Sierra Club

This past weekend, I was asked to make some comments at the Rally for a Moral Budget.  I used the opportunity to speak out loudly about the ineffectiveness of DHEC to protect our environment and to call for increased funding and earnest reformation of the agency so that it does the job it was chartered to do.

Some DHEC employees in the crowd did not share my frustration with the agency and interpreted my remarks as personal attacks on them.  While it was not my intent to make anyone there feel uncomfortable, several members spoke with me afterwards and voiced their concerns.

Our grievances with DHEC are not agency wide.  As a very large state agency, there are many different departments.  Our problems arise mainly from those departments that issue permits and perform regulatory oversight, not with the other departments that deal with issues like immunizations and smoking regulations.

Over the years, we have tried, on numerous occasions, to "work with" DHEC.  Most of our efforts have been in vain.  We have looked on in horror while DHEC rubber stamped industry-written plans to dispose of dangerous nuclear waste in unlined trenches at the Barnwell nuclear dump.  We had to take this case to court to challenge the re-issuing of the permit that DHEC granted.  That case is still pending.

We have a long litany of situations where DHEC has taken a pass on its responsibility to protect our environment and, by extension, our health.  I sat at a recent hearing about arsenic leaching from a coal ash site into the Wateree River and heard the DHEC official declare that, in this case, dilution WAS the solution to pollution—incredible!  Rather than mandate the utility to clean up the problem and stop the leaching, DHEC recommended lowering the standards for the amounts of allowable arsenic.

I attended hearings last year where DHEC staff openly advocated for issuing a permit for a company on the banks of the Great Pee Dee river to emit 12,000 lbs of lead into the air.  We all know that lead is extremely dangerous to children who are in their developmental stages.  Where was the concern for children's health in that issuance?

Currently, we are engaged in another DHEC created debacle in Pelion, where a septic tank pumping company was allowed, for years, to dump raw sewage on the ground.  Some community wells are now contaminated.

We have pages and pages of these fights where we have found DHEC to be squarely on the side of industry and not on the side of the environment or the people who inhabit it.

I have many friends at DHEC, and I know they are good people who care about the work they do.  Unfortunately, the collective actions of DHEC do not always represent those people, and the part of DHEC that we deal with is more often our adversary than our friend.  The problem with DHEC is the institutional culture not line staff (many of whom try to do their jobs and believe in environmental protection but get slapped down when they stick their necks out).  The root of the problem is top leadership that caves to political pressure from polluters, channeled through legislative friends who regularly intervene in DHEC decisions.

We wish this were not so, and we will continue to keep the lines of communication open; however, until the protection of the environment becomes a major priority of this state, DHEC will continue to be manipulated by the legislature and overly influenced by industry.  Business at any cost seems to be the mantra these days, and DHEC is often the enabler of pollution and not the protector of our health or our environment that it should be.