Don’t Drink the Water – Mercury contamination

There are many places where the water has been polluted by something. Ten Bears talks about Bend, Oregon.

1979 and one of the largest environmental complaints was lodged by the Federal government against a major corporation. Acting on behalf of EPA, the Department of Justice filed four suits against Hooker Chemical Co. Hooker Chemical and its parent corporation Occidental Petroleum Corporation were to clean up four chemical waste dumpsites in Niagara Falls, New York. Love Canal was posing substantial danger to residents of the area.

Where I was living in Michigan, the current danger is PFAS and similar compounds. People were told not to eat the fish. In Mississippi SCOTUS ruled the Clean Air Act does not give the Environmental Protection Agency broad authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from power plants. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote Congress must speak clearly on this subject. I can see Congress quickly deciding on anything?

SCOTUS restricts Congress from delegating authority to an agency created to manage environmental issues. Next up Ten Bears and Oregon.

Mercury … | Homeless on the High Desert, Ten Bears

Long as I can remember, pushing seventy years now, we’ve been admonished to don’t drink the water or eat the fish out of the Deschutes River, it has unhealthy levels of mercury in it. Grandma wasn’t talking about our teeth falling out in our twenties when she said,

“it’s in the water.” Took a while to figure it out.

First commercial enterprise in Central Oregon wasn’t logging or lumber, cattle or trapping. First commercial enterprise in Central Oregon was a mercury mine.

The pall, when not a wood-smoke pall pumping its own mercury into the environment: the air we breathe, the dust, the fine powder stirred up by a hundred thousand people driving three hundred thousand cars we wipe from the mantel in the mornings, out of the refrigerator, or suck out of the dryer vents once a year. Mercury silicate. Central Oregon, all of Oregon is volcanic. Some of it quite young. Parts of Bend sit on fifteen hundred year old lava that isn’t quite “set”, is still “wet”, as if it were concrete. Lava. Crushed to gravel the roads, then further crushed by cars and trucks to stir up and … inhale. Breathe.

The only thing we know about the aquifer is the water to replenish it has to percolate through thousands of feet of lava, of mercury silicate, to get there.

This is why so many of us, so many of our children and grandchildren, our parents, grandparents, are on the spectrum. Why we’re drunks and meth-heads.

Doesn’t help that Bend, home to my family for seven generations, is The Beer Brewing Capital of the World: got more breweries, got more brewing capacity per capita than anywhere else in the world. Actually has more bars, breweries, beerhalls and bordellos than Portland, five times the size of Bend. It’s like a great neon sign a’ flashing: We Are Drunk! And I have personally found meth, methamphetamine, laying in the street; recent reporting has had school-children finding in their front-yard. Beertown USA. Drunktown USA, meth-central, the crossroads of alcoholism and methamphetamine addiction.

I didn’t know those two kids, but I’ve known the man accused of killing them since he was a kid, in grade-school. Contemperous with, went to school with my sons. Knew him in some of the work he did. This is hard, it breaks my heart.

I don’t know, maybe it’s evil spirits, but there’s something wrong in Bend

It’s not a safe place

Mississippi leaders react to Supreme Court EPA ruling” (wtok.com)

U.S. Sues Hooker Chemical at Niagara Falls, New York” | About EPA | US EPA

Thermofil Inc, Green Oak Township, Livingston County (michigan.gov)