EiJ Hazard: PFAS
FOR ECOGOVLAB/CCEJP CURRICULUM: Use this as a research resource during 11th and 12th Grade Lesson 2 on Hazards.
FOR ECOGOVLAB/CCEJP CURRICULUM: Use this as a research resource during 11th and 12th Grade Lesson 2 on Hazards.
I hope to be involved in projects that aim to gather scientific evidence to inform environmental decision making and advocate for greater equity and justice in environmental governance. Through this work, I hope to learn the skills needed to engage in community based research and leverage community knowledge as expert knowledge. In my department, things are often siloed and issues are only seen through one perspective. I really want to gain more experience in collaborating with a wide array of stakeholders to come up with approaches to mitigate the environmental injustices experienced in under-resourced communities.
1. Under private equity ownership, some ambulance response times worsened, heart monitors failed and companies slid into bankruptcy, according to a Times examination of thousands of pages of internal documents and government records, as well as interviews with dozens of former employees. In at least two cases, lawsuits contend, poor service led to patient deaths.
2. “Private equity has, in this case, threatened public safety,” said Richard Thomas, the mayor of Mount Vernon, N.Y, which relied on TransCare. “It’s not the way to treat the public.”
3. Do the Write Thing “didn’t sit well with the firefighters,” said Nico Latini, who has worked at Rural/Metro for a decade. “We operate under a high level of integrity and we do the right thing every day — with an R, not a W.”
Emergency response isn't explicitly addressed in the article, but in order to incorporate structural interventions into public health, emergency response would have to be improved as well. As the article states, there are many "diseases of poverty" and medical emergencies would be more common in those populations. Noting these trends can streamline medical response and help with providing education/ resources to prevent emergencies.
A GoogleDoc link to a bibliogrpahy about PFAS in Santa Ana and community-led responses