Children Should Not Play Next To Toxic Oil Refineries
Once Again, Paulsboro NJ Plays The Sacrifice Zone
Still Fourth And Long In Paulsboro NJ
(Caption: June 10, 2023: Children play at Fort Billings Park in the shadow of the Paulsboro Refinery. Oil refineries would be given an extended grace period to transition to PFAS-free alternatives, under the terms of proposed legislation. (Source: NJ Spotlight)
Look at the photo above – would you want your children playing there?
That photo was randomly inserted (with no comment) in a NJ Spotlight story today about legislation that would phase out – with huge loopholes for the oil and chemical industries – toxic firefighting foam contaminated with “forever chemical” PFAS.
NJ Spotlight was so eager to write again about their favorite chemicals that they missed the toxic elephant in the playground.
Those children are being exposed to a witches brew of toxic chemicals and heavy metals emitted by the Paulsboro refinery, and DEP is doing very little about all that, see:
The risks to their health posed by exposure to these chemicals far exceeds the risks from exposure to PFAS and “forever chemicals” in their drinking water.
The NJ Spotlight story – despite publishing this shocking photograph – completely ignored those risks. No mention of them at all!
This is typical of the blinkered coverage by not only NJ Spotlight, but the entire NJ media.
And it is no accident: their failure to even mention these risks lets powerful corporate polluters and their captured DEP regulators completely off the hook.
Current DEP air quality standards and permit limits for major hazardous air polluters like refineries and chemical plants are far to lax and do not consider the cumulative impacts of multiple toxic chemicals, especially on children.
This would not happen in Princeton or Montclair.
But it happens in a working class community like Paulsboro, which I’ve described as a “Sacrifice Zone”, see:
But the lobbyists and lawyers at the NJ Chemistry Council, Petroleum Council, and Big Pharma – who emit millions of pounds of these toxic chemicals and poison communities across the State – have a stranglehold on media and their captured DEP scientists and regulators, so don’t expect to see any reporting about any of that jive.