Katz, Deb

Deb Katz’s concern for community health and safety has moved from being a psychotherapist in a quiet, safe, private practice to being the frequently harassed leader of the Nuclear-free New England movement.

Appalled by the corporate operations of nuclear power plants in her area, Katz founded CAN, the Citizens Awareness Network, which is doing “Paul Revere tours” to alert New England residents to the health and safety dangers and taxpayer rip-offs involved.

The seven chapters of CAN spread the word, in clear, no-jargon language, about the unreliability of these old facilities, about the new owners’ hazardous operating procedures, and about their massive abuse of public funds.

CAN research shows that companies are buying old plants at ten cents on the dollar, then firing skilled operators and hiring smaller, untrained crews to run the plants longer hours. Regulations currently in place guarantee the companies above-market rates for the power they produce and allow them to decommission the plants in the near future at taxpayer expense—and at high corporate profits. All the while, CAN warns, suspicious levels of birth defects and fatal cancers appear in the residents around the plants.

Deadly disregard for public health, environmental racism, and theft of public funds are not welcome messages, not to residents who don’t want to think such things are happening, not to the corporations that are making them happen and want to go on, unnoticed. Deb Katz has been ostracized and threatened, her phone tapped, her car tampered with.

Katz says she has frequently been terrified but has never thought of stopping. She describes going to all the agencies that are supposed to protect the public and finding that none of them were doing the job. “They’re not going to save us. We have to take it on.”

“We” now includes hundreds of volunteers who have stepped up to be Paul Reveres, along with Katz. CAN is working with churches to join the public denouncement of the ethics involved in such actions and is now forging links with poor, rural communities in other parts of the country where radioactive wastes are dumped. They are “sacrifice communities” too says Deb Katz. And thanks to her leadership, more and more of them are not going to take it any more.