is really a false one, but nevertheless, it is given a lot of lipservice attention, and I hope you can appear on the 12th. Thank you very much. We will introduce in the record at this time a statement from the Greater St. Louis United Auto Workers Council on this subject matter, signed by Mr. Kenneth L. Worley, director, region 5, United Auto Workers. (The statement is as follows:) STATEMENT OF KENNETH L. WORLEY, DIRECTOR, REGION 5, UAW International Union UAW is proud that it involves itself socially and politically in all the great issues of our times. We take positions on Viet Nam, armament deescalation, school integration, racial injustice, Supreme Court appointments, moon shots, mass transit and health insurance. It is frightening to think that all the above issues, each screaming for priority, will become, or worse-already are hypothetical, and we here are a "moot court" planning today to meet yesterday's deadline. We believe no problem has greater priority than the problem of our environment. What difference will it make if the fighting stops in Viet Nam- What difference will it make if black children finally receive a chance for an education and their fathers a chance for a job What difference will it make which persuasion dominates the Supreme Court, or how many more billions are budgeted to trample more footprints on the moon What difference will it make if at last we decide that all men have the right to the best medical care that can be provided What difference will any of it make if we continue to poison and destroy the life supports of our world? We in the UAW ask ourselves if we are struggling for the benefit of a generation which will never have the chance to be. Better we tear the factories to the ground, abandon the mines, plug the petroleum holes and fill the fuel tanks of our cars with sugar than continue this doomsday madness. CAW has placed air and environmental pollution at the top of its list of priority problems of man. We demand that our community and all communities do the same. We demand that uncompromising and irreversible standards and controls be established to preserve our environment, no matter what the cost, no matter how great the violation of property rights, no matter what the effect on dividends and no matter what the effect on our own bold plans for collective bargaining. Senator EAGLETON. I am told that Dr. Tudor and Dr. Arnold had to leave and I apologize to them. They did have to leave. Their statement will appear in the record. (The statement is as follows:) STATEMENT OF DR. WILLIAM J. TUDOR, SOUTHERN ILLINOIS UNIVERSITY Senator Muskie, Senator Eagleton and other members of the committee, I am William J. Tudor of Southern Illinois University which has campuses at both Carbondale and Edwardsville. I am assistant to the Vice President for Area and International Services, and I direct the University Regional and Urban Development Studies and Services program at Edwardsville. Ours is the second largest university in Illinois with over 35,000 students on the two campuses and has emphasized public service for the citizens of the State. Edwardsville is in the St. Louis Air Quality Control Region, and our local campus has a variety of educational services for the St. Louis metropolitan area with special emphasis on the Illinois portion. With respect to the August air pollution alert in St. Louis, we point out that one of our staff members in 1964 predicted this condition, but few heard him. He said that during the fall season, the weather at St. Louis is like that of Los Angeles. He said "* * * when light winds exist, the cool evening air of the Mississippi Bottom, like that of the San Fernando Valley, becomes trapped and through the night gathers up hydrocarbons in the same way as the air on Santa Monica Boulevard." The recent St. Louis smog was almost a perfect image of the infamous ones of the Los Angeles basin. As a unit of the Area and International Services of S.I.U., Regional and Urban Development Studies and Services has been directly concerned with problems found in primarily Madison, St. Clair and Monroe counties of Illinois. We have a staff with a wide variety of professional backgrounds and training but also can draw on the expertise of faculty and staff of the total university, which approximates 6,000. We have been somewhat frustrated in the efforts we have put forth to assist with the problems of air and water pollution because several projects have been proposed to federal agencies and private foundations without success. Three important approaches are necessary to achieve solutions to our pollution problems. 1. Research is necessary to find the nature and extent of the conditions that exist. 2. An educational program is necessary to acquaint the people with the findings. 3. Following this, it is essential to have the legal mechanism to provide the laws, statutes, codes, etc., along with the machinery to enforce compliance with these regulations. It would appear to me that perhaps we are in a position of needing to put the backbone where our wishbone has been. We have been hoping the problem would go away and it would not be necessary to force expensive efforts on those who have polluted our air and water. The time has come when we can no longer afford the luxury of freedom to pollute at will. Congress must find the funds to, on the one hand, enforce the controls and, on the other, assist with the research, the education and the revamping of the sources of pollution. To turn to some specific recommendations perhaps the following would be in order: 1. Congress should raise the Federal grant matching ratio for projects protecting the environment. A good precedent for this is the 9-to-1 ratio for the Interstate Highway system. A high matching ratio for pollution abatement would motivate the recipients. 2. In order to help reduce the automotive pollution in cities, we urge Congress to expedite the development of mass transit systems. There would be multiple benefits for the beleaguered city dwellers. 3. The delegation of primary responsibility to the states for implementation of the Air Quality Act of 1967 is heartily commended at this stage and time. It is now desirable to give more responsibilities to the state governments, and encourage them toward close patronage with duly constituted agencies within their borders. Since governmental channels of action are normally discontinuous at state boundaries and since interstate compacts have been unacceptable, your nurturing of intrastate competence is appreciated. 4. Provision of Federal financial assistance to electric utility companies for control of particulates and sulfur dioxide from their plants might be wise. Electric energy is essential to the high standard of living of every citizen in the United States. The public will ultimately pay the cost of electricity one way or another. Why not put some of our tax money into control of the major source of SO, in the country-the electric power industry? Perhaps this should be in low interest or deferred interest loans to the power companies. 5. The United States Congress should hold fast to the 1970 budgetary provision of the Clean Water Restoration Act of 1968 and hold to the previous allotment of $1,000,000,000 for sewage treatment plants. The billion dollars, as we all know, would be only a fraction of what is needed for this purpose. 6. The Congress should pass an act assigning the task of junk auto disposal to a specific Federal agency. The need is so widespread and of such magnitude that only a well established arm of the Federal Government can cope with it. Returning military men from overseas duties could be assigned to the agency according to manpower requirements. Perhaps the metals could be stockpiled for future generations. In conclusion, I want to thank you for the privilege of appearing before you today. The people of our great country are indebted to your committee for its untiring efforts to resolve this difficult but extremely important problem. Senator EAGLETON. We have in the audience Dr. Helen Graham. Will Dr. Helen Graham please stand up? We have a pollution hearing starting in Detroit tomorrow morning at 9 o'clock. We will try to complete this list. Mr. Courtney Goodman, Jr., apparently has left. South County Citizens for Community Betterment, James E. Meisner? STATEMENT OF JAMES E. MEISNER, ON BEHALF OF THE SOUTH COUNTY CITIZENS FOR BETTER GOVERNMENT Mr. MEISNER. My organization is representative of people living generally south of Highway 66 in the South County, St. Louis area. For the record, in that community, there are some 150,000 people living there that cover some 100 square miles. We are nonprofit, a nonpartisan civic league whose only purpose in life is to furnish a format for discussion of issues and possibly some leadership in attempting to solve areawide problems. We have no particular political affiliations, whatsoever. For the sake of brevity, let me say this, that I think the preceding witnesses that we had, particularly the professionals, illustrate the lack of coordination that we have in fighting air pollution problems, not only in our community but across the country. We have to have strong leadership, who are financially backed, who can furnish the expertise that is necessary. It is quite evident that the local State and local level just had either been unwilling to do it or for reasons cannot do it. You have heard many discussions about the Portland cement problem and the fact they have been in compliance because of the variances. The variance is another problem. I think St. Louis County lacks the expertise to really pin down a large corporation like Portland Cement. However, we have a problem at the south end that goes a little further. We have a cement factory that is in compliance with the present requirements and I think we will just take a few minutes to illustrate the problems that we are still having, even though they are meeting today's regulations. I would like to introduce Mr. Jerry Dyer, who is an engineer associated with one of the large companies in town. I am inquiring as to whether today's present day's regulations are good enough and if this company is in compliance based on what I have been told, I still repeat my curiosity about the efficacy of the present regulations. STATEMENT OF GERALD DYER Mr. DYER. My name is Gerald Dyer. I am a graduate engineer. 1 live about a half mile from Alpha. The last time I gave this presentation, it lasted 1 hour and a half. I will try to shorten it up to a few minutes. Here is a brief sketch of the cement plant. The kiln is right here, high velocity through the kiln, and here is the dust collector and stack. Alpha, in the past, has collected dust in the precipitator and dumped it back into the kiln. Now, I asked them if they mixed it with water and the answer was "No." I said, don't these high velocities have a tendency to blow it right back out the stack? They said, yes, it does. That is why we stopped doing that last year. This plant was built in 1910 and the records show that the citizens in this area have been dissatisfied with the conditions and have been complaining quite bitterly about them since 1955. The plant has come into compliance in July of this year. We patiently waited for 14 years for a solution on this problem. I waited, myself, for the last 6 years. Now that the plant is in compliance, we still have some of the same problems that we had before. There seems to be somewhat of a credibility gap. In 1966, the plant was putting out 980 pounds an hour, almost a half ton an hour. In 1968, reduced to 225 pounds; 1969, to 140 pounds. This represented a decrease of 860 percent. Today, we are down to approximately 50 pounds an hour, with another additional 60 percent decrease tacked onto that. We have cement dust on our cars, and very difficult to clean. I have a few exhibits here. One is a mirror that I put on top of my toolshed in July. This, here, is when the plant came into compliance. The other, here, is a group of photographs of automobiles and this automobile that is shown here was washed and polished one evening and this is what it looked like the next morning. I have here a small sample of a fiberglass furnace filter. These are fallout tests that have been conducted, which have been qualitatively and quantitatively analyzed. I, too, am pessimistic. I don't think the control standards are adequate and we still have the problem, even though the plant is in compliance. Senator EAGLETON. We will hear from Mrs. Jean Francis now. STATEMENT OF MRS. JEAN FRANCIS, CHAIRMAN, CITIZENS FOR CLEAN AIR, GRANITE CITY, ILL. Mrs. FRANCIS. In behalf of the Madison County and Granite City, Illinois Citizens for Clean Air, I want to welcome your committee to our area, and even if you don't get to the Illinois side of the river, a good deal of the air you'll breathe while you're here will be contaminated by our industry. I am here to speak for the many citizens in my area who feel the need for clear air now. We want enforcement of rules and regulations as they now exist by putting an end to variances allowed industry so it can continue to hedge on its obligation to let us breathe again. We seek a uniform Federal standard, for air does not cleanse itself along political boundaries. Let me assure you there is no public apathy on this subject. Until now, however, industry has been able to wear us down by shifting the political arena in which it wished to conduct the air war. The Federal Air Quality Act of 1967 is really a subterfuge to enable industry to wage its campaign in the more easily controlled State legislatures. It talks of compacts between governments. But each State is convinced by its industry that any air quality standards imposed at the State level places the industry in that State in an unfair competitive advantage with industry in other States. No compacts are worked out, and no air is cleaned. Industry has constantly borrowed time by shifting the battle scene in this manner. My group, for instance, has been to statewide pollution meetings where industry successfully advocated that "this is a local problem, which is being handled at the local level"; then the very same industry representatives successfully advocated at the local level that this problem is a regional problem, and can't be handled piecemeal. At the regional meetings these lobbyists for filth talked about States rights, again successfully. The Federal Act itself is a monument to those who argue States rights to hide a State's wrongs. Industry wrote the act so that it sounds like the Federal Government is doing something and industry argues in our State legislatures that the Feds have preempted the field. Yes, the public is aroused. The doctor's offices are full of children with chronic bronchitis; and men hanging onto life suffering the agony and pain of chronic emphysema. Many of the mothers are too busy nursing their ill children and many of these men haven't the energy to climb the stairs into pollution hearing halls, but their presence is felt here today by all of us. Too many workmen have been forced into early retirement, utterly worn out by lung congestion contracted in some foundry. Not only are their bodies damaged, their families are often in desperate financial straits as they try to make do with a meager retirement income too much of which must be spent on doctors and medicine to keep the worn out being alive. It is in behalf of these people that we are here. It is time to draft industry into the people's air war, to enlist them in the ranks of concerned citizenry, and the only level of government which has this power of conscription is the Federal Government. Let us see how patriotic our industry will be when we tell them it is un-American to pollute the air with sulfur dioxide and particulate matter so concentrated it murders and maims our fellow Americans. Let us enact an alert warning system at the Federal level to benefit all the people in a regional air shaft. Let us allow no variances from it. Let us have the wisdom to pass an easily enforceable act, one with both stiff criminal and civil sanctions, against both violating industries and those who control those industries, only in this manner can we conscript the guilty into this fateful struggle for survival. Senator EAGLETON. Thank you, Mrs. Francis. I am sad to say that this is as far as we can go with additional testimony. Our plane leaves at 7 o'clock for Detroit and we just have to catch that plane. I would like to acknowledge that I have a list of names of people who are here and I will ask them to give us their written statements either now or mail them to us and they will be made a part of the record. We must adjourn at this time. I thank everyone for being so patient and cooperative. This has been most informative and interesting and stimulating. Thank you. The subcommittee is adjourned. (The following statements were submitted during and after the hearing for inclusion in the printed record:) STATEMENT OF DR. D. W. RYCKMAN, P.E., ON BEHALF OF THE CONSULTING ENGINEERS COUNCIL OF THE U.S.A. 1. THE CONCERN OF THE CONSULTING ENGINEERING COUNCIL OF THE UNITED STATES REGARDING AIR POLLUTION CONTROL The role of the Consulting Engineer in air pollution control is to provide and implement engineering solutions to: (1) Health hazards created by air pollution. (2) Restore and maintain the beauty of our environment. (3) Apply the technology and research to solve immediate solutions to air pollution problems. (4) Provide these solutions without sacrificing economic or social gain. |