Word: plante
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...been just another day at the Borden Chemicals and Plastics plant. A month later, half a dozen similarly hazardous chemicals were released but remained on plant grounds. The following year, in July 1997, vinyl-chloride monomer and ammonia escaped from the plant and forced the closing of Route 73. In July 1998, a cloud of hydrochloric acid spewed out, shutting down roads in the area for about 20 minutes...
...accusing the company of a series of environmental-law violations. Among the charges: the company stored hazardous waste, sludges and solid wastes illegally; failed to install containment systems; burned hazardous waste without a permit; neglected to report the release of hazardous chemicals into the air; contaminated groundwater beneath the plant site (thereby threatening an aquifer that provides drinking water for residents of Louisiana and Texas); and shipped toxic waste laced with mercury to South Africa without notifying the EPA, as required by law. Last March, on the third day of what was expected to be a three-week trial...
...weep for Borden Chemicals. It was able to pay the fine with just a couple of years' savings from abated taxes. For over the past decade, while the plant has been fouling the land, water and air in Louisiana, the state has excused the company from paying $15 million in property taxes as part of just one of its corporate-welfare programs. A Borden spokesman said even with the exemption, the tax the company pays in Louisiana is "about average" for Southern states. Without the exemption, he says, Louisiana would no longer be "competitive as far as trying to attract...
...said, companies might actually create new jobs in exchange for the abatements. "Today the corporations may add one or two new jobs for every million [dollars in abatements they receive]," he said. "That's not fair." Even when a company does create "100 new jobs, [it] closes a plant somewhere else, and 150 people lose their jobs," he added...
Each year the EPA compiles a catalog of the toxic chemicals discharged into the environment. Congress ordered the accounting after a deadly cloud of chemicals escaped from a Union Carbide plant in Bhopal, India, in 1984, killing thousands of people--and after the company released a smaller quantity of an equally toxic gas from its plant in Institute, W.Va., less than a year later...