Letter to DENR and elected officials

Dear Sir or Madam:

My understanding is that our current state law requires the responsible party of a spill (oil, sewage, etc) to notify the state within 24 hours. The state then has 48 hours to notify the public. This law needs to change to ensure the state is notified immediately and that the public is also notified immediately. And this needs to be acted on immediately. If the spill is located close to a DENR office, then an official needs to be on site immediately. In every case, the local police and fire department should immediately be dispatched also, to start to work to protect the environment and the people who live in this state.
In both the coal ash spill in the Dan River, and the fuel spill in Hominy Creek, this did not happen. Action was delayed. I first heard about the Hominy spill from a friend who happened to be taking a walk in the area, and that was about six hours after the spill happened. This is not acceptable.

DENR should be using social media and the corporate media to get the word out to notify the public, and again, this needs to happen immediately. We also clearly need better and more frequent inspections of oil and fuel storage facilities to make sure they are properly constructed and maintained, with very serious fines when such is found not to be the case. In the case of repeated failures to safely contain such toxins, the corporations involved should be shut down completely and taken over by the state.

In the case of coal ash ponds, I seriously wonder why no one in DENR or our legislature learned anything from the massive coal ash spill in Tennessee in December 2008. It has been several years since that disaster, and in the meantime we have had numerous reports of leakage of toxic materials into our own NC waterways. And yet, nothing has been done. And in 2009, the majority of the NC House, the majority of the NC Senate and Governor were all Democrats. In 2013, the majorities were all Republican. Clearly, nether branch of the Corporate Party (Democrat or Republican) are up to the task of protecting our environment. How bad do things need to get before we see some improvement? What sort of actions do the citizens of this state need to take to protect our lands and our waterways, if our legislature and regulating agencies are too incompetent to do so? I really have no idea, but I do wonder how long citizens will peacefully tolerate such behavior from mega corporations and elected officials.

Our Governor is a former employee of Duke Energy. And a former US Representative, Democrat Heath Shuler, is the current chief lobbyist. And Duke has been directing our state legislature for quite some time, as they were allowed to escape any real consequences for their actions and become an energy monopoly in our state. This seriously needs to change. It is, of course, a reflection of our seriously corrupted political system where corporations are allowed to write the laws that govern them and face no real consequences for their actions no matter how badly they hurt the American people. This seriously needs to change.