Hundreds Fight Incinerator Plan : Environment: Jesse Jackson leads rally against proposed facility. Protesters say it is an example of ‘toxic racism.’

In a town where the biggest event is the annual elementary school carnival, more than 500 environmentalists, led by the Rev. Jesse Jackson, converged here Saturday in a festival-like protest of plans to build California’s largest commercial hazardous waste incinerator.

The battle over the incinerator on the site of an existing toxic waste disposal site has been going on for four years. But it reached new heights this weekend with the arrival of Jackson and scores of other activists.

The two-time and possibly future presidential candidate joined other speakers in declaring that plans for an incinerator in this dusty town populated mainly by Latino farm workers amounted to “toxic racism.”

“Nobody has the right to engage in chemical warfare upon the people,” declared Jackson, who came here by way of the Visalia airport in the next county.

Across from the park where the rally was being held, Alicia Jacobo, 25, stood in the yard of the small home where she was raised. Her mother, Apolonia, 65, who works in the lettuce fields, stood nearby.

“They figured this is a little sleepy community,” said Jacobo, proud that her family, friends and neighbors have banded together to try to stop the incinerator. “They didn’t realize it was going to get this much attention.”

Rally organizers led by Greenpeace estimated the crowd at 700. More than half were from out of town. Groups from the San Francisco Bay Area and Los Angeles arrived in vans and buses to join the protest and listen to speakers and Latin music in a small grassy park in the center of town.

The focus of their ire is a proposal by Chemical Waste Management to build an incinerator five miles away that would consume 50,000 tons of hazardous waste annually.

The rally was a reflection of the increased attention being paid to environmental concerns in the Central Valley, as farmers and others see that air pollution appears to be reducing crop production, and smog alerts are being declared in Fresno. A plan to open a similar incinerator in the farming town of Alpaugh was defeated recently.

“This is how the San Joaquin Valley will be defined,” said Bradley Angel of Greenpeace. “Will those fruits and vegetables be poisoned by toxic waste incinerators? The chamber of commerce cannot have it both ways.”

Mark Langowski, general manager of Chemical Waste’s disposal site, insisted the incinerator would be safe, and called the allegation that the site selection amounted to racism “unfounded.”

It was chosen not because the company, a subsidiary of Waste Management Inc., believed it could ride roughshod over the locals, but because it already has a disposal site here, he said.

The state Department of Health Services and the Environmental Protection Agency have yet to approve Chemical Waste’s application to operate the incinerator. The Kings County Board of Supervisors initially approved it in January. But since then, the company has revised its design, so the application may go back to the local supervisors. A suit by California Rural Legal Assistance also is pending to block construction of the plant.

Reaching temperatures of 1,800 degrees, the incinerator would consume in a matter of two seconds the byproducts of industry, ranging from automobile and electronics manufacturing to the oil industry.

Unused or banned pesticides, along with contaminated soil and water from Superfund sites, also would be destroyed in it. As it is, some of California’s hazardous waste is exported to Texas and Illinois, where it is burned. Some of it is treated, stored or buried at one of three legal hazardous waste dumps, including the 500-acre Chemical Waste site at Kettleman.

“We don’t produce this material. We are trying to provide a solution,” said Langowski.

The protest is a far cry from the 1970s when state and local government officials approved the opening of the toxic waste dump. At the time, many residents were unaware that it was even going in, several of them said. Others said they moved here not knowing that such a facility was just a few miles away.

Mary Lou Mares, for one, didn’t know it was there until 1987 when she heard of plans to construct the incinerator. Now she is a leader of the local group fighting Chemical Waste. Mares, 41, said several of her family members suffer from lung ailments, and she fears the problems will only worsen if the incinerator is allowed to fire up.

“It doesn’t take a degree from Harvard or Yale to know that incinerators mean smoke,” Mares said.