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Sunday, June 08, 2003
posted by gbarto at 4:59 AM:
Natalie Solent writes here and here about California's efforts to destroy a couple old folks in their late 80s (one with Alzheimers) because they ran a dry-cleaning business before people knew the dangers such things posed and therefore may have polluted. We must inform Natalie that such things are not so odd. In the small town where I grew up, a widow in her late 80s spent years tangling with the state's environmental bureaucracy which wanted her to pay to clean up the site where here husband had had a car dealership. The state admitted that the contamination was a heavier machine oil, not standard motor oil, and that no one would assert more than occasional spillage at the car dealership while people who had worked in the factory that preceded the car dealership remembered pouring barrels of machine oil down the drain. But that was not important. What was important is that the factory had gone bankrupt and its owners had never recovered, whereas the car dealer's widow had money left over and the state environmental agency had been embarrassed by the failure of its litigation arm to make polluters pay. They thought they had an easy kill; fortunately they lost in the end but they made things a lot harder for a family friend before admitting after ten years of harassment that they didn't really have a case.Funny, I think, that for all we hear about scams to bilk old people, the same governments ever on the lookout lest a little old lady spend an extra penny for her grapes at the local market will pull these stunts without even blushing.
Incidentally, this happened in Michigan. I think place is less important than the mentality which makes one think that becoming a lawyer is the way to save the environment.
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