Methane Forcing People to Relocate in Cali; As the Horrific Water Crisis in Flint Continues…

While in Flint, MI, the people are struggling under the weight of an unjust, racist system that allows the government and companies to use land near mostly Black and/or poor neighborhoods to be exposed to not only unsafe air pollution, a less than satisfactory quality of living; but also toxic waste, lead -as we see in Flint, MI, where President Obama has just declared a state of emergency and former resident Michael Moore has an ongoing petition going to arrest Governor Synder for his “premeditated actions” of his “administrators,” Mr. Moore goes on to speak more truth by then tragically but truthfully stating:

These graphics from @WashingtonPost really show how much damage has been done to Flint, MI. #ArrestGovSnyder pic.twitter.com/KVoCE2KUpg

— Michael Moore (@MMFlint) January 15, 2016

 

“…you have effectively poisoned, not just some, but apparently ALL of the children in my hometown of Flint, Michigan.

And for that, you have to go to jail.

To poison all the children in an historic American city is no small feat. Even international terrorist organizations haven’t figured out yet how to do something on a magnitude like this.

But you did. Your staff and others knew that the water in the Flint River was poison — but you decided that taking over the city and “cutting costs” to “balance the budget” was more important than the people’s health (not to mention their democratic rights to elect their own leaders).
So you cut off the clean, fresh glacial lake water of Lake Huron that the citizens of Flint (including myself) had been drinking for decades and, instead, made them drink water from the industrial cesspool we call the Flint River — a body of “water” where toxins from a dozen General Motors and DuPont factories have been dumped for over a hundred years.”

Michael Moore was in Flint, MI, discussing the water crisis, calling on President Obama for help and protesting with the people against those in control over this tragic and sick attempt to put money before humanity.

But environmental racism never has been secluded, and at the moment there are also thousands of people in the LA, California, area suffering due to leaks from a gas leak coming out of a SoCalGas storage facility.

Article from RevolutionNews.com ->
Environmentalists demanded a federal agency use its power to bring about a “total shut down” of an aging gas storage facility near Los Angeles, claiming that a leak there is causing an ecological disaster of massive proportions. Gathering in front of the Environmental Protection Agency on Friday, they said that the EPA was not responding with the urgency that the situation requires.

A gas leak from a faulty well was detected at the SoCalGas Aliso Canyon storage facility on October 23. Reports indicate that the risks of a total blowout of the well have increased with every attempt to contain it.

The leaking gas is mostly methane, a potent greenhouse gas, but also contains carcinogenic gasses such as benzene. The sulfur additives required to detect colorless and odorless methane are also toxic. More than 10,000 people living nearby have been forced to relocate because they were becoming sick from breathing the gasses. The gas leak is emitting 4.5 million cars’ worth of pollution every day. (Watch gasses being steadily being released in the following video):

Walker Foley, an organizer with the Los Angeles chapter of Food and Water Watch, knew of several families who had to rush their children to the hospital because of the gas leak.

“What we need is a total shut down,” he said.

An infrared video taken by an independent monitoring agency demonstrated the overwhelming extent of the gas release. The leaking well is spewing 1,000 tons of methane gas per hour, the equivalent of one-quarter of California’s total greenhouse gas emissions. Some environmentalists believe that the impacts of Aliso Canyon eclipse the BP Deep Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010.

“By all means, it is a crisis that deserves national and perhaps international attention,” Foley said.

He expressed frustration that the EPA was not taking action to address the emergency.

“The EPA could literally open a [Microsoft] Word doc and draft an order demanding the closure of the facility,” he said. “They haven’t done that because our elected officials in many cases don’t operate on behalf of the American people, and it usually takes a tremendous amount of popular pressure to get them to do anything anymore.”

Wenonah Hauter, Executive Director of Food and Water Watch, also called on the Obama administration to invoke executive authority to close the storage facility.

“The blowout in Porter Ranch is a reminder of the threat of fossil fuels to our environment and public health,” she said.

On Friday, another attempt by SoCalGas to contain the leak by pumping a heavy mud slurry around the well-head went awry and created a wide crater around the well-head instead, further destabilizing it.