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July 21, 2021 - RFK Jr. The Defender
24:01
Fist Fight Against Poison Cartels with Hurricane Creekkeeper

RFK Jr discusses poison cartels and pollution with John Wathen. There are 350 Waterkeepers around the world and John Wathen is a favorite within the movement.

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Hey everybody!
I'm really happy today to introduce you to one of my old friends, John Watham, who's a hurricane creep keeper in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, Tuscaloosa County.
And like many of the water keepers, John is a veteran of the military service.
He was in the United States Navy, came home to an industrial job, and got poisoned And ended up devoting his life to clean waterways.
Now, John, you're originally from Boston, right?
No, no, from Birmingham.
Don't get off on the wrong foot, Bobby.
I'm from Birmingham, Alabama.
I was born there in the 50s and watched things progressively go downhill around me as a kid.
I didn't understand a lot of the environmental changes that I was seeing.
We just took it for granted that that's the way it is.
You mentioned that I got poisoned on a job.
That's the first time that, me personally, that I had been impacted by industrial pollution to the point where I was in pretty dire straits.
We sued the company and in the process during discovery, I went out with them into the community And found out that there was a cancer cluster all the way around this plant where I was working.
And there were children out playing in the rain water that ran down the gutter was black with coal dust.
The top of their school was black with coal dust.
This stuff was all over the place.
It inspired me to want to do more to expose things like that.
But when I got so sick and nearly died from it, I got angry.
That's when it hit me.
Somebody made a lot of money by skirting the rules that allowed me to get sick.
And all those people living around that place up there, they were also getting sick because of a bunch of industrial fat cats that wanted to make money.
Off of our backs, they made money.
And I tell people all the time, it pissed me off and I hadn't calmed down yet.
What kind of plant was that?
It was a coal coking plant.
In Birmingham, Alabama, it's where they take raw coal and they put it into these coke ovens and they bake it until all of the impurities come out of it.
It leaves a product called coke, which is used in steelmaking.
It burns much hotter than coal.
But all of those so-called residual products are things like benzene, toluene, xylene, methyl chlorine, methyl chloride, so many orides that I can't pronounce.
It's just not even funny what they subjected us to.
This stuff was all in the groundwater where I was working.
ADEM, the Alabama Department of Environmental Management, knew about it.
The EPA, Environmental Protection Agency, knew about it.
In fact, when we first discovered this stuff, we found out that there had been a benzene spill on that property many years ago, and the EPA cut a deal.
Told them, you know, you didn't have to clean it up as long as you never built anything on the property.
We weren't supposed to be building anything on that property.
I nearly died from it.
And I can't say for sure because none of the doctors would ever specifically identify the reasons for the death.
But one of the guys on the crew that was subjected to the same stuff I was had the same symptoms I did.
He died from it.
This was a serious situation.
I didn't know at the time how widespread this is across the country.
Until I became associated with you and the Waterkeeper Alliance, I had no idea that this was in almost every major city in the country.
That's systemic failure.
of the Environmental Protection Agency to do what it was supposed to do.
Their very name, Environmental Protection, is not something that they do.
We call those captive agencies, as you know, and the Alabama Department of Environmental Management is kind of the poster child for captive agency phenomena.
And even I remember when I made a trip down there and I spent three days going through ADEMS files, I found about, I don't know, 40 or 50,000 violations by steel plants on the Alabama River and the Tennessee River around the Birmingham, violations by steel plants on the Alabama River and the Tennessee River Around the Birmingham, Huntsville area.
And we filed letters of intent to sue against those companies.
And on the 59th day, ADEM and Alabama Attorney General's office came in and rescued those guys.
The companies asked ADEM, and you know they do this, to sue them to preempt us from suing them so that they can make a sweetheart deal with each other.
How many years ago was that, Bobby?
I was like in, I think it was like 88, 89.
They're still doing it today.
That is still the modus operandi at ADEM today.
We call them the Alabama Department of Environmental Maniacs.
Doing the same thing over and over and over again, expecting different results is insanity.
But that's what we're facing.
Recently, Tennessee Riverkeeper filed a lawsuit against the city of Guntersville for sewer violations.
And of course ADEM jumped in and wanted to file a notice of violation of their own and intervene with a lawsuit from ADEM with a consent order.
These consent orders Sometimes they can last for years and years and years, and the problem goes on and on and on systemically, like it is here in Tuscaloosa.
And it's about just giving the company immunity to pollutants.
Yeah, because once the state is involved and the company or the city accepts...
Enforcement from ADEM, then we as citizens no longer have any power in the matter.
In this particular case, the city of Guntersville had dealt with ADEM before and decided it was better for them to want to deal with the local water keeper.
Tennessee Riverkeeper made specific demands on what needed to be fixed.
I believe there were some timelines set out and everybody was kind of getting in agreement with it.
ADEM decided they didn't like that.
They want to have themselves in charge because this sets a precedent against what they've been doing in the status quo.
The city of Gunnersville responded to ADEM and told them no, they would rather deal with the water keeper because ADEM themselves are far too complicated.
They're not really designed to enforce.
They act more as a buffer.
Between the citizens of the state of Alabama and the polluters in the state of Alabama.
By law, we have to go through ADEM to start.
ADEM systemically fails, you know, regularly.
ADEM fails to enforce to the letter of the law.
And then we come along behind that and sometimes intervene with a notice of intent to sue.
We've done due diligence through the state and through the feds, and they haven't done their job.
So we have no choice but to file these lawsuits.
It's not like water keepers, you know, I didn't file my charter in order to file lawsuits.
That's not what we're about.
We're about fixing the problems.
Sometimes that does take a lawsuit.
The director of ADEMP wrote that he penned this op-ed that said it takes more than lawsuits to fix the problems.
And I fully agree with him.
It takes a state agency doing their damn job so we don't have to sue.
That's what it's all about.
We wouldn't be in such an adversarial position If the state and federal government were doing their job, and it's not just in Alabama.
This is nationwide, I see it.
But what I also see is the stronger the waterkeeper presence in an area, the better regulated the waterways are, because they know we will take them to task.
Well, you've been out in hand-to-hand combat with the coal industry for however long.
How long have you been with us?
You've been there forever.
It seems like it has been, Bobby.
It was, I guess, 79, 80 when I first started really getting involved.
I grew up in an area on the Jefferson-Walker County line in Alabama that was all forest land.
We stock hunted.
We went out into the woods, and those woods are gone now.
I watched that happen, and I knew it was the coal industry.
But I also worked in the coal industry on tugboats, pushing this stuff down the river.
I didn't make the connection until later on in life, actually until I got sick.
But I knew something wasn't right about it.
We had in the neighborhood where I lived up in Maxine, there was an old geological overburden pile, a gob pile.
That caught fire and it burned for a couple of years.
That was the nastiest smell in sulfur.
The laws then weren't like they are now.
They can't get away with that today.
So whenever I found mines or mine operations or anything around coal that was not adhering to the law, it put me in this defensive mode of wanting to expose what they're doing.
I've been doing that now for, I guess, 30 years, Bobby.
I think it's up on a level that most people, it would horrify them to see what I have seen.
Whole mountains blown apart in West Virginia.
They used more explosives on the mountains in West Virginia than we did during the entire Vietnam conflict.
Water stolen from the reservations out west in the Four Corners area where, you know, the Zuni Pueblo, the Navajo, the Hopi, these people depend on sacred aquifers there for their livelihoods.
And that water is routinely pumped out of the ground and used to slurry coal two states over to burn in a coal-burning fireplace.
And we have a Hopi waterkeeper who is in a war with Peabody Coal.
The whole tribe is, but the waterkeeper is out there leading that battle.
Peabody, that issue.
Exactly.
Tell us about what happened with BP, because a lot of people might recognize you.
You were on Rachel Maddow.
You were on all the news.
You actually got up in a helicopter and went down and took...
Well, I used a helicopter a few times, but mostly we used a single-engine airplane.
A friend of mine owns a flight aviation company out of North Carolina called South Wings.
And we can charter flights with them, and they would fly us out there.
I got one pilot, he was a regular Tom Hutchings.
Tom would actually take the door off the side of his airplane, and I would get in the back where I could lean out with the telephoto lens.
And we flew out, you know, it was like 90 miles out to the well site.
And that's outside FAA jurisdiction.
There are no flight regulations out there that the U.S. can impose.
So we were able to fly right over the rig and get pictures that Refuted what was going on in the media every day when they tried to downplay the severity of this thing.
We were seeing miles and miles of oil just cover the Gulf of Mexico.
I've got pictures of pods of dolphins breaching and breathing in this stuff.
I've got one whale that we got a picture of it and I didn't find out until I started blowing it up there was something red all down the back of this whale.
And I believe, I don't know for sure, but I believe it to have either been a big patch of oil or that whale was hemorrhaging.
We reported it.
The Coast Guard reported finding a whale in that vicinity the next day dead.
This was horrifying for me.
We were at three, sometimes four thousand feet.
Now we did get down a lot lower than that at times, but we would start out at a high altitude and you could smell the oil inside the plane.
It was on our skin.
I got headaches from it.
The instruments on the plane got coated with oil.
We'd have to clean them after every flight.
But we were able to get there and take photographs of Olympic swimming pool sized patches of oil that they were firing flares into and burning at sea.
There were turtles, there were dolphins, there were birds, there were all kinds of wildlife in those fires that just burned up.
There was never an accurate accounting for all of the wildlife that was killed and is still dying today.
There are still severe impacts from that oil spill.
We have a lot of water keepers in the Gulf, including a number of Cajun shrimp fishermen and you know all those men and women and their livelihoods have been absolutely devastated by that spill and continue to be devastated today.
Yeah, they're still feeling a lot of negative impacts from it.
In all honesty, the Gulf is beginning to rebound a little bit.
The fishing industry is better than it was then, but it's nowhere near like what it was, say, pre-Katrina or pre-BP. And now, of all the insanity, the EPA and the Corps of Engineers are allowing them to breach the Mississippi River and dump untold amounts of sediment down into Barataria and down into the bayous down there as a way of trying to supposedly We rebuild the Delta.
This is some of the most toxic sediment in the Mississippi River.
So, I mean, none of this makes good sense to me, but a lot that the government does and allows doesn't make good sense to me.
Oh, it was the coal company trying to fight you, John.
Well, I've had to face lawsuits with them.
They've never come after me with what's known as a slap suit, but I've had from mostly non-union mines, let me specify the scab mines are the ones that are probably the most aggressive when you challenge the permits.
I've had blasting caps put in my driveway as a message.
I know it was.
I think I know who did it, but I can't prove it.
I've had my dogs poisoned.
I've been shot at.
I've had life-threatening telephone calls from people from within the mine.
They take it as a threat to their job, and if the industry would follow the rules set up in the permit, then their job security would never be an issue.
They know that these companies are skirting the law and they let them get away with it.
Bottom line is the miners, honestly, that come out getting hurt because of these bad practices.
If they're lax in their environmental compliance, they're also lax 99 times out of 100, they're also lax in their safety protocols, their safety procedures.
So when that happens, men die.
We had 13 miners here in Brookwood, Alabama, that were killed in a series of explosions.
The state regulatory agencies had cited that mine over 20 times for airborne volatiles in the mine, but they didn't shut them down.
They didn't force them to fix it.
They just wrote them up these meaningless citations.
A fire broke out.
Two men died.
They sent an elevator shaft down with a rescue crew because the call came out, fire in the mine.
You can handle a fire in the mine differently than you can an explosion in the mine.
An explosion, everything is completely unstable.
So they thought they were going down into a fairly stable situation when the second explosion went off and killed them near the entire rescue crew.
Thirteen men died that night because the state and federal regulatory agencies didn't do their job.
These companies can only be blamed so far, Bobby.
They're going to do what they're allowed to get away with by the state and federal agencies.
If the state and federal agencies don't uphold the law, then these citations become nothing more than cost of business.
We can write this off and it's not a problem.
Thirteen men died.
They wrote them off.
That's not right.
That is why I am so passionate about what I do in the environment.
For me, it's not just the nuts and bolts of the water quality.
It's the impact that water and the need for water has on our communities as a whole.
We all have a right to go out here and enjoy the use of Hurricane Creek, the Black Warrior River, the Tennessee River, wherever we want to go.
We have rights as Americans to do that.
And it's not political.
The water is not Republican.
It's not Democrat.
It's the best independent it can be.
Everybody loves and needs water.
So there shouldn't be all of this yeah yeah back and forth in the political atmosphere about water quality.
Everybody should agree.
We want the very best possible.
There's ulterior motives for those that don't want strong environmental policy.
Environmental policy, they weigh it off against the economy.
They weigh it off against jobs.
But a good, healthy environmental policy equates into a good economy and healthy jobs.
If the people in your community are sick because of the water quality, then you can't possibly have a good economy.
Those people are always in the doctor's office.
They're always having to buy high-priced medications.
I was prescribed a medication when I first got it.
It was like $18 to $20.
They found out how good it is, and now that same prescription would cost me $3,400.
Well, that's because the pharmaceutical industry cares about you, John.
Oh, I know.
My sarcasm here.
John, thank you.
You've been an amazing leader, not only for North Alabama, but for the whole water keeper movement.
you're respected and beloved by all the water keepers and I know you love the moment and you know like I do it's part of our DNA.
Well you show my podcasters your uh your tattoo which I I love to show people all the time.
You know he was supposed to picture of it.
What?
You know you know why he does this?
He paid to get my tattoo done, and now he thinks he's got the right to jerk my shirt off everywhere we go.
Well, you know, the water keeper, people should know this, and if you're a water keeper, we will pay for you to get a tattoo.
I can't see it in this life.
It looks really good, John.
You look good for an old man.
Huh?
I said, you look good for an old man.
Don't speak too loudly, my brother.
You're not much younger than I am.
I think one year.
They don't call me an old gray beard for nothing.
Well, John Watham, thank you very, very much for joining us.
And tell everybody how they can support you.
How they can support, you know, you, what you do in Northern Alabama.
We are...
The Friends of Hurricane Creek is my umbrella organization, www.hurricanecreek.org.
We always accept donations.
We're a 501c3.
We accept donations.
It's been a long, interesting career, but we can't do it without community support.
A lot of people think that what we've done here on Hurricane Creek was because of me alone, but it's not.
I had a lot of help Community involvement at the political level, at the activist level, at the donor level, is all critical to the survival of all of our non-profit organizations that are out here advocating for the health of Unshimaka, the Grandmother Earth.
We have an obligation.
As human, to leave this earth in better shape than we found it.
And we're not living up to that as a whole.
So I ask people to support us locally, but also get involved where you are locally as well.
Get involved with the local water keepers.
There's 10 here in Alabama.
We're Water Keepers Alabama.
There's water keepers in every corner of the world.
We're not just here on Hurricane Creek.
Support your local water keeper.
If you're in my area, I'm surrounded by water keepers, but we have the crown jewel of Alabama.
We appreciate your support.
John Lawson, thank you very much.
John, that was great.
Thank you, man.
No problem.
No problem, Bobby.
Glad to see you looking good.
Looks like you've been in the sun a little bit.
Yeah, there's a lot of sun out here.
Yeah.
A lot of rain here.
Well, come visit me if you ever get to the West Coast.
You always got a place to stay, John.
We're going to take a picture.
Smile.
All right.
All right, Johnny.
I love you, man.
Thank you, Bobby.
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