Over Memorial Day weekend, 50,000 people in Garden Grove, California, were evacuated from their homes in anticipation of the explosion of a bulging tank containing 7,000 gallons of methyl methacrylate, a chemical used to make plastics. The resulting fireball would be lethal, and toxic air would blanket nearby communities, potentially causing neurological, respiratory, and reproductive harm as well as organ damage.
Tragically, this is not an unusual situation. Chemical disasters happen in the United States every day or two. Yet EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin is working to gut one of the only protections from chemical disasters we have, alongside his efforts to roll back nearly all our climate and clean air protections—at the expense of his agency’s mission to protect human health and the environment.
The corruption is flagrant, and Moms continue to speak out.
Tell Congress: Hold Zeldin Accountable for Corrupting EPA’s Mission
Alarmingly, one in every three schoolchildren in this country live within the “vulnerability zone” of a hazardous chemical facility. Zeldin’s blatant disregard for childhood chemical exposures is frankly obscene.
His agency seems to have wrongly—and dangerously—assumed that children’s bodies work the same way as those of adults. Children’s immune systems, the primary defense against infections, diseases, and harmful chemicals, are physiologically immature. It takes only tiny quantities of hazardous pollutants to cause serious damage to the cardiovascular, immune, reproductive, endocrine, gastrointestinal, and central nervous systems of fetuses, infants, and children.
Moms spoke out by the thousands against EPA’s proposal to roll back the Chemical Disaster Rule before the comment period closed earlier this month. But the problem is bigger than that.
We are witnessing a mind-boggling pollution spree at EPA. And it’s time for Congress to step in to stop it.
Join Moms in telling Congress to hold Zeldin accountable for his reckless and dangerous actions.
Tell Congress: Hold Zeldin Accountable for Corrupting EPA’s Mission