Letter: Don't dump in Lincolnville

Letter: Don't dump in Lincolnville


David Thundershield Queen
St. Augustine
Publication Date: 12/13/07


Editor: City officials will participate in an important community meeting tonight on the Lincolnville dump site and proposed park at 6:30 p.m. at St. Paul A.M.E. Church, 85 M.L. King Ave.

Controversial City Manager William Harriss earlier ordered 10 percent of the waste from the old Riberia Street dump to be removed and illegally dumped in the Old City Reservoir in West Augustine. Now, they want to return material back to Lincolnville. Lincolnville residents/concerned citizens should push for all debris which may include toxic materials such as arsenic, mercury, lead, cadmium, and dioxins to be taken to a proper disposal site.

Capping old toxic sites is in vogue at the federal EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) and is often allowed by Florida Department of Environmental Protection because both agencies were earlier ransacked by the George W./Jeb Bush administrations.

These agencies under GOP control violate or ignore their own laws while endangering public health and safety. Their departments are headed by managers chosen for their "friendliness" to corporate interests, polluters and developers. DEP's acronym has become "Don't Expect Protection."

"Capping" isn't the best cleanup practice but is the cheapest. It saves corporate polluters and municipalities money but doesn't adequately address potential Floridan Aquifer contamination.

You wouldn't see capping in a wealthy white community where the dump wouldn't have been sited in the first place. It's called environmental racism.

The environmental justice movement sprang up in the 1990s to counter landfills, toxic waste dumps, fuel "tank farms" and major highway sitings which selectively target economically disadvantaged communities. Three out of five blacks in the United States live in communities with uncontrolled waste sites.

The right thing must be done. The dump site must be cleaned up and trucked off to a state-approved, Class 1 (or higher) disposal site.

Then parks would be welcomed in West Augustine and Lincolnville.

David Thundershield Queen

St. Augustine


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