John Warshaw is a Waterkeeper in Tuscaloosa, Alabama and a veteran of the United States Navy. He was in the U.S. Navy, came home to an industrial job, and got poisoned. And ended up devoting his life to cleaning up the local waterways. John talks about his experience with industrial pollution, and how he became involved with the Waterkeeper Alliance, a group dedicated to fighting industrial pollution in the local water supply. John also talks about the dangers of benzene, toluene, xylene, methyl chloride, and other chemicals found in the water, and why the EPA is still doing the same thing over and over again, even though they know they should be doing something about it. John also shares his story of how he got poisoned on a job and how it inspired him to fight for clean water and clean up the water supply in his hometown of Birmingham, Alabama. He talks about how he and others are fighting for clean drinking water everywhere, and what it takes to keep our local water clean and safe for all of us to drink and bathe in it. And he talks about why he thinks the EPA should do what they're supposed to do, which is protect our drinking water and fight against industrial pollution. If you like what they do, please HIT SUBSCRIBE on Apple Podcasts and leave us a rating and review this episode on iTunes! and share it with your friends and family! and tell a friend about this podcast on your favorite drinking water company! Thank you for listening and sharing it! -Bobby and I hope you enjoy this episode! XOXO, Bobby and I'll see you next week! -Jon and I will be looking out for you in the next episode of Drinking Waterkeeper. -Shout out to you in 2020! -Shawna Thanks, Bobby & John -Drew, Bobby, Kevin, John, and Bobby, "The Waterkeeper Association" Thank You, John Warshaws (Avery, Jr., Sr., John, Sr., & Bobby, Jr. & Mike, Sr. . . . , & , etc., . , & etc., etc., & etc. (Thank you, , and the Waterkeepers Association ) ... ! -- Thank you, Mr. John,
00:00:01.000I'm really happy today to introduce you to one of my old friends, John Watham, who's a hurricane creep keeper in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, Tuscaloosa County.
00:00:13.000And like many of the water keepers, John is a veteran of the military service.
00:00:17.000He was in the United States Navy, came home to an industrial job, and got poisoned And ended up devoting his life to clean waterways.
00:00:29.000Now, John, you're originally from Boston, right?
00:00:41.000I was born there in the 50s and watched things progressively go downhill around me as a kid.
00:00:49.000I didn't understand a lot of the environmental changes that I was seeing.
00:00:54.000We just took it for granted that that's the way it is.
00:00:57.000You mentioned that I got poisoned on a job.
00:01:01.000That's the first time that, me personally, that I had been impacted by industrial pollution to the point where I was in pretty dire straits.
00:01:12.000We sued the company and in the process during discovery, I went out with them into the community And found out that there was a cancer cluster all the way around this plant where I was working.
00:01:26.000And there were children out playing in the rain water that ran down the gutter was black with coal dust.
00:01:36.000The top of their school was black with coal dust.
00:01:58.000Somebody made a lot of money by skirting the rules that allowed me to get sick.
00:02:06.000And all those people living around that place up there, they were also getting sick because of a bunch of industrial fat cats that wanted to make money.
00:02:30.000In Birmingham, Alabama, it's where they take raw coal and they put it into these coke ovens and they bake it until all of the impurities come out of it.
00:02:41.000It leaves a product called coke, which is used in steelmaking.
00:02:47.000But all of those so-called residual products are things like benzene, toluene, xylene, methyl chlorine, methyl chloride, so many orides that I can't pronounce.
00:03:00.000It's just not even funny what they subjected us to.
00:03:04.000This stuff was all in the groundwater where I was working.
00:03:08.000ADEM, the Alabama Department of Environmental Management, knew about it.
00:03:13.000The EPA, Environmental Protection Agency, knew about it.
00:03:16.000In fact, when we first discovered this stuff, we found out that there had been a benzene spill on that property many years ago, and the EPA cut a deal.
00:03:29.000Told them, you know, you didn't have to clean it up as long as you never built anything on the property.
00:03:34.000We weren't supposed to be building anything on that property.
00:04:20.000of the Environmental Protection Agency to do what it was supposed to do.
00:04:25.000Their very name, Environmental Protection, is not something that they do.
00:04:31.000We call those captive agencies, as you know, and the Alabama Department of Environmental Management is kind of the poster child for captive agency phenomena.
00:04:42.000And even I remember when I made a trip down there and I spent three days going through ADEMS files, I found about, I don't know, 40 or 50,000 violations by steel plants on the Alabama River and the Tennessee River around the Birmingham, violations by steel plants on the Alabama River and the Tennessee River Around the Birmingham, Huntsville area.
00:05:02.000And we filed letters of intent to sue against those companies.
00:05:08.000And on the 59th day, ADEM and Alabama Attorney General's office came in and rescued those guys.
00:05:15.000The companies asked ADEM, and you know they do this, to sue them to preempt us from suing them so that they can make a sweetheart deal with each other.
00:05:50.000Recently, Tennessee Riverkeeper filed a lawsuit against the city of Guntersville for sewer violations.
00:05:58.000And of course ADEM jumped in and wanted to file a notice of violation of their own and intervene with a lawsuit from ADEM with a consent order.
00:06:09.000These consent orders Sometimes they can last for years and years and years, and the problem goes on and on and on systemically, like it is here in Tuscaloosa.
00:06:21.000And it's about just giving the company immunity to pollutants.
00:06:25.000Yeah, because once the state is involved and the company or the city accepts...
00:06:32.000Enforcement from ADEM, then we as citizens no longer have any power in the matter.
00:06:39.000In this particular case, the city of Guntersville had dealt with ADEM before and decided it was better for them to want to deal with the local water keeper.
00:06:50.000Tennessee Riverkeeper made specific demands on what needed to be fixed.
00:06:55.000I believe there were some timelines set out and everybody was kind of getting in agreement with it.
00:07:03.000They want to have themselves in charge because this sets a precedent against what they've been doing in the status quo.
00:07:12.000The city of Gunnersville responded to ADEM and told them no, they would rather deal with the water keeper because ADEM themselves are far too complicated.
00:07:23.000They're not really designed to enforce.
00:08:54.000But what I also see is the stronger the waterkeeper presence in an area, the better regulated the waterways are, because they know we will take them to task.
00:09:08.000Well, you've been out in hand-to-hand combat with the coal industry for however long.
00:10:23.000So whenever I found mines or mine operations or anything around coal that was not adhering to the law, it put me in this defensive mode of wanting to expose what they're doing.
00:10:39.000I've been doing that now for, I guess, 30 years, Bobby.
00:10:45.000I think it's up on a level that most people, it would horrify them to see what I have seen.
00:10:54.000Whole mountains blown apart in West Virginia.
00:10:58.000They used more explosives on the mountains in West Virginia than we did during the entire Vietnam conflict.
00:11:06.000Water stolen from the reservations out west in the Four Corners area where, you know, the Zuni Pueblo, the Navajo, the Hopi, these people depend on sacred aquifers there for their livelihoods.
00:11:19.000And that water is routinely pumped out of the ground and used to slurry coal two states over to burn in a coal-burning fireplace.
00:11:29.000And we have a Hopi waterkeeper who is in a war with Peabody Coal.
00:11:37.000The whole tribe is, but the waterkeeper is out there leading that battle.
00:12:42.000There are no flight regulations out there that the U.S. can impose.
00:12:47.000So we were able to fly right over the rig and get pictures that Refuted what was going on in the media every day when they tried to downplay the severity of this thing.
00:13:01.000We were seeing miles and miles of oil just cover the Gulf of Mexico.
00:13:08.000I've got pictures of pods of dolphins breaching and breathing in this stuff.
00:13:15.000I've got one whale that we got a picture of it and I didn't find out until I started blowing it up there was something red all down the back of this whale.
00:13:25.000And I believe, I don't know for sure, but I believe it to have either been a big patch of oil or that whale was hemorrhaging.
00:13:42.000We were at three, sometimes four thousand feet.
00:13:46.000Now we did get down a lot lower than that at times, but we would start out at a high altitude and you could smell the oil inside the plane.
00:13:59.000The instruments on the plane got coated with oil.
00:14:02.000We'd have to clean them after every flight.
00:14:05.000But we were able to get there and take photographs of Olympic swimming pool sized patches of oil that they were firing flares into and burning at sea.
00:14:17.000There were turtles, there were dolphins, there were birds, there were all kinds of wildlife in those fires that just burned up.
00:14:24.000There was never an accurate accounting for all of the wildlife that was killed and is still dying today.
00:14:32.000There are still severe impacts from that oil spill.
00:14:37.000We have a lot of water keepers in the Gulf, including a number of Cajun shrimp fishermen and you know all those men and women and their livelihoods have been absolutely devastated by that spill and continue to be devastated today.
00:14:55.000Yeah, they're still feeling a lot of negative impacts from it.
00:14:58.000In all honesty, the Gulf is beginning to rebound a little bit.
00:15:03.000The fishing industry is better than it was then, but it's nowhere near like what it was, say, pre-Katrina or pre-BP. And now, of all the insanity, the EPA and the Corps of Engineers are allowing them to breach the Mississippi River and dump untold amounts of sediment down into Barataria and down into the bayous down there as a way of trying to supposedly We rebuild the Delta.
00:15:32.000This is some of the most toxic sediment in the Mississippi River.
00:15:37.000So, I mean, none of this makes good sense to me, but a lot that the government does and allows doesn't make good sense to me.
00:15:45.000Oh, it was the coal company trying to fight you, John.
00:15:49.000Well, I've had to face lawsuits with them.
00:15:52.000They've never come after me with what's known as a slap suit, but I've had from mostly non-union mines, let me specify the scab mines are the ones that are probably the most aggressive when you challenge the permits.
00:16:08.000I've had blasting caps put in my driveway as a message.
00:16:20.000I've had life-threatening telephone calls from people from within the mine.
00:16:25.000They take it as a threat to their job, and if the industry would follow the rules set up in the permit, then their job security would never be an issue.
00:16:38.000They know that these companies are skirting the law and they let them get away with it.
00:16:44.000Bottom line is the miners, honestly, that come out getting hurt because of these bad practices.
00:16:51.000If they're lax in their environmental compliance, they're also lax 99 times out of 100, they're also lax in their safety protocols, their safety procedures.
00:17:34.000They sent an elevator shaft down with a rescue crew because the call came out, fire in the mine.
00:17:42.000You can handle a fire in the mine differently than you can an explosion in the mine.
00:17:47.000An explosion, everything is completely unstable.
00:17:50.000So they thought they were going down into a fairly stable situation when the second explosion went off and killed them near the entire rescue crew.
00:18:00.000Thirteen men died that night because the state and federal regulatory agencies didn't do their job.
00:18:08.000These companies can only be blamed so far, Bobby.
00:18:13.000They're going to do what they're allowed to get away with by the state and federal agencies.
00:18:19.000If the state and federal agencies don't uphold the law, then these citations become nothing more than cost of business.
00:18:28.000We can write this off and it's not a problem.
00:18:37.000That is why I am so passionate about what I do in the environment.
00:18:43.000For me, it's not just the nuts and bolts of the water quality.
00:18:48.000It's the impact that water and the need for water has on our communities as a whole.
00:18:57.000We all have a right to go out here and enjoy the use of Hurricane Creek, the Black Warrior River, the Tennessee River, wherever we want to go.
00:19:07.000We have rights as Americans to do that.
00:22:11.000It's been a long, interesting career, but we can't do it without community support.
00:22:18.000A lot of people think that what we've done here on Hurricane Creek was because of me alone, but it's not.
00:22:25.000I had a lot of help Community involvement at the political level, at the activist level, at the donor level, is all critical to the survival of all of our non-profit organizations that are out here advocating for the health of Unshimaka, the Grandmother Earth.