Nancy Feichtl
With the sudden, heart-sickening death of John Austin, Eastern Sussex has just lost a brilliant, indeed irreplaceable advocate and champion of public health and our environment. After a distinguished career as an EPA scientist largely working on toxic contamination and waste issues, when John and Marti retired to the shore, he could have spent the brunt of his time, largely stress-free, playing golf, traveling, and gardening; but instead for the last 15 years of his life he worked tirelessly through any number of frustrating battles with unwelcoming arms of the state’s bureaucracy in support of his fellow citizens, exhibiting for all to see an astonishingly commanding ability to access, analyze, and explain technical scientific studies, reports, and data files without which public policy cannot be effectively challenged, let alone remedied for the common good. No other concerned citizens I know in the groups with whom John affiliated himself so generously could have begun to utilize those materials to their maximum effect when questioning public policy decisions or forwarding more enlightened remedies.
I personally know him to have been essential to the Citizens for Clean Power’s executive committee’s effectiveness during a number of years while we tried to address the health dangers presented by the antiquated coal-fired Indian River power plant – a facility grandfathered by the Clean Air Act in 1970 but neither subsequently closed down nor, 40 years later, operating with any substantial improvements in its virtually non-existent air pollution controls. Though he and his collaborator, Kim Furtado, were repeatedly dismissed as unprofessional cranks by the Delaware Department of Public Health’s officials, John’s persistence single-handedly forced that department to recognize and publish the truth: the area near the Indian River power plant was and is one of the number of cancer clusters in the state that he had uncovered. Then there was a two-year effort to secure approval of offshore wind development (since aborted by NRG) and his studies of well-head contamination in Millsboro neighborhoods bordering long neglected industrial sites slated for redevelopment, studies whose validity was denied or whitewashed out of hand by state authorities. Finally, we owe to John his recent and tragically interrupted involvement in support of those whose groundwater was negatively affected near the Mountaire processing plant. For well over a decade, he leant scientific authority to the Citizens Committee of the Center for the Inland Bays as it pressed for improvements to the toxin-laden coal ash storage facility at the Indian River power plant and weighed in on the adequacy of Inland Bay buffers as well as the advisability of a new wastewater treatment facility so close to the Inland Bays’ waters.
To John’s repeated and great frustration, most of these demanding and time-consuming efforts came to little or nothing; but John carried on, “bearing it out,” as the Bard affirmed of the power of love, “to the edge of doom.” For that civic grace under pressure so modestly granted to those he worked with, on behalf of others who did not, he has our undying admiration. Surely it’s the generous aim even more than any hit-or-miss accomplishments that most counts in our wonder at those who make such sacrifices.
At the turn of the 21st century a Harvard School of Public Health study indicated that those who lived within a 25 mile radius of old coal plants like that Indian River were 50% more likely to die prematurely or suffer serious cardiopulmonary disease and damage from the untreated particulates they emitted. Today, three of the four stacks at Indian River have been closed down; the one that is left, its newest, has reduced Mercury omissions by over 90% and has been fitted with the latest, most effective controls available for obsolete coal generation stations. None of that would’ve happened
-Bill & & Kit Zak, Nancy Feichtl, Dr. Kim Furtado
