EPA Superfund Head Can't Visit PCB-Contaminated WV Town; Too Busy Cleaning Up Pruitt's Mess
On Thursday night, Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Scott Pruitt’s point person for the EPA’s Superfund program failed to show up at a scheduled meeting with residents of a West Virginia town contaminated by toxic chemicals.
Albert Kelly, senior adviser for the agency’s Superfund program, stayed behind in Washington to help Pruitt deal with the fallout from the barrage of controversies facing the administrator. Instead, the EPA sent Kelly’s top assistant, Nick Falvo, to Minden, West Virginia, to hear from residents about why they believe the town should be placed on the Superfund program’s National Priorities List (NPL).
The meeting, held in the sanctuary of the New Beginning Apostolic Church in Minden, attracted approximately 60 community members. Falvo told residents that Kelly would come back to visit Minden himself “once the storm in D.C. clears up,” referring to scandal-plagued Pruitt. This will hopefully be sometime next month, he said.
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Residents are concerned that their exposure to PCBs over the years is leading to a high cancer rate in the area. In the last four years alone, Minden has seen 154 cases of cancer, with 68 of them reported since the EPA returned to the town in 2017 to conduct more testing, according to tracking by Headwaters Defense. The town has a population of about 250, down from a peak of about 1,200 during its heyday as a mining town from the 1920s through the 1960s.
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Kelly had never worked in the environmental field or developed environmental policy prior to being named last April as an adviser to Pruitt and head of the EPA’s Superfund Task Force. His home city of Bristow, Oklahoma, though, has a Superfund site and several other contaminated sites. Kelly was banned from the banking industry for life for violating federal banking laws. Kelly holds as much as $75,000 in financial stakes in several fossil fuel companies, including a company responsible for contaminating a bayou in southwestern Louisiana and a stretch of river in Oregon.
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https://thinkprogress.org/epa-superfund-official-visits-minden-west-virginia-63704c2946d4/
