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By Lee Cataluna
Advertiser Columnist
Carroll Cox knows a lot of people would like to see him fall. One mistake could discredit him. That's why he has his rules: "Don't ever speak unless you have a document. Tell the truth and don't owe anybody any money or any favors."
He has been called a loose cannon, a troublemaker, an alarmist. Those names he brushes off. The one label he doesn't like is "environmentalist."
"That title is such a shallow one," Cox says. "It's the quickest thing the media has to label me." Instead, he says, he's a humanitarian interested in environmental justice.
Bruce Asato • The Honolulu Advertiser
Last month, Cox found a pile of thousands of propane tanks improperly disposed of at the old Waipahu incinerator site. Nearby, he found a burial ground of old household appliances, another illegal disposal. Then he found another illegal dump site. And then another. These sites had been festering for years. It was Cox who got the city and state to take action.
Carroll Cox, president of EnviroWatch, looks over an old appliance pump that was among other objects partially buried near the city's old incinerator, in background, at the end of Waipahu Depot Road.
Cox has managed to stir up a lot of action, much of it defensive, in the past several years. He was behind the effort to move the Kailua Fourth of July fireworks from Flat Island, a state bird sanctuary. He touched off a state investigation into alleged illegal dumping of wastewater by the Oceanic Institute. He was at the Pu'uwai Momi housing complex during the mercury spill, taking photos and asking pointed questions. Do an Internet search of his name, and it comes up in stories about shark finning, long-line fishing, contaminated bird sanctuaries and on and on.
"Unfortunately," he says, "somebody has to play the role I play. That seems to be the only way things get done."
So who is this man climbing through back yards and bushes and stream beds, taking photos, submitting Freedom of Information Act requests for government documents and holding press conferences?
Carroll Cox, who turned 50 yesterday, grew up in the Mississippi Delta at a time when children as young as 7 picked and chopped cotton for $3 a day. "They would spray defoliants, either from a tractor or from an airplane," he recalls. "You'd be walking in the cotton and your knees would be burning and all up your legs. I always thought that was wrong."
It's that experience that puts the emotion in him when he talks about what he found in Waipahu.
"I believe that all people, whether you got a dollar or a million dollars in your account, you should live a life free of chemical contaminants. People in power, people with money wouldn't tolerate this in their neighborhoods."
After high school, Cox went into the Army. He later worked as a California game warden and became an enforcement agent for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. He took classes at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo and UCLA, but didn't get a degree. He was transferred to the Fish and Wildlife Hawai'i office in 1989.
On watch at EnviroWatch
Bruce Asato • The Honolulu Advertiser
In 1995, Cox was fired from the agency. According to an essay he wrote, it was because he blew the whistle on dubious operations and filed EEOC complaints against his employer.
Carroll Cox of EnviroWatch looks over piles of debris scattered in a field near the old Waipahu Incinerator. He criticized the state Health Department, saying its regulators failed to regulate.
He founded EnviroWatch, a non-profit that has been described in media stories as an "environmental watchdog group." The stated mission on EnviroWatch's Web site (www.envirowatch.org) is: "to assist you in putting an end to environmental injustice by way of investigating and exposing environmental degradation, habitat destruction, poaching, clear cutting, pollution, animal cruelty, and government waste and abuse."
The old Waipahu incinerator site and the surrounding area might have Carroll busy for a while.
The illegal dumping in the area took some digging and sleuthing, but the abandoned incinerator is in plain, awful sight.
The Waipahu incinerator was closed in September 1994, but since then, nothing has been done to seal it off, lock it up or take it down. The smokestacks were disassembled (Carroll believes that's what has been dumped out in the bushes; the contaminated firebricks, asbestos and ash) but the doors are wide open, calling to any curious child who may wander over from the Waipi'o soccer complex next door. Cox calls it an "open invitation" for kids, similar to the abandoned pump house where the Halawa kids found the mercury.
Inside it's like the trash compactor scene in "Star Wars." It's like every bad '80s rock video: Dripping and corroded walls, open oven doors, metal staircases leading to terribly high perches, dead rodents, cobwebs, dark smells and, scariest of all, fresh garbage. "You see how often they get on the military for closure of sites yet the city is allowed by the state to keep this thing as a monument to bad business practices," Cox says.
Exposure risk remains
The main part of the incinerator is now roped off with a single band of yellow caution tape that blows in the wind, but the city still has people reporting to work in part of that abandoned, crusted building. The Environmental Services Maintenance Department is there, as is the Parks and Rec office that takes care of the soccer fields. Cox worries about the exposure risk of these workers, who greet him with a warm "Howzit, Mr. Cox" as they pass by in their trucks.
"When I see them, I see me. I see my brothers. I see my uncles. They're there in that workplace."
"Linda Lingle ate dim sum in Chinatown to talk about how SARS is not a threat." Carroll says. "I haven't seen her walking around the Waipahu incinerator."
The incinerator is under city jurisdiction, but Carroll points a finger at the state Health Department.
"They are the regulators who failed to regulate. They are the enforcers who didn't show up."
"Half of the environmental problems I work on, the state has been there, issued a statement of strict conditions to be met, said they'll fine the responsible party until they're dead, but nothing happens."
Get Cox talking and he does go on. He names names. He links stories. He expounds on his theories. So far, when he's blown a whistle and called a foul, he hasn't been wrong.
"I was brought up that you don't ever lie. If you see someone hurting another human being, you're no better than the person inflicting the injury if you remain silent. That's how a community gets corroded."
Cox owned a carpet-cleaning business for several years, but right now is wholly devoted to EnviroWatch. He claims no hobbies, no pastimes, no recreational activities other than the hiking he does for surveillance purposes.
"This is it," he says. "This is fun."
Lee Cataluna's column runs Tuesdays, Fridays and Sundays. Reach her at 535-8172 or lcataluna@honoluluadvertiser.com.
