The Biggest Environmental Disaster of the Decade

Here is a cautionary tale about the risk of downplaying the importance of environmental health.

A year ago, Fukushima City was a bustling city with a population of 290,000.  Its people were going about their business the day the earthquake and tsunami hit northern Japan, triggering the biggest environmental disaster most will ever experience.

At first, the trains stopped running because of damage to the railways, and most of the city’s water stopped running because of ruptures in water mains.

Over the next several days, a silent toxin began to spread along with word of the natural disaster.  The Fukushima nuclear power plants, 39 miles southeast of the city, began melting down, releasing radioactive particles into the air and water. 

Although Fukushima remained outside the quarantined evacuation zone stretching twelve miles out from the nuclear facility, waves of radioactive cesium dust escaped the zone, flying on the winds toward the city.  As it rained and snowed, the cesium dust fell to the ground, infiltrating homes and businesses, hospitals and markets, roadways and parks. 

A year later, the Fukushima government is still trying to save people’s homes by cleaning up a deadly environmental mess.

If you have ever experienced a home construction or renovation project, you have an idea of what environmental health officials are facing.  When you tear down a wall, sheetrock dust collects everywhere and sticks to everything – furniture and floors, wall hangings, clothes, and even inside cupboards and cabinets.  To clean it, you have to wipe down everything individually.  And what you don’t catch goes back into the air, eventually needing to be cleaned up again.

Now imagine that this dust were completely invisible and radioactive, and both indoors and outdoors.  That’s what the people of Fukushima have to clean.  Building by building and property by property, they go about their task.  They can’t just wash the cesium down the drain.  They have to dig out the top two inches of their landscapes, and cart away the vegetation and dirt as radioactive waste, or create mini nuclear waste dumps by burying everything contaminated in deep holes in their own backyards.    

If just one property owner refuses, then as it rains again, the entire neighborhood can be re-contaminated.

We should all know by now that Fukushima’s story today could be Hartford’s, Miami’s, or West Palm Beach’s tomorrow.  Hartford is just 40 miles from the Millstone nuclear plants, Miami is 25 miles from the Turkey Point nuclear plants, and West Palm Beach is 40 miles from the Jensen Beach nuclear plants.

If a Fukushima-level event hit near me or my family, I’d want a strong Health Department with a clear environmental health mandate ready to respond. 

But that’s not what people in Florida are getting.

Last week, Florida’s State Legislature passed a law eliminating the Division of Environmental Health from the State Health Department.  It also eliminated the Community Environmental Health and Healthy Communities, Healthy People programs.  The Florida Public Health Association and others fought valiantly against these changes.

Not only did the legislature eliminate the Division of Environmental Health, it removed from the Health Department’s duties in section 381.0011 of the Florida statutes the power to quarantine “premises as the circumstances indicate for… providing protection from unsafe conditions that pose a threat to public health.”

Faced with a Fukushima-level event, radioactive or otherwise, the Florida Health Department will no longer have the independent power to create an evacuation zone to protect the public health.

The legislature did give some quarantine responsibility back to the Department as an amendment to section 381.00315 of the Florida Statutes.  But in that section, the Department’s authority is severely restricted.  It must consult with any agency that might be affected, its quarantine order is limited to sixty days, and violations of the order are punishable by as little as a $500 fine.

In other words, if the Fukushima meltdown had happened in South Florida, any general quarantine orders related to Miami would have expired ten months ago, and the only penalty for repeated re-contamination of a neighbor’s property might be a $500 fine.

Political leaders often embrace nuclear energy and many other industrial contaminants, in spite of the risks and costs.  These risks may not bother them, but at the very least they could give the rest of us a modicum of protection.

Otherwise, the biggest environment disaster of the decade may not be the one we witnessed in Japan.  It could be the one that just played out in the Florida legislature.

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