{"id":7550,"date":"2014-01-31T06:59:47","date_gmt":"2014-01-31T11:59:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/?p=7550"},"modified":"2014-01-31T07:01:40","modified_gmt":"2014-01-31T12:01:40","slug":"the-trash-problem-could-be-worse-north-of-naples","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/2014\/01\/the-trash-problem-could-be-worse-north-of-naples.html","title":{"rendered":"The trash problem could be worse: north of Naples"},"content":{"rendered":"

\r\n\r\n<\/a>\r\nThey call it the Triangle of Death because of the cancer clusters.\r\nNo, not Waycross: near Naples, Italy, \r\n

\r\nJim Yardleyjan wrote for NYTimes 29 January 2014,\r\n\r\nA Mafia Legacy Taints the Earth in Southern Italy<\/a>,\r\n

\r\n

\r\n“The environment here is poisoned,” said Dr. Alfredo\r\nMazza, a cardiologist who documented an alarming rise in local\r\ncancer cases in\r\n\r\na 2004 study published in the British medical journal The Lancet<\/a>.\r\n\r\n<\/a>\r\n“It’s impossible to clean it all up. The\r\narea is too vast.”\r\n<\/p>\r\n

\r\nHe added, “We’re living on top of a bomb.”\r\n<\/p>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n

\r\nMaybe it’s not that bad around the\r\n\r\nCSX railyard in Waycross, near the Seven Out Superfund site<\/a>.\r\n

\r\n

\r\n\r\n<\/a>\r\nGarbage is a perennial problem in Italy as landfills run out of\r\nspace, setting off periodic crises in cities like Rome and Naples.\r\nBut the land of the Camorra, stretching from the Tyrrhenian Sea to\r\nthe Apennine foothills, is a particularly vivid tableau of ruined\r\nbeauty.\r\n<\/p>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n

\r\nHere in Lowndes County we’ve only got two closed landfills\r\nand\r\n\r\none open in an aquifer recharge zone that has accepted\r\nPCBs, coal ash, and wastewater from Seven Out<\/a>, plus the county’s\r\n\r\nLand Application Site<\/a>.\r\n

\r\n\r\n<\/a>\r\nAnd a Texas company that wants to run a yard-wide methane pipeline\r\non a hundred-foot gouge through the county’s closed landfill.\r\nA company with a long list of\r\n\r\nsafety violations<\/a>.\r\n

\r\n

\r\nGarbage is strewn along highways, tossed beneath overpasses or\r\ndumped atop irrigation canals. Rats search for food amid discarded\r\nsheets of asbestos, broken computer screens and empty paint cans.\r\nPlumes of black smoke often rise, the entrails of trash illegally\r\nburned from distant hillsides or abandoned fields.\r\n<\/p>\r\n

\r\n\r\n<\/a>\r\nThe landscape is a result of decades of secret dealings between\r\nmanufacturers in Italy and beyond, who sought to avoid the high\r\ncosts of legally disposing of hazardous waste, and the Camorra, one\r\nof Italy’s three main mafia organizations, which saw the potential\r\nto make huge profits by disposing of it illegally.\r\n<\/p>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n

\r\nWell, the Lowndes County’s\r\n\r\nExclusive Franchise for Solid Waste Collection Services<\/a>\r\nisn’t entirely secret; we do have through an open records request\r\na copy of the contract.\r\nAlthough Commissioners\r\n\r\noffer only feeble excuses for it<\/a>\r\nand\r\nthe county continues to\r\n\r\nsue a local garbage disposal business<\/a>\r\neven though\r\n\r\nthe exclusive franchisee fails to recycle<\/a>\r\nand before that\r\n\r\n<\/a>\r\n\r\nincluded household trash in their recycled items<\/a>.\r\n

\r\nBut this part sure seems familiar:\r\n

\r\n

\r\n“The mafia has made money on the garbage,” said Ciro\r\nTufano, 44, an accountant who has spent two decades pushing\r\nofficials to clean up a toxic site near his home. “Politicians\r\nmust have been aware, but they don’t care. Nobody was tracking this\r\ntrail of garbage.”\r\n<\/p>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n

\r\n\r\n<\/a>\r\nFew if any local politicians, as near as I can tell after asking several\r\nof them to do so, are tracking what goes into the landfill\r\nor what gets dumped into woods or burned because of the county’s\r\nExclusive Franchise.\r\n

\r\n

\r\nThe acreage where waste is buried is relatively small, he said, but\r\nthe risks are significantly higher because the dump sites are spread\r\nacross such a large area.\r\n<\/p>\r\n

\r\n“It flows all over the place,” he said. “You can\r\nbe a farmer who is unwittingly irrigating your land with polluted\r\nwater.”\r\n<\/p>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n

\r\n\r\n<\/a>\r\nCould this happen with\r\n\r\na landfill in an aquifer recharge zone<\/a>?\r\n

\r\nBut not to worry:\r\n

\r\n

\r\n“We’re polluting our own house and our own land,” the\r\nmobster said. “What are we going to drink?”\r\n<\/p>\r\n

\r\n“You idiot,” the boss replied. “We’ll drink\r\nmineral water.”\r\n<\/p>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n

\r\nThat’s it!\r\nWe’ll all drink mineral water.\r\n

\r\n -jsq\r\n<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"They call it the Triangle of Death because of the cancer clusters. No, not Waycross: near Naples, Italy, Jim Yardleyjan wrote for NYTimes 29 January 2014, A Mafia Legacy Taints the Earth in Southern Italy, “The environment here is poisoned,” said Dr. Alfredo Mazza, a cardiologist who documented an alarming rise in local cancer cases […]","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[14,70,2,6687,478,479],"tags":[7414,8704,8728,6279,8701,8699,393,8702,2723,154,12,7,6769,6076,8772,8773,6],"class_list":["post-7550","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economy","category-ethics","category-government","category-pipeline-2","category-solid-waste","category-trash","tag-camorra","tag-economy","tag-ethics","tag-exclusive-franchise","tag-georgia","tag-government","tag-italy","tag-lake","tag-land-application-site","tag-landfill","tag-lowndes-area-knowledge-exchange","tag-lowndes-county","tag-mafia","tag-pipeline","tag-solid-waste","tag-trash","tag-valdosta"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p585fK-1XM","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7550","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7550"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7550\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7552,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7550\/revisions\/7552"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7550"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7550"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7550"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}