Although on any given day there's a lot of competition, the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry might be the most irrelevant government bureaucracy going. Thursday it announced that the latest installment of its years-long "health consultation" of Midlothian will be the subject of yet another community meeting in that town on Thursday May 24th from 7 to 8:30 at the Midlothian Conference Center. The ATSDR evaluation started in 2005 at the request of Midlothian Citizens when TXI was still burning hazardous waste. It then was the subject of a 2010 Congressional investigation that revealed how the Agency mostly neglected to do any real science in the course of its evaluation. This new meeting concerns an analysis of air monitoring information that "will support public health evaluations for many of the pollutants of concern." Of that we have no doubt. Since ATSDR does no monitoring of its own, it's completely reliant on the monitoring done by theTexas Commission on Environmental Quality. Does anyone know of any instance where TCEQ monitoring has shown anything to be concerned about? If citizens complain about getting sick from industrial pollution, it's TCEQ position that it's the fault of anything but the pollution itself. No amount of empirical evidence collected by citizens in the field from their own sampling or experience can convince Austin otherwise. TXI quit burning waste in 2008. ASTDR's evaluation of Midlothian? It just might outlast the plant itself.
