February 21, 2018
By Natasha Geiling –
For the past 1,040 days, Amy Brown has gotten up, gone to work, come home, and cooked dinner with bottled water. She has used bottled water to brush her teeth, to wash her dishes, to give to her two young children to drink.
In 2015, Brown and hundreds of other families across North Carolina received a letter from the state Department of Environmental Quality warning that their water could be contaminated with heavy metal from nearby coal ash pits. It has been over three years since Brown stopped drinking the well water that comes out of her tap out of fear for her family’s health.
So when Brown heard that Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Scott Pruitt had racked up over $90,000 on first class travel because of security risks that he attributed to the “toxic” political environment, she was stunned.
“It’s so insulting and a slap in the face, that he is above sitting with people who have questions, who might be the people who have been affected by his decisions,” Brown told ThinkProgress. “I wish that I could get away like that from my situation, but I don’t get a day off from living this nightmare.”
The mission of the Environmental Protection Agency is “to protect human health and the environment.” Disgraced EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt tried his best to undermine this vital mission by choosing to slash critical health protections and let corporate polluters off the hook. Now that Pruitt’s been booted, we need an EPA administrator dedicated to undoing his toxic agenda and restoring the agency to its core mission. Progress is possible and necessary – but another corporate crony or climate skeptic will not get us there.
Scott Pruitt is gone, but the fight is just beginning. We need an EPA administrator who puts our health and environment first, period. Any alternative is unacceptable.
