Part 1

Michael Sauers

April 6,2024

In April of 1990 I helped organize an “Earth Day” celebration unlike any the greater Hazleton area had ever experienced. Community groups and individuals put together an educational event that covered scores of environmental topics. Citizens participated/attended and a dialogue was opened within the community.

At that time Hazleton was inundated with polluting industries. EPA Toxic Release Inventory numbers confirmed significant levels of carcinogenic air, water and soil contamination. Superfund sites popped up like pimples on a teenagers face. Government studies showing high levels of “cancers” and other deadly conditions, such as berylliosis, became public information and continue to this day. Proposals such as New Jersey Steel, Foster Township Mega Landfill and a tire pyrolysis plant were occurring with increasing frequency.

These polluting industries did not miraculously appear. They were actively recruited in the name of “progress” by misguided industrial and community “leaders”. Their glaring miscalculations gave birth to the Beryllium Corporation and the Valmont Industrial Park. Several other industrial parks including Humboldt and McAdoo would follow. These industrial parks required environmental degradation such as leveling forests, filling in wetlands, diverting streams and eliminating thousands of acres of natural habitat. This was habitat destruction on a mass scale and it continues to this day.

You see, my friends, I have perspective. As a 74 year old I remember how things used to be. An aerial study shows the helter skelter, cluster #*!% approach to the above industrial parks. It is truly a nightmare that negates any rational development plan. Much of this plan was funded by government (taxpayer) grants, loans and subsidies which continue unabated to this day. Just recently the ever compliant Hazleton Area School District granted enormous tax deferment benefits to “warehouses”. Money drives all of this.

Now, couple this with the devastation foisted on the area by the coal industry. Coal is a dirty and polluting fossil fuel. It is on its way out. It has destroyed thousands of acres of natural habitat leaving abandoned mine lands, abandoned mine tunnels spewing acid mine drainage, polluted waterways and subsidence issues. It has given thousands of miners “black lung” or pneumoconiosis disease which results in a horrible death. Thank you coal barons. Thank you capitalists.

The above environmental/economic development disasters still plague NEPA. (See Part 2)