total on- and off-site releases of PBT chemicals (persistent, bioaccumulative and toxic chemicals such as lead, mercury, PCBs, dioxin) and total on- and off-site releases of lead compounds in California.
Over an eight-month period in 1992, two babies were born with neural tube birth defects to mothers from Buttonwillow. The occurrence of two cases in one year created a rate twenty-five times higher than expected for Kern County, according to the California Birth Defects Monitoring Program (CBDMP). Area residents suspected that the Laidlaw facility (the operator at the time) was responsible for the defects, and attempted to force the dump's closure through community participation in the permitting and permit appeals processes.
The Center on Race, Poverty & the Environment (CRPE) represented the Padres Hacia una Vida Mejor (a Buttonwillow community activist group) in a series of civil litigations that eventually forced Safety-Kleen to stop accepting radioactive waste that it had been illegally accepting from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, from remediation of a former Manhattan Project production facility in upstate New York, but were unable to close the dump, which has since expanded.
