WEC in the News

  In Plainfield, school’s out early. “It’s good because if we stayed there we would be sweating and melt or something,” said second grader Keyly Portillo. Sweat hardly describes it for Portillo. Mercury reached well above 90 today, making for hazardous conditions in some classrooms. Across the state dozens of school districts called for early dismissal. "Off the top of my head, we have roughly 30 to 40 thousand students in New Jersey who are actually not attending school for a full day because of temperature control issues,” Jerell Blakeley from the New Jersey Work Environment Council said. Read [...]

"Hundreds of workers from community organizations, unions and faith-based groups rallied Sunday to observe Workers’ Memorial Day. Despite the Occupational Safety and Health Act, workers continue to find themselves at great risk of exposure to dangerous workplace conditions. In December 2016, Alvaro Esteban of Freehold died on the job at the Edgeboro Landfill in East Brunswick after being crushed by a trash compactor. He was 22. Though progress has been made in reducing the number of incidents, workers continue to be injured on the job. Those at the rally added that even today, not all injuries are reported. 'Seeing the names and photos of the [...]

The devastating 1995 Napp Technologies explosion in the heart of Lodi killed five men, created a plume of toxic black smoke that lingered over the county for days -- and led to the creation of a federal board that spent the next two decades investigating more than 100 chemical industry accidents across the nation. Now, the U.S. Chemical Safety Board is slated to be eliminated under the President Trump’s proposed budget, worrying supporters who say the board has helped improve safety nationwide. The Chemical Safety Board has a budget of $11 million, which supporters say is meager compared to the current [...]

A new coalition of more than 30 environmental, labor, and community organizations is urging New Jersey lawmakers to do more about the threat of climate change and reduce the state's greenhouse gas emissions. Dan Fatton, executive director of the Work Environment Council, said the coalition, called Jersey Renews, is a ray of hope in the era of President Donald Trump. As a candidate, Trump called climate change "a hoax invented by the Chinese" and in the early days of his administration, has implemented a temporary media "black out" at the Environmental Protection Agency and a freeze on new grants and [...]

Dan Fatton, WEC executive director, appeared on NJTV News with Mary Alice Williams to discuss WEC's latest report, ACCESS DENIED. For the interview transcript, please click here. Several clarifications: As noted in the report, an estimated 12 million people live or work within the danger zones of NJ facilities; however, not all those people are NJ residents. EPCRA is the Emergency Planning and Community Right-to-Know Act, a 1986 federal law created to help communities plan for chemical emergencies. SERC is the State Emergency Response Commission. ACCESS DENIED REPORT

December 3 marks the 32nd anniversary of the Bhopal, India disaster: the world’s worst industrial accident. In the middle of the night, an accident at a Union Carbide plant released a toxic gas, methyl isocyanate. The impact on the surrounding community was immediate and deadly. Chaos ensued as people attempted to escape the lethal toxic cloud. Thousands of people died and hundreds of thousands of lives were forever changed. The effects from the toxic exposure included blindness, kidney and liver failure. Decades later, survivors and their offspring continue to experience health impacts from that deadly night. In response to [...]