Our Road: Then -- E26: Sanjour Blows the Whistle on the EPA Chemical Name-Game

Photo: Screenshot of EPA Whistleblower William Sanjour, 
“They Blew the Whistle at Work Then Paid the Price,” Phil Donahue Television Show,
February 28, 1996. Video Archives, YouTube.

In this episode, Ken and Deborah ask their listeners why they should care about the seeming web of toxic waste relationships taking place back in the summer and fall of 1979 in a backwoods part of the rural South.

This episode is the answer to that question.

They ask, “Why should their listeners care?”

Because that web of relationships in 1979 was part of a crucial turning point in American environmental history, a tragic watershed of EPA decisions and events that were taking the nation down the road to pervasive petro-chemical and other pollution and to the climate disaster that we are now on.

As they continue to tie the past to the present, Ken and Deborah focus on EPA official William Sanjour who exposes the EPA chemical waste name-game as EPA is shifting regulations originally written to protect public health and the environment to regulations written to protect industry’s economic bottom line.

Sanjour describes how “cruel, stupid, and short-sighted" the regulatory shift is and says, “by relieving industry of the burden of testing their wastes for harmful effects before dumping them, the EPA is transferring the testing to the livers, kidneys, and fetuses of people unknowingly exposed to the wastes.”

As they share this ongoing North Carolina PCB saga, Ken and Deborah continue to reveal how a multi-racial coalition of industrial developers, government officials, and politicians are targeting a sparsely populated but conveniently located poor, minority community, surely not having anticipated that the effort to stop them will continue to be an informed and impassioned multi-racial coalition of ordinary citizens that will be relentless.