Schoolchildren Poisoned by Chemours & Dupont Chemical

No one needs to be a legal expert or a political scientist to understand the story of what happened in Park City, Utah.

It’s a tale that has played out in countless communities across the country, where the pursuit of profit leaves a toxic legacy for generations to come. This is a story about the very real consequences of corporate actions on the lives of everyday people.

At the heart of this story is a simple, brutal fact: the ground beneath a junior high school was contaminated with hazardous substances, including lead, arsenic, cadmium, and zinc. For decades, mining and milling operations treated the land as a dumping ground, creating a massive impoundment of toxic waste that came to be known as the “Grasselli Dump”. This was the land where a community would eventually build its homes and schools.

The story of how this came to be is a familiar one. It’s a story of corporate shells and legal maneuvering, where one company is absorbed by another, and another, until the lines of responsibility become blurred. It’s a story of a company that, even after it stopped its own milling operations, continued to lease the land to others who carried on the same toxic practices.

But the real story is about the human cost of those decisions. It’s about the children who played on the fields of Treasure Mountain Junior High School, unaware of the elevated levels of lead in the soil beneath their feet. It’s about the families who built their homes in the Prospector Park development, unknowingly living on top of a former toxic waste dump.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) had to step in to perform a time-critical removal action, scraping off the top six inches of contaminated soil from the junior high school grounds and replacing it with clean material. This is a matter of public health and safety. Lead, arsenic, cadmium, and zinc are not harmless substances. They are hazardous materials that can have devastating effects on human health, especially in children.

The economic fallout is also significant. The cost of cleaning up this mess is not insignificant, and the U.S. government is now seeking to recover those costs from the companies it holds responsible. But the true economic cost is borne by the community. It’s the cost of a compromised environment, the cost of the fear and uncertainty that comes with living near a Superfund site, and the cost of the potential long-term health consequences for those who were exposed.

This is a story that has been repeated time and time again, in communities across the country. It’s the story of an exploitative late-stage capitalistic system that prioritizes profit over people, a system where the pursuit of short-term gains can lead to long-term devastation. It’s the story of a political and economic system that has been shaped by the forces of neoliberalism, where deregulation and weak enforcement have created a fertile ground for corporate misconduct.

And what of accountability?

The legal system, for all its complexities, often fails to deliver true justice in these cases. The outcome is often a settlement, a monetary payment that, for a multi-billion dollar corporation, can be little more than a cost of doing business.

There is no admission of guilt, no real acknowledgment of the harm that has been done. The individuals who made the decisions that led to this environmental disaster are rarely, if ever, held personally responsible.

But there is a pathway to real change.

It’s a pathway that involves strengthening our environmental regulations and empowering the agencies that are tasked with enforcing them. It’s a pathway that involves reforming our system of corporate governance to prioritize social and environmental responsibility alongside financial returns. And it’s a pathway that involves empowering communities to have a real say in the decisions that affect their health and their future.

The story of what happened in Park City is not just a story about one community’s struggle with a toxic legacy. I mean, it is about that… but it’s about o much more! It’s also story about the failures of a system, a system that is designed to produce these kinds of outcomes. It’s a story about the human cost of late-stage capitalism, a system where the relentless pursuit of profit can leave a trail of devastation in its wake.

This is a crisis that we must all confront if we are to build a more just and sustainable future for ourselves and for generations to come.

All factual claims in this article were derived from the attached documents from the Department of Justice.

https://www.justice.gov/enrd/media/1371426/dl?inline