Contact:
Cherise Udell, President, Utah Moms for Clean Air: nomadicmuse@yahoo.com

Today, Bryce Bird, Director of the Utah Division of Air Quality (DAQ) signed a modified approval order for Kennecott Utah Copper’s Bingham Canyon Mine. The clean air activist community, including Utah Moms for Clean Air and the Utah Physicians for a Healthy Environment, denounce DAQ’s move to further pave the way for Kennecott’s expansion despite strong public opposition.

Thanks to ongoing public pressure, the permit does strengthen requirements on Kennecott to control dust emissions and monitor for air quality in two locations, as well as, establish new emission caps for the facility, but Utah Moms for Clean Air believes this still falls far short of what is required to protect public health.

“DAQ’s declared mission is to ‘safeguard human health and quality of life by protecting and enhancing the environment’ says Utah Moms for Clean Air President, Cherise Udell, “Nowhere does DEQ’s mission state ‘and safeguard the needs of Utah’s industrial polluters’ and yet that appears to be their priority.”

Utah’s air pollution is at times the worst in the nation – and every year between 1,000 and 2,000 Utahns die prematurely due to chronic air pollution exposure. Since, Kennecott creates about 30% of our local air pollution, logic suggests they are also responsible for 30% of these premature deaths – and DAQ is continuing to approve the permits necessary to expand by 30%? Clearly, not enough is being done to clean-up Utah’s air and safeguard public health. We call upon DAQ’s Bryce Byrd and Amanda Smith to prove through their actions that protecting public health is their number one priority – and stop approving permits for Kennecott’s expansion until substantial air pollution mitigation investments are agreed upon.

For a full list of our demands, please contact Cherise Udell at nomadicmuse@yahoo.com.

Heather May
Jun 11 2011 11:44PM
Salt Lake Tribune

Could Utah’s high autism rates be related to Salt Lake County’s large number of toxic chemical releases?

University of Utah researchers say the question deserves more study after their preliminary review shows children with autism spectrum disorders and other intellectual disabilities are more likely to have been born near industries that emit toxic chemicals or heavy metals.

“If you take this combined with the other studies [showing links between pollution and autism], it’s pointing to something that we need to seriously look at,” said Judith Pinborough-Zimmerman, research assistant professor in the U.’s Department of Psychiatry.

She and researchers from the Rocky Mountain Center for Occupational and Environmental Health and the Utah Department of Health presented their findings at The International Society for Autism Research conference last month in San Diego.

They examined the maternal addresses found on birth certificates of children born in 1993 and 1994 in Davis, Salt Lake and Utah counties who were later diagnosed with autism or other mental disabilities. They also mapped the addresses of children without a known neurodevelopmental disorder.

They found that children born to mothers who lived within a mile of what are called Toxic Release Inventory sites that emit certain chemicals and heavy metals were more likely to have those problems. TRI facilities release or dispose toxic chemicals regulated by the Environmental Protection Agency. The EPA maintains a database of all such facilities and the type and amount of chemicals they release.

• The risk of having an autism spectrum disorder was 3.5 times greater for children born within a mile of a site releasing between 5,000 and 10,000 pounds of halogenated chemicals (dioxins, polychlorinated biphenyls and trichloroethylene). There were five such TRI sites emitting at those levels in the mid-1990s.

• The risk of having an autism spectrum disorder was twice as big when living within a mile of one of six TRI sites emitting up to 5,000 pounds of the heavy metals arsenic, cadmium, lead, nickel and mercury.

• The risk for developing an intellectual disability was similarly high within a mile of those sites.

• Oddly, the odds of developing a speech-language impairment was less for children born closer to a TRI site.

Those particular chemicals and heavy metals were chosen because they are suspected endocrine disrupters, which may cause developmental and neurological problems, said Rod Larson, with the Rocky Mountain Center. Most of the chemicals and metals are also known to affect the neurological system, according to the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry.

Salt Lake County has the second-highest amount of toxic chemical releases in the country, according to the EPA’s TRI database. Tooele is ranked 64th.

Earlier in May, Pinborough-Zimmerman released a separate study showing Utah’s autism rate among 8-year-olds doubled from 2002 to 2008. The latest report shows 1 in 77 have the disorder, which is marked by difficulties communicating and interacting socially. Children with autism also often engage in repetitive behavior. Many suffer from sleep disorders, anxiety, depression and other medical problems.

But it’s too soon to say that living next to TRI sites contribute to the development of autism, cautioned Amanda Bakian, one of the researchers of the TRI study and epidemiologist for the Utah Registry of Autism and Developmental Disabilities.

She said the team plans a more rigorous study that would include controlling for other risk factors, such as maternal age and socioeconomic status. In addition, they want to include air dispersion models to know whether children with the disabilities were downwind and exposed to the chemicals.

The current review didn’t include length of exposure to chemicals and heavy metals, or other sources of chemical exposures in the home or workplace.

It also couldn’t account for whether the women were potentially exposed to the chemicals during the first trimester of pregnancy, a critical period of development.

“We need to take this study to the next step and have it peer-reviewed and published,” Bakian said.

Other recent studies have also shown a link between autism and environmental exposures, such as living near a freeway or living among higher concentrations of some of the metals and chemicals the Utah researchers included.

Brian Moench, president of the Utah Physicians for a Healthy Environment, said the U. pilot study, along with the others, should serve as a wake-up call. “We need to start paying attention to the kinds of exposures we’re allowing our families to be subjected to.”

He points to one place to draw the line: Kennecott’s planned expansion at the Bingham Canyon Mine. While the company maintains it will reduce air pollution with improved technology, Moench and other environmental and health groups are skeptical.

Because heavy metals don’t break down, “the impact on public health increases every single year,” he said. “It’s time we looked at this and said, ‘Can we afford the community [to be] continually exposed to these kinds of emissions?’ ”

Brian Moench, president of the Utah Physicians for a Healthy Environment, said the U. pilot study, along with the others, should serve as a wake-up call. “We need to start paying attention to the kinds of exposures we’re allowing our families to be subjected to.”

He points to one place to draw the line: Kennecott’s planned expansion at the Bingham Canyon Mine. While the company maintains it will reduce air pollution with improved technology, Moench and other environmental and health groups are skeptical.

Because heavy metals don’t break down, “the impact on public health increases every single year,” he said. “It’s time we looked at this and said, ‘Can we afford the community [to be] continually exposed to these kinds of emissions?’ ”

hmay@sltrib.com

Salt Lake Tribune

Several Alaskans from the salmon-dependent Bristol Bay region toured Utah’s Bingham Canyon Mine on Monday for a look at the kind of tourist attraction they hope never to see back home.

They came with a village association, Nunamta Aulukestai, which represents Alaska Native corporations that oppose development of the massive Pebble mineral prospect on a remote and largely roadless mountain area southwest of Anchorage. The headwaters there feed spawning grounds that support commercial and sport fisheries valued at up to half a billion dollars a year.

With funding from a conservation foundation and the Bristol Bay Native Corp., the association in recent years has sponsored several such tours, so far bringing about 50 people to view Kennecott Utah Copper’s pit, three-quarters of a mile deep in the Oquirrh Mountains along the western edge of the Salt Lake Valley.

“It’s friggin’ huge,” said Kim Williams, the association’s executive director.

Williams fears Pebble, with an estimated 81 billion pounds of copper and significant gold and molybdenum deposits, could be just as large of an open-pit mine. Its placement, she said, threatens a way of life that includes subsistence fishing.

“Our kitchen is our salmon,” she said, “and the caribou and the moose and the birds.”

The Pebble Limited Partnership, a group of international mining corporations seeking to build the Alaska mine, disputes the threat to fisheries.

“The folks you’ve spoken to [with Nunamta Aulukestai] are quick to say this is a choice between fishing and mining,” said Mike Heatwole, spokesman for the mining partnership. “We do not believe that.”

The mining partnership has offered its own tours of Bingham Canyon to interested southwest Alaskans, plus visits to Canadian mines that operate next to salmon runs on the Fraser River. Heatwole said it’s unclear how the Pebble mine might ultimately compare in size to Bingham.

Williams had toured the Kennecott pit’s visitor center before, peering down at the giant trucks hauling ore and waste rock, but had never seen it from the air until Monday. She noted the urban development that laps at the mine’s dry foothills offers a stark contrast to the green wilderness around Pebble.

Colorado-based nonprofit EcoFlight, a conservation group offering educational flights with environmental themes, supplied the plane and pilot for Monday’s flyover, which The Salt Lake Tribune accompanied.

Ivan Weber, a former environmental official for Kennecott Utah Copper, briefed the Alaskans on groundwater contamination from the Bingham mine and fears of increased air pollution from a proposed pit expansion that would keep the Utah operation going through 2028. He isn’t buying the company’s assertions that its plans for a wider pit to extend operations by nine years can reduce Salt Lake Valley air pollution.

Rio Tinto, owner of Kennecott Utah Copper, holds about a one-fifth stake in the Pebble Limited Partnership, which is doing environmental groundwork before seeking state and federal permits on the Alaska mine. Nunamta Aulukestai is asking the Environmental Protection Agency to reject filling or dredging applications, thereby blocking tailings disposal.

A Pebble mine would support about 1,000 year-round jobs, Heatwole said, and workers would fly in to a work camp on rotating shifts. The average mining wage in Alaska is $90,000 a year, he said, and the partnership aims for more than half the workforce to be from around Bristol Bay.

The Utah mine expansion should reduce the company’s contribution to Salt Lake Valley particulate pollution by upgrading the electrical power source from a purely coal-fired plant to one using more natural gas than coal, said Rio Tinto spokeswoman Jana Kettering. That pollution upgrade would come despite an increase in large-haul trucking and dust at the pit. The company is awaiting final permitting from the Utah Division of Air Quality.

bloomis@sltrib.com