Dead Babies, Pollution, Rat Infestation, All Part and Parcel of Covanta's Business... But They're Giving us $25k for a Park

Dead babies can't take care of themselves." A l i c e Cooper

Covanta, the company currently under orders by the State of Oregon to stop incinerating aborted fetuses along with household garbage, industrial waste and lawn clippings, reacted to last week's Niagara Falls Reporter expose of their dead baby business with a quick gift to city officials.

The local branch of the company, Covanta Niagara, generously donated a whopping $25,000 to help renovate a park on 57th St. near its incineration plant, a rat-infested garbage dump neighbors have been complaining about for months.

To put that in perspective, Covanta's gift to the city amounts to 0.3 percent of the $8 million in tax breaks the county Industrial Development Agency gave the company to expand.

Kevin O'Neil, business manager for Covanta Niagara, said his company — which was recently fined by the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation for installing new equipment without a permit — decided to support the project because it believes it will be good for its neighbors and the surrounding neighborhood.

"Basically, they are recycling lots and we really like that idea," O'Neil said.

In New York State, abortion is permitted through the 24th week of pregnancy. At this point, breathing-like movement has begun in the fetus, and the heart, hands, feet, brain and other organs are present, and the baby may weigh as much as 1.4 pounds.

More than half of premature babies born between 23 and 24 weeks of pregnancy will survive delivery and live, and babies as young as 21 weeks have lived to see life outside of the NICU.

But to the faceless corporate drones that run Covanta, such beings are merely another form of garbage, to be reduced to ash and shoveled into a dumpster.

If Covanta really wanted to show its humanity, O'Neil and other Covanta execs might have proposed turning the 57th St. park into a memorial for all the dead babies burned and discarded like so many used condoms.

But the company has no humanity to show. They spew pollution into our air from giant taxpayer funded smokestacks, attract rats and other vermin into what was once a nice residential area and burn the corpses of dead babies like garbage.

Covanta is a multi-national corporation with revenues of $1.6 billion annually. The $67,000 fine the company paid to the state and the $25,000 they donated for a tax write off to the city for its 57th Street Park amount to less than what the company earns in a few seconds of operation each day.

Mayor Paul Dyster has been an enthusiastic supporter of Covanta from the beginning, describing the company as just the sort of "green" waste-to-energy operation the city will need as it moves into the 21st Century.

He's wrong about Covanta, just as he is wrong about most things. Perhaps if he took his beer glasses off long enough to take a real look at Covanta, he would see that the revenue derived from the sale of electricity generated by the company's incinerators is a mere pittance compared to what they make importing garbage from out of the area, out of the state and even out of the country.

And maybe he would find the company's callous disposal of dead babies as disgusting, immoral and abhorrent as the rest of us do.