Friday, December 11, 2015

DERAILING CLEAN WATER

from Elizabeth Outzs

The final and most serious congressional battle in the polluter-driven war to derail the Clean Water Rule is happening now.

Big coal companies, big oil companies and big agribusinesses have long wanted Congress to roll back clean water protections. And many members of Congress are willing to shut down the government to make their polluter friends happy.1

Tell Congress to protect clean water, not polluters' bottom lines.

Protecting our environment is a no-brainer to you and me. Special favors that undermine safeguards for our cherished waterways, drinking water, and public health run counter to everything we hold dear. It's imperative that our champions in Congress don't surrender in the face of the polluters' final assault.

Now is the time to take action. Congress and President Obama must come to an agreement on the budget by Dec. 11. Tell Congress the budget should be about dollars and cents, not senseless giveaways to polluters.

There have been many battles in this fight for the Clean Water Rule, and thanks to your efforts, we've won them all so far -- either by congressional vote or presidential veto – but this final battle is the most serious. Please take action now to ensure the biggest victory for clean water crosses the finish line.

Send a quick note to your members of Congress now. Let's flood their inboxes for clean water!

Thank you for taking action against this serious threat to our waters,

Elizabeth Ouzts

Environment Florida Regional Program Director

BIG CYPRESS IN TROUBLE

From Michelle Gale

Greetings:

This is one of my lengthier posts. Please read it all because even if you don’t attend Tuesday’s meeting at Big Cypress, you will have an opportunity to participate in a meaningful way in this campaign against turning a national preserve into an oilfield.

On Tuesday, December 8th, the National Park Service will hold a public meeting from 5:30 to 7:00 pm at the Big Cypress Welcome Center, 33000 Tamiami Trail East, in Ochopee in response to two years’ worth of requests from citizens concerned about Burnett Oil’s proposal to do seismic testing on 70,454 acres of Big Cypress National Preserve.

Environmental groups are hosting a press conference outside the Welcome Center beginning at 5:00. There will be an open mic at which attendees can articulate their comments to the Park Service and a petition delivery.  

The meeting itself will open with a 15-minute presentation by the National Park Service outlining the three possible alternatives for Big Cypress:

·     Seismic survey by vibroseis trucks,

·     Seismic survey by dynamite, and

·     No seismic survey

Burnett Oil proposes to use vibroseis trucks. This would entail 60,000-pound trucks criss-crossing the Preserve in groups of three on cut lines (essentially, roads) up to 50 feet wide, vibrating large plates against the ground to generate seismic signals that are indicative of local geology, while helicopters hover overhead and generators run—in the heart of pristine wetlands set aside to protect critical habitat for threatened species and vital watersheds that recharge the aquifers on which South Floridians rely for drinking water. Roads would be cut, trees and other vegetation removed, and five staging areas, including two helicopter pads, constructed.

 The Preserve is not only the home of the endangered Florida panther, but a critical rookery for five colonies of endangered wood storks and home to the shy and diminutive red-cockaded woodpecker, the eastern indigo, and the gopher turtle. 
  
Seismic testing would have permanent and cumulative impacts on wildlife, wetlands, recreational areas, and the water supply. The fractures and fissures created by vibroseis trucks would degrade the wetlands, shallow limestone strata, and base rock.

 In a letter to the U.S. Department of the Interior objecting to the survey, Senator Bill Nelson wrote that the testing “…is troubling as it represents the first step toward fracking. This activity is distinctly at odds with the purpose and best use of a national preserve, and it would be reckless to allow this to move forward.”

 Senator Nelson concluded that “federal, state and local partners have spent billions of dollars working diligently to restore and protect the Everglades, Big Cypress National Preserve, and other valuable ecosystems in Florida. With so many resources devoted to protecting these treasures, approval of oil and gas exploration does not make sense and is a dangerous step in the wrong direction.” 
  
We’re right behind the Senator. We oppose any seismic survey, and urge the National Park Service to conduct a full Environmental Impact Statement including public hearings that will provide it with the substantiated, documented evidence it needs to reject Burnett Oil’s project once and for all. It’s up to us to call on the National Park Service to live up to its stated mission of preserving, conserving, and protecting our natural and cultural resources.

 It has taken two years to get the Park Service to call a meeting that consists of its making a public statement followed by members of the audience moving from station to station asking questions and submitting written comments. That’s how afraid they are of us. And that’s why there will be an open mic at the press conference, a video of which will be sent to the Park Service after the meeting.

 Comment cards are small, so if you do go to the meeting—and I can’t urge you strongly enough to do so—please bring your written comment of up to ten pages in length. And if you can’t possibly attend, you have through December 20th to submit a written comment up to ten pages long to the Park Service here.

 It’s critical for us to show the Park Service just how strong opposition to seismic testing and fracking in Big Cypress National Preserve is, and how utterly committed we are to preserving Florida’s water supply and wildlands. The DEP has already approved Burnett Oil’s proposal, so the National Park Service is our last hope. Please don’t sit this one out.
  
One last word on the significance of your participation: A while back, I asked you to submit a comment to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission as part of a statewide campaign by the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy against FPL’s proposal to build two more nuclear reactors at Turkey Point. It was a last-ditch attempt. The NRC was inundated with over 11,000 comments. It indicated that it was unable to stick to the deadline it had set, and that it would be at least seven months before anything could be decided. This is how it went with Keystone XL—it was delayed and delayed again, until finally it was nixed.

 That’s how important your participation in this campaign is. It could change history.

 Thank you,


Michelle Gale

Thursday, November 19, 2015

NO FRACKING WAY!

from Michelle Gale

Hi All,

Last year, there were two fracking ban bills in the State Legislature, one in the House and one in the Senate. Neither was introduced. The pro-fracking bills were expedited.

This year, despite the fact that we’ve instigated 54 city and county resolutions against fracking in Florida, the same scenario is beginning to play out. We have to stop it.

Please make two critical calls:

1.   One to Senator Charlie Dean, chair of the Senate Committee on Environmental Preservation & Conservation, at 1.866.583.2908, to urge him to introduce SB 166 to ban fracking, and

2.   The other to Representative Steve Crisafulli, Speaker of the House, at 1.888.793.4597, to urge him to introduce HB 19 to ban fracking

A pro-fracking bill is already on its way through the house. It’s up to us to let Senator Dean and Representative Crisafulli know that the commissions that govern 45% of the Floridian population have spoken, and the ban bills must be introduced.

Friday, October 30, 2015

TALLAHASSEE FRACKING BILL

from David Cullen

The following appears on the Florida Report listserv, an email alert system controlled by Sierra Club Florida to keep members aware of legislative doings.  To subscribe to that list and receive regular updates contact Sierra Club Florida Legislative Lobbyist Dave Cullen (cullenasea@aol.com)

Fracking bill up in committee on Tuesday, Nov 3, 2015

Calls Needed to stop a new fracking bill that will:
  • wreak havoc with Florida’s water through excessive and wasteful consumptive use
  • risk chemical pollution underground and/or at the surface
  • continue to enable the use of fossil fuels in a world impacted by GHG driven climate change, and
  • completely preempt local governments’ ability to protect their communities

HB 191 - Regulation of Oil and Gas  by Rep. Ray Rodrigues,  will be heard in the House Agriculture and Natural Resources Subcommittee next Tuesday, November 3 at noon.  Please contact the members of the committee to urge them to vote NO on this bill.  Also, contact your personal Representative and Senator and urge them to stop the bills permitting fracking.   Committee member contact information is below. 

There are currently six fracking bills filed this year.  A brief explanation of each is included at the bottom of this alert.  Please take a minute to go through it so you’ll know which are good, which are bad, and which legislators are behind them.  (The sponsor of the bad bill HB 191 - the subject of this alert, is Rep. Rodrigues (with an ‘s’) who could easily be confused with Rep.Javier Rodriguez (with a ‘z’) the sponsor of a good Constitutional amendment to ban fracking, e.g.)


     House Agriculture and Natural Resources Subcommittee 2016
Rep. Tom Goodson, Chair   850-717-5050      tom.goodson@myfloridahouse.gov
Rep. Jake Raburn, V Chair  850-717-5057      jake.raburn@myfloridahouse.gov
Rep. Jim Boyd                            850-717-5071      jim.boyd@myfloridahouse.gov
Rep. Neil Combee                   850-717-5039      neil.combee@myfloridahouse.gov
Rep. Brad Drake                      850-717-5005      brad.drake@myfloridahouse.gov
Rep. Bobby DuBose                850-717-5094      bobby.dubose@myfloridahouse.gov
Rep. Katie Edwards                850-717-5098      katie.edwards@myfloridahouse.gov
Rep. Larry Lee                           850-717-5084      larry.lee@myfloridahouse.gov
Rep. Ray Pilon                           850-717-5072      ray.pilon@myfloridahouse.gov
Rep. Jimmie Smith                  850-717-5034      jimmie.smith@myfloridahouse.gov
Rep. Cyndi Stevenson            850-717-5017      cyndi.stevenson@myfloridahouse.gov
Rep. Jennifer Sullivan            850-717-5031      jennifer.sullivan@myfloridahouse.gov
Rep. Clovis Watson                 850-717-5020      clovis.watson@myfloridahouse.gov


To find your  legislators paste this address into your browser:



Talking Points
Fracking imposes unnecessary and unacceptable risks on the residents of Florida.  The tremendous use of water that is forever lost due to contamination, the risk of contaminating our aquifers, and the continuing contribution of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere posed by fracking and burning natural gas is unconscionable when energy efficiency and renewable energy offer a clean and safe alternative. 

HB 191:
  • Completely preempts anything to do with oil or gas to the state, including: exploration, development, production, processing, storage, or transportation.  The preemption would apply to existing ordinances as well as prohibiting the adoption of new ones.
  • Uses a definition for “high-pressure well stimulation” that exempts the fracking activities most likely to be used in Florida from any regulation because those techniques, acid fracturing and acid matrix stimulation, are performed at lower pressure and are thereby excluded from the definition in the bill.  These are the techniques most often used in limestone and dolomite geological areas like Florida
  • Exposes municipalities to all oil and gas exploration and production activities inside city limits, (not just fracking) regardless of local government’s wishes by eliminating a provision in current law that permits can only be issued if the governing body of the city passes a resolution in favor of the oil/gas activity,
  • Provides that permits will be issued as soon as rulemaking is complete regardless of what a study required by the bill may reveal,
  • Designates FracFocus as the official chemical disclosure registry while preventing citizens from knowing what is being injected into the ground beneath their feet by use of the Uniform Trade Secrets Act.
Backers of the bill tout it as being a moratorium (a delay before fracking permits are issued.)  Permits won’t be issued right away, but they will be issued as soon as the rulemaking process is complete. And all of the other bad policy in the bill will be effective immediately. The preemption, the vulnerability of cities that oil/gas operators may want to drill in, and of course, the definition of “high-pressure well stimulation” that excludes the most likely methods of fracking for Florida from new regulation will all take effect on Day One.  No new regulations or permitting will be put in place for acid fracturing or acid matrix stimulation and the potential for contamination will occur regardless of whether or not “high-pressure well stimulations” permits are being issued.  The broad preemption language will prevent localities from doinganything about it, and the Trade Secrets provision will prevent residents from finding out what toxic chemicals they may be exposed to.
The bill calls for a study, but only of “high-pressure well stimulation.”  And there is no provision for delay or a change in direction if the study turns up a threat to public health - fracking permits get issued when rulemaking is complete.
Water Use:

Contaminants:
  • Oil and gas service companies used hydraulic fracturing products containing 29 chemicals that are (1) known or possible human carcinogens, (2) regulated under the Safe Drinking Water Act for their risks to human health, or (3) listed as hazardous air pollutants under the Clean Air Act. These 29 chemicals were components of 652 different products used hydraulic fracturing. Chemicals Used in Hydraulic Fracturing U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Commerce and Energy, Minority Staff Report, 2011
  • The National Academy of Sciences discovered that homes within 1 kilometer (2/3 mile) were six times more likely to have six times more methane in their drinking water than those farther away.  Ethane levels were 23 times higher.


Trade Secrets:
  • HB 191 lets well operators claim the chemicals they use are “trade secrets” which means residents, first responders, and medical personnel cannot find out what they are dealing with.  All that is necessary to claim “trade secret” protection is to say the secret is valuable to the well operator and that the well operator is trying to keep it a secret.  688.002 (4) Florida Statutes

Health Impacts:
The New York State Department of Health report states under ‘Health outcomes near HVHF (high volume hydraulic fracturing)Activity:
  • One peer-reviewed study and one university report have presented data indicating statistical associations between some birth outcomes (low birth weight and some congenital defects) and residential proximity of the mother to well pads during pregnancy (Hill, 2012; McKenzie, 2014). Proximity to higher-density HVHF well pad development was associated with increased incidence of congenital heart defects and neural-tube defects in one of the studies (McKenzie, 2014).



Fracking legislation filed for 2016 session:
Good Anti-fracking bills:
There are two bills to ban fracking by statute:

SB 0166 Oil and Natural Gas Production or Recovery  by Sen. Soto has been referred to Environmental Preservation and Conservation; Commerce and Tourism; Community Affairs; Fiscal Policy


HB 0019 Well Stimulation Treatments by Rep. Jenne has been referred to Agriculture and Natural Resources Subcommittee; Energy and Utilities Subcommittee; Agriculture and Natural Resources Appropriations Subcommittee; State Affairs Committee


There are also two good Joint Resolutions to place a constitutional amendment on the ballot to banfracking in the state:

SJR 0358 Hydraulic Fracturing  by Sen. Ring has been referred to Environmental Preservation and Conservation; Judiciary; Rules.

A similar Joint Resolution has been filed by Rep. Javier Rodriguez (with a ‘z’) -
HJR 0453 Well Stimulation by Rep. Rodriguez (with a ‘z’) but has not yet been referred to  committees.

The legislature can place proposed amendments to the state constitution without getting any petitions signed.  The only requirement is that the Resolution proposing the amendment get a 3/5ths vote in each chamber.  (It would also need the approval of 60% of the voters to be adopted.)


Bad Pro-fracking bills:

HB 0191 Regulation of Oil and Gas Resources by Rep. Rodrigues (with an ‘s’) has been referred to to Agriculture and Natural Resources Subcommittee; Agriculture and Natural Resources Appropriations Subcommittee; State Affairs Committee.  (It is the bill up in Agriculture and Natural Resources on Tuesday, November 3.)

SB 0318 Regulation of Oil and Gas Resources by Sen. Richter has been referred to Environmental Preservation and Conservation; Appropriations Subcommittee on General Government; Appropriations.

This year the pro-fracking sponsors have not filed separate ‘trade secrets’ bills and are relying on the process already in statute in Chapter 688 to protect them from having to disclose what toxic chemicals they are injecting into the ground.

David Cullen



Friday, October 23, 2015

FRACKING BENEFITS NOT WORTH COST

'Fracking' benefits not worth costs
October 21, 2015
By Richard C. Silvestri , Fort Myers Beach Bulletin, Fort Myers Beach Observer
           
High pressure well stimulation is most commonly known as "Fracking."

This is a process used to extract hydrocarbons of oil and natural gas from shale layers that are approximately one mile down where the drill can turn horizontally and continue up to two miles. The process uses an average of four million gallons of water. A well can be fracked up to eight times, so on average each well can use 32 million gallons of water, equally one-foot of water over 100 acres.

The source of Fracking water can be natural springs like Silver Springs, ponds, lakes, creeks, rivers, streams or the aquifers that are under all of Florida. To that water is added numerous chemicals which are not revealed and the fossil fuel industry (FFI) refuses to reveal them.

Chemical analysis is easily obtained but the FFI denies any purported chemicals come from their operations and since no base-line analysis has been done, it is hard to prove. Not until recently did the need for this base-line become evident when illnesses and contaminated wells appeared. We know that benzene is one chemical for sure and in Florida, with its porous limestone, hydrofluoric acid is used to dissolve this. Benzene was banned from gasoline by the American Petroleum Institute (API) in the early 1950s due to their own research that concluded it was not safe for human contact. It was used to raise the octane rating of gasoline to eliminate motor "knock."

The Florida Petroleum Council contends, "Fracking is harmless." Yet Fracking and, what other names it goes by, uses benzene within the aquifers. Hydrofluoric Acid is used to etch glass and is so corrosive to glass it is kept in plastic containers. Glass is silicone dioxide, the major component of sand, and is in the soil in various silicon compounds and limestone has many silicon compounds in it.

Once a well is fracked, water, called "flow back," returns through the bore hole. However some 80 percent of the water remains along with the chemicals. The other 20 percent is placed in holding ponds or is deep-well injected at local sewage plants. Therefore, virtually all of this chemical 
additive of millions of gallons is left in the ground.

In addition to the chemicals, a gritty material called "propant" is injected. Propants hold the fissures in the shale open so the hydrocarbons can flow into the bore which is lined with small holes.

These holes are also the method which the pressure from explosives in the well pipe inject more pressure to fracture and crack the shale, hence the verb "to Frack" and its lineage of names such as "Fracking," "Fracked," etc. Addition of these propants creates local air pollution when they are put into the mix at the surface, and they linked to silicosis.

Having traveled through Texas and North Dakota and personally seen the oil wells there and from reports about earthquakes from fracking in Oklahoma, my personal impression is that today most if not all oil and natural gas is extracted by the Fracking process. That goes right along with the scientific consensus that in the USA the "low hanging fruit" or "peak oil" has been exhausted and Fracking is getting at the last drops.

While the FFI reports that the USA has a "mother lode" of natural gas, the global demand will mean we in the USA will have to compete with that demand which will drive up prices domestically. Unfortunately and most importantly, Fracking can devastate Florida's beauty, its agriculture
and its people.

Are the benefits worth the costs?

Richard C. Silvestri is the vice president of Treasure Coast Progressive Alliance. He holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Chemistry from the University of Miami, is a former hazardous materials instructor and a retired chief fire officer.


Monday, August 10, 2015

PETITION TO PROTECT PRISON WHISTLE-BLOWER

from George Mallinckrodt

George's Note: I knew Harold Hempstead from when I was still working in the psychiatric ward at Dade CI. He was housed in J3 - steps away from my old office and where Darren Rainey was killed. Concerned about inmate abuse, he told me how guards, thinking he wasn't listening as he did custodial chores, amused themselves with the latest torment they perpetrated on mentally ill patients.

Many know that I took steps to bring Rainey's killer to justice after a former coworker called two days after his scalding death and blurted out, "THEY KILLED HIM!" But my efforts pale in comparison to Harold's ongoing campaign inside the FL DOC. I am awed by his courage and tenacity.

I worry about Harold given the ability of the DOC to get rid of people who have the temerity to question their cover-up philosophy. It's my hope this added publicity will protect him somewhat. Please take the time to sign the petition below to protect Harold Hempstead. It is no exaggeration to say that he is at risk daily of being murdered while he is still in the control of the Florida Department of Corrections.




The inmate who exposed Florida prisons’ culture of cruelty

​BY JULIE K. BROWN

Harold Hempstead is a man with two conflicting narratives. One is a criminal past that sent him to prison for life. The other, a courageous pursuit of justice that has shaken the corrupt and crumbling foundation of Florida’s prison system.

Hempstead didn’t set out to be a hero and, perhaps to some people, he isn’t a hero at all. But it is likely that no one would have ever known about the death of a mentally ill inmate named Darren Rainey, or about the systemic culture of physical and mental abuse of inmates in Florida prisons, had it not been for Hempstead.

Hempstead’s steadfast determination to expose the monstrous acts he says he witnessed ultimately brought about an overhaul of the agency, the firings of top corrections officials and officers, federal arrests and an ongoing investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice.

Hempstead did all this from a prison cell — and in spite of threats, intimidation and a haunting fear that one day he would suffer “an accident” and never wake up.

“What he did took real courage,” said Malcolm Tomlin, a retired Florida corrections officer and prison minister who led Bible studies with Hempstead at Dade Correctional Institution.

“He saw something was wrong and he took a stand. … He was blackballed with the officers. That will go with him wherever he is sent. But he did what was right.”

Hempstead reached out to the Miami Herald — ultimately maintaining a correspondence and engaging in regular phone calls, one as as recently as Friday — after authorities ignored his pleas to investigate the death of Rainey.

The convicted burglar didn’t always do the right thing. At the age of 13, Hempstead was already stealing and getting into trouble on the streets of St. Petersburg, where he grew up the youngest of three siblings. While still at 16th Street Middle School in St. Petersburg, he was recruited by detectives, who paid him handsomely to give them tips that helped them solve crimes, according to confidential police reports obtained by the Herald with Hempstead’s permission.

By his early 20s, however, he had started to fall out of favor with police, some of whom tried to arrest him a couple of times, not knowing that he was engaged in intelligence gathering for another detective squad. One time, he was charged with conspiracy to commit murder, but the charge was dropped after the cops accepted his explanation that he was playing a role, setting up a drug dealer, the records show.

But it was a dog named Molly that really led to his undoing.

In 1999, police investigating a rash of burglaries in his neighborhood found the dead German shepherd’s ashes in a stolen urn, along with about $200,000 in pilfered loot stashed in a U-Haul at his home. He was charged with 38 burglaries.

Though he had no history of violence, the judge, calling him “a despicable human being,” sentenced him to 165 years in prison. He was just 22 when he entered the Florida prison system.

Pinellas County Circuit Judge Brandt Downey III, accused prior to that of tainting jurors, was later defrocked in a pornography scandal.

For all intents and purposes, time has no meaning for Hempstead, who is now 39. He unsuccessfully appealed his sentence, and sued or filed hand-written motions against the police, the judge, the prosecutor and even his own lawyer.

Over the past 15 years, Hempstead has developed a deep religious faith and now worships and reads the Bible daily. He has enrolled in dozens of correspondence courses, earning certifications in everything from paralegal work to mopping up hazardous materials. Eventually, in 2010, he was trusted enough to move freely about the confinement units — a more restrictive form of incarceration than general population — as an orderly at Dade Correctional Institution south of Homestead.

The facility, set amid farm stands and alligator swamps on the edge of the Florida Everglades, has been described — even by staff and officers who work there —as a squalid, un-airconditioned, putrid hell. Up until late last year, the roofs, the plumbing and the electrical systems were deteriorated, and the kitchen was so filled with rodent droppings and infested with roaches that it flunked several health inspections and was designated a health hazard during an audit last year.

“In many housing units, it was not possible to turn showers and faucets off completely, but in one dorm the drain was so clogged that water ran out on the housing floor. In D housing unit, there was a broken light fixture hanging from the ceiling above an occupied bunk,” auditors found, among other hazards listed in the report.

Hempstead had already seen the inside of almost half of Florida’s 49 state-run prisons, and to him, Dade really wasn’t any worse than the others.

By that time, he said, he was used to seeing horrible things in Florida prisons: inmates being starved, beaten, sexually assaulted, mentally tortured by officers and gassed for no reason. Officers putting laxatives in inmates’ food, urinating on their clothing and toothbrushes and paying inmates to attack other inmates. Sick inmates begging for medical care, only to be told they were faking. Even basic necessities like soap and toilet paper were often rationed to make their lives more miserable.

But at Dade, while working in the TCU, or transitional care unit that houses mentally ill inmates, he said he witnessed officers punish and torture prisoners who were the most vulnerable — those who were so sick they had no control over their faculties.

Hempstead grew up around mental illness. His father, an alcoholic, died when he was 7, and he and his brother and sister were raised by their mother, who was committed to psychiatric hospitals off and on for as long as a year.

“I did want to help my mom out with the issues she had, going in and out of hospitals. She would tell me about the things that happened to her, being tied down and stuck with needles. As a child I couldn’t help my mom out and I wanted to,” Hempstead said.

He tried helping some of the inmates at Dade, slipping them food or arranging to get prisoners a mattress when they had none. But, in many instances, there was really nothing he could do without being punished himself, so he did what he was ordered to do — even if it meant throwing a bucket of chemicals on an inmate to get him to behave.

Then, in January 2012, the guards came up with an even more creative and sinister way to torture prisoners in the mental health unit: placing them in scalding hot showers to control them.

“Then it hit me,” Hempstead recalled. “It felt like 1,000 pounds of sadness fell on me. It overtook me. I was in my cell crying. I just couldn’t take it anymore.”

Taunted and tormented

On June 23, 2012, Darren Rainey, a 5-foot-6 inmate, was handcuffed by officers. Rainey, 50, had been at Dade only a few months and was serving a two-year term for drug possession.

Rainey, a Muslim with whom the Christian Hempstead had little in common and scant contact, suffered from severe schizophrenia. On that evening, on the pretext that Rainey had misbehaved by defecating in his cell, two officers, Cornelius Thompson and Roland Clarke, the latter a 6-foot-4, 300-pound former college football lineman, led him to a 12-by-3 shower stall.

They threw him a bar of soap, locked the door, then turned on the water, which was cranked up to more than 180 degrees. According to Hempstead and other inmates interviewed by the Herald over the past year, the officers laughed and taunted Rainey as he begged for forgiveness, gasping for air in the scalding steam. They then left, and when they returned nearly two hours later, Rainey was dead, with pieces of his skin floating in the water.

Inmates would later say they were ordered by officers to clean up the shower with bleach, throw away the fragments of his skin and never speak about what happened or, they were told, they, too, would face the same fate as Rainey.

“The shower treatment,” as it was called, was used by officers on other inmates, Hempstead explained in one of many interviews with the Herald. It was first used to control inmate Daniel Geiger, who chattered incessantly, annoying officers. The guards sometimes purposefully placed him in a cell next to another inmate they wanted to punish.

“Geiger was the loudest inmate in the unit. He was 110 pounds and constantly being deprived of food. I would have thought if anyone would have collapsed and died it would have been him,” Hempstead said.

He recalled that one of the inmates suggested putting Geiger into the shower to shut him up, and it worked.

“He kept screaming, ‘It’s hot, get me out of here!’ Then, after 10 or 20 minutes, he stopped yelling. I think they put him in there three or four times,” Hempstead said.

As the orderly who served inmates their food trays, Hempstead saw how the officers devised a system for depriving prisoners of food, sometimes for weeks. They came up with names for this treatment, possibly inspired by football terminology.

“A two-point conversion meant no lunch or dinner for two days. A six-point conversion was no lunch or dinner on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays.”

Some inmates dropped so much weight that Hempstead said one guard — a sergeant since promoted to lieutenant — would proudly announce “Welcome to Auschwitz,” when someone new came into the unit.

Hempstead said hungry inmates would break sprinklers just so they would be charged criminally with vandalism and be transported to the Dade County Jail — where they would finally be fed.

“It was definitely evil. There were times when they were laughing as they were starving inmates. A lot of it was hard to deal with,” he said.

Although the autopsies give another cause, Hempstead believes two deaths that occurred while he was working in the TCU could be attributed to the punitive lack of feeding.

“You know, I made a lot of mistakes in my life, but nothing I did resulted in somebody dying,” he said.

Hempstead was initially apprehensive about reporting what he saw. At first, he quietly confided in the doctors and nurses who worked for Corizon, the private healthcare company contracted by the state to provide medical and psychiatric care for inmates.

But it soon became apparent as the months went by that they would do nothing.

“I threatened the doctors, told them, ‘If you don’t do this, I’m going to get your license.’ They took an oath. I just wanted them to report it, but they wouldn’t,” Hempstead said.

The corrections officers grew bolder and began other abusive tactics on the inmates. Sometimes, they would place a violent inmate in the same cell with a smaller prisoner they wanted to punish and walk away, allowing the brutal inmate to beat or sexually assault the other inmate, Hempstead said.

In December 2012, Hempstead was transferred out of Dade Correctional to another prison, and it was then that he began in earnest to report what was happening at the prison.

At one prison, he spoke to a psychiatric counselor.

“I told her what they were doing and she looked at me like I was telling her a story out of a horror movie. A week later, she said, ‘We’re going to talk about something else.’ She didn’t want to talk about Dade anymore,” Hempstead said.

Though he didn’t know it at the time, other inmates who had been transferred out of Dade were also reporting what happened. Their complaints to the Department of Corrections also went unheeded.

Dade’s former warden, Jerry Cummings, in an interview last year, admitted he heard that inmates in the mental health unit weren’t being fed, but said he couldn’t do anything about it because he couldn’t prove it.

The cameras in the unit, he said, only captured the guards giving the inmates trays; it was not discernible whether the trays had food on them, he said. In prison parlance, an empty tray is known as an air tray.

“I would walk in there and the inmates would beg for food, for soap, for a toothbrush,” Cummings said. “The officers held all the power and if they didn’t want to feed them, they wouldn’t feed them.”

Records show that Hempstead wrote dozens of letters and complaints about the abuse throughout 2013, sending them to the Department of Corrections, to Miami-Dade police, to the Miami-Dade medical examiner and to the office of Miami-Dade State Attorney Katherine Fernández Rundle, which inexplicably returned them, telling him to write to the state attorney in Pinellas County, where Hempstead was convicted. All the crimes he alleged happened were in Miami-Dade, not Pinellas.

He wrote to Gov. Rick Scott, who took office in 2011 pledging to slash $1 billion out of the Department of Corrections, the state’s largest agency. Scott’s office forwarded Hempstead’s complaints to Jeffery Beasley, the DOC’s inspector general. They were all returned to Hempstead with no action, for various reasons. Among them: that he filed the wrong form or that his grievance didn’t affect him personally.

“I had written a dozen or more letters, with maps of the shower, maps of the TCU. I sent them to the medical examiner and Miami-Dade police, but nothing happened,” Hempstead recalled.

For two years, Rainey’s case languished in the case files of Miami-Dade police, who were entrusted with investigating it; and with the Department of Corrections, whose inspector general’s office suspended its investigation four months after his death, in October 2012, with no action.

It appeared that Rainey’s death would be written off as just another in-custody death, likely the result of natural causes. Rainey’s brother, Andre Chapman, who lives in Tampa, said the only thing he was told about his brother’s death was that he suffered a heart attack.

“If someone put you or I in a scalding shower like that, I think we might die of a heart attack, too,” said Chapman’s attorney, Milton C. Grimes.

Hempstead, meanwhile, was shuffled around the prison system, and with each stop, it seemed the officers knew about him and his crusade. They made it clear they wanted him to shut up.

“It started with them searching me and ransacking my cell,” he said. At the prison system’s Reception and Medical Center, north of Gainesville, one officer reminded him how officers at the prison used to kick the gold teeth out of inmates’ mouths — and said they used to bury other inmates in the rec yard.

“He said, ‘You know, people can just die here. Some people die from luck.’ I asked him what he meant and he said, ‘It would be luck for us, not luck for them.’’’

Hempstead was sent back to Dade in June 2013 — a year after Rainey’s death. Clarke — one of the officers who forced Rainey into the shower — was in charge of his dorm.

“He started calling me his dog, and he was bragging about beating the Rainey rap,” Hempstead said.

Then one day, in April 2014, Hempstead enlisted a friend on the inside of the prison to call the Miami Herald. In order for a reporter to interview Hempstead, he was told he needed to write the Herald, giving its representative permission to visit him.

The first letter he wrote to the Herald was seized by the officers. At 3 o’clock in the morning, Hempstead said he was led into a control room, where the guards forced him on the floor and interrogated him for more than an hour, demanding to know why he was writing to a journalist. They vowed to throw him in solitary confinement — forever, if necessary, unless he kept quiet.

“My biggest fear was going to confinement because I had seen plenty of things that they did to inmates in confinement. It’s easy for them to put medicine in your food; you can O.D. an inmate. I worked there and knew all their tricks,” Hempstead said.

He was scared but pressed on. An interview with the Herald was finally arranged, then abruptly canceled by the DOC. It was rescheduled. By then, a reporter had started digging, and submitting public records requests to the police, the medical examiner and the prison agency.

Hempstead was also submitting public records requests from behind bars. He ordered reports from the police, the prison system and other agencies.

On May 23, 2014, the Herald published the first in what would be a series of stories about Rainey and other suspicious deaths and assaults of inmates in Florida prisons.

Over the past year, the agency’s secretary was replaced, wardens and corrections officers were fired, the FBI made arrests, the state Legislature called for hearings, and the governor and new secretary, Julie Jones, enacted reforms. Partly due to prodding by a civil lawsuit filed by Disability Rights Florida, Dade’s transitional care unit has been renovated, complete with new surveillance cameras, TVs and a wall mural.

Despite all that’s been done, Rainey’s case remains open, his autopsy is still filed away in the medical examiner’s office and his family hasn’t been told how and why he died.

To this day, no one from the Department of Corrections has interviewed Hempstead about Rainey. In a statement Friday, the agency said it continues to cooperate with other law enforcement agencies investigating the case.

“In my opinion, because Rainey was black, poor and mentally ill, to a lot of people his life had no significance,” Hempstead said recently. “But to me, if we have that opinion on the value of life, and if staff thinks they can get away with killing inmates, then they are going to get away with anything.’’

Miami Harold

These days, corrections officers and some inmates call Hempstead “Miami Harold,’’ owing to his frequent talks with Herald journalists. His friends and family continue to refer to him as Joey, his middle name.

Because Florida has no parole, he must serve at least 85 percent of his sentence, despite an exemplary record behind bars that has shaved a few years off his sentence. He is not scheduled to be released until 2161, nearly a century and a half from now.

Like Hempstead, some 60 percent of Florida’s 100,000 inmates are serving time for nonviolent crimes. Florida is second only to Louisiana among states with the largest number of inmates serving life for nonviolent crimes, according to a 2013 analysis of state and federal statistics by the American Civil Liberties Union.

At the time Hempstead was sentenced in 2000, Judge Downey told him: “I hope you die in prison.”

“The problem with Mr. Hempstead is he thought he was smarter than everybody else,” said Downey, now retired and living in Indiana. “He was arrogant, abrasive, sort of an ‘I know better than you’ kind of person.”

The prosecutor, Pat Siracusa, recalls that, at the time, Hempstead’s case was one of the biggest burglary trials in Pinellas County. It involved more than 80 witnesses and 350 pieces of evidence. Hempstead was accused of being the mastermind behind a burglary ring that stole everything from deer antlers to gold watches.

At trial, his accomplice testified that Hempstead taught him everything, right down to picking out which residences to break into, how to get in and how to get out undetected.

“He hit neighborhoods he was familiar with, places where he had cut lawns,” Siracusa said of Hempstead. “It was a lot of stuff and a lot of lives that were disrupted.”

Hempstead insists he didn’t break into homes, but acknowledges he fenced stolen goods. The accomplice who fingered him served no time in prison.

One of the victims, Jeff Fineran, said he had about $7,000 worth of property stolen, though he managed to have some of it returned. He recalls wanting Hempstead to get a stiff sentence, but was surprised at just how harsh it was.

“He didn’t take somebody’s life,” Fineran said. “I think he should have a long sentence but not where he won’t ever have a free breath of air. Forgive and forget. All I can do is pray for him.”

Siracusa, who is now a judge, remains convinced that Hempstead deserves to be behind bars. But he declined to comment on whether, had he been the judge, he would have imposed a 165-year sentence.

Bob Dillinger, who has been public defender in Pinellas County since 1997, doesn’t recall the case, but he did remember Hempstead’s judge. Dillinger once attempted to have Downey removed from 200 cases because the judge made derogatory comments about a defendant to a jury.

Downey later acknowledged his comments in that case were improper and sent letters of apology to the six jurors who decided the case in 1999.

Downey, a 17-year veteran of the bench, continued to generate controversy, including accusations that he made improper utterances toward female litigators. And in 2005, after a virus infected the courthouse computer system, technicians tracked the problem down to Downey, who had been using his office laptop to look at pornography.

He retired a year later as part of what was essentially a plea deal brokered with the Judicial Qualifications Commission that was approved by the Florida Supreme Court.

The judge’s comments from the bench in Hempstead’s case should have been enough to grant him a new sentencing, said Jeff Weiner, a Miami criminal defense attorney and former president of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers.

“That judge made comments that were completely inappropriate and out of context to the crime that he committed,” Weiner said.

‘Protective management’

Hempstead is now housed at Columbia Correctional Institution in north-central Florida, one of the state’s toughest prisons. State corrections officials call his status “protective management.” He believes that is a misnomer, and that protective management is one of the most dangerous places in a prison.

“I’ve been through just about everything you can be subjected to in prison just short of being killed,” said Hempstead. He spends most of his days in a 12-by-10 cell with no air conditioning.

After his most recent transfer out of Dade — for his own safety, after the Herald quoted him by name, with his permission — he lost all the privileges he enjoyed while working as an orderly.

Hempstead is now linked to “a high-profile investigation,” and has limited privileges. He is allowed to go to chapel two hours a week and has access to gym equipment. Still, in the summer, when temperatures climb to 90 degrees or more, inmates sleep on the concrete floor, along with rodents and insects.

The others in protective management include some of the most vicious inmates at Columbia, some of them placed there after they were accused of beating or sexually assaulting other inmates.

“I just thought, what kind of a place did they send me to? It seemed like a killing ground of inmate violence,” Hempstead said.

He has filed a lawsuit — the latest in a series of long, handwritten court pleadings over the years — seeking release into the general prison population, saying that he has been traumatized by all the violence he has witnessed in Florida prisons.

“What rationale is there that he gets a longer sentence than most people who commit murder?” asked Howard Finkelstein, Broward County’s chief public defender.

“The interests of all people in Florida have been served by this man by revealing the horrors and violence of both corrections officers and inmates. Because of him, we are the better for it.”

PRISON IMPROVEMENTS

Since Harold Hempstead revealed details of the death of Darren Rainey, a series of changes have occurred, including:

1) Corrections officers in the mental health ward at Dade Correctional have been reassigned. The two officers most directly involved in putting Rainey in the scalding shower have left the agency. The warden and assistant warden were forced to retire.

2) The U.S. Justice Department initiated an investigation into Rainey's death.

3) The head of the prison system, then-Secretary Michael Crews, instituted crisis-intervention training for corrections officers, two new centers to help inmates re-enter society and new policies aimed at improving accountability among officers.

4) Crews turned 82 inmate death investigations over to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, and FDLE was assigned to handle most future in-custody death investigations.

5) Crews created an “inmate mortality database" to publicly account for the deaths of Florida inmates.

6) Crews ordered a department-wide audit of use of force against inmates, which had doubled over the past five years.

7) Crews summarily fired over 32 corrections officers involved in excessive force against inmates.

8) Dade Correctional's mental health unit was renovated to include high-tech cameras with audio, televisions and murals. An ombudsman was assigned to oversee patient treatment and care.

9) Crews retired, and his replacement, Julie Jones, was given a mandate to overhaul the agency.

10) Jones rebid of the agency’s healthcare contracts.

11) Gov. Rick Scott issued an executive order calling for an independent audit of the entire prison system, focusing on staffing, organization and ways to improve safety, security and the rehabilitation of inmates.


12) New surveillance camera systems were ordered installed throughout the prison system, and Jones has proposed putting air conditioning in all facilities.

Thursday, August 6, 2015

CLIMATE REALITY PROJECT TRAINING

In 2006, Founder and Chairman of The Climate Reality Project, Al Gore, sparked an international conversation on climate change with his Academy Award-winning documentary, An Inconvenient Truth. By speaking directly to audiences –– as one concerned citizen to another –– about the reality of climate disruption and how we can solve it, Chairman Gore inspired people everywhere to stand up and help build a healthy and sustainable future for us all. Later that year, he launched the Climate Reality Leadership Corps. 

Today, the Climate Reality Leadership Corps continues to take great leaders and make them exceptional through our training program, which provides top-quality instruction in climate science, communications, and organizing. In advance of the climate negotiations in Paris this December, this three-day training will bring together accomplished individuals from diverse sectors to ensure wide participation from business, government, and civil society. During the training, participants will develop the skills, relationships, and connections to shape the conversation within their communities in the context of a global solution to the climate crisis. As of today, the result of this program is a network of thousands of world-changers in 126 nations in every time zone. 

From September 28-30, The Climate Reality Project will welcome hundreds more leaders to this network as we hold our 30th Climate Reality Leadership Corps training. We’ve chosen Miami, Florida as our second location for a US training this year, in part because of Miami’s position as one of the most at-risk cities in the world for climate change impacts. The training will highlight these potential impacts on Miami and the state of Florida, as well as what cities, businesses, universities, and other groups are already doing to promote resiliency and support solutions. The training will also explore Florida’s massive solar energy potential and look at the importance of raising the Latino voice on the issue of climate change.
 • Spend a day with former US Vice President Al Gore exploring the implications of climate change for the region and the solutions we have today; 
• Learn skills and strategies for dynamic storytelling, public speaking, and media engagement in the 21st century; 
• Hear from local, regional, and international experts on strategies for implementing solutions; and
• Meet in small-group sessions facilitated by veteran Climate Reality Leaders and subject experts who will help connect them to the Climate Reality organization and our global network. 
 APPLY TODAY TO JOIN US IN MIAMI, FLORIDA FROM SEPTEMBER 28-30, 2015! www.ClimateRealityTraining.org/florida