mike of the mountain wrote:

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hot off the press ; another low level exposure risk is identified .   but i was not aware of an increase in skin cancer in niagara county ? that does not mean it does not exist , only that i was not aware of it.           as a child i remember my dear departed mother had something removed from her skin , upper thigh area .   ....

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I guess it's one of those things that just seem normal to us Niagara County children. My mother also had moles removed 30 years ago, several of them. I know several people that have had this done. The thing is this isn't normal in most parts of the country.

.

-- Edited by dovey at 14:05, 2005-07-24

This might help explain it. This is what industry has done to our kids. This is what we need to show all the people that say it didn't hurt us any. This is showing that it absolutely did hurt us. When does enough become enough?

Toxic elements found in infants' cord blood
By Christine Stapleton

Palm Beach Post
Thursday, July 14, 2005

In a benchmark study released today, researchers
found an average of 200 industrial compounds,
pollutants and other chemicals in the umbilical
cord blood of newborns, including seven dangerous
pesticides - some banned in the United States
more than 30 years ago.

The report, Body Burden - The Pollution in
Newborns, by the Washington, D.C.-based
Environmental Working Group, detected 287
chemicals in the umbilical cord blood of 10
newborns. Of those chemicals:

* 76 chemicals that cause cancer in humans or animals.
* 94 that are toxic to the brain and nervous system.
* 79 that cause birth defects or abnormal development in animal tests.

The findings are especially important in Florida,
where farmers use more pesticides per acre than
any other state.

"What's most startling is that we have such a
wide range of compounds in us the moment we are
born," said Tim Kropp, senior toxicologist for
the project. "Babies don't use any consumer
products, they don't work in a factory and yet
they're already starting off with a load of these
chemicals."

Among the most pervasive pesticides found:
4,4'-DDE a contaminant and byproduct of DDT,
banned in the United States in 1972 but still
used in other parts of the world to control
mosquitoes; hexachlorobenzene, a fungicide widely
used on wheat until 1965 when chemical giants
Bayer and Dow voluntarily discontinued production
of the likely carcinogen; and Dieldrin, routinely
used on corn and cotton until banned in 1974
except for treatment of termites.

Scientists blame the presence of the pesticides
in the babies' blood on the fact that many of the
compounds take decades to break down and some are
still used in foreign countries, which export
produce to the United States.

For example, Mirex was used to control fire ants
and as a flame retardant in plastics, rubber,
paint, paper and electrical products from 1959 to
1972. It sticks to soil for years and
contaminates fish and animals living near treated
sites. Aldrin and Dieldrin, probable carcinogens,
have not been banned or restricted in most of
Central and South America. While most countries
have banned imports, Brazil and Venezuela still
allow the importation and restricted use of
Dieldrin.

Besides the pesticides, chemicals from two widely
used household products - Teflon and Scotchgard -
were found in every baby tested. PFOS, the active
ingredient in the stain-repellent Scotchgard,
does not break down in the environment and has a
strong tendency to accumulate in humans. While
PFOS has not been found conclusively to be toxic
to humans, lab tests have shown it can cause
birth defects and deaths in laboratory animals
given high doses. 3M, the sole manufacturer of
Scotchgard, voluntarily agreed to phase out PFOS
products in 2000 after pressure from the EPA.

PFOA, the chemical used to make such non-stick
products as Teflon, is present in the blood of 95
percent of all Americans. Last month, an
Environmental Protection Agency advisory panel
released a report finding PFOA a likely
carcinogen. The chemical has also been linked to
birth defects and liver damage in lab tests.

Although the amounts of some of the chemicals
detected were extremely small, the results are
still troubling to experts, since no one knows
how much of any given chemical - much less a
mixture of chemicals - could affect a human
fetus. What research exists has shown that
chemical exposure in the womb can be dramatically
more harmful than exposure later in life.

In 2003, the EPA updated its cancer risk
guidelines, finding that carcinogens are 10 times
as potent to babies and that some chemicals are
up to 65 times more powerful in children.

The EPA also sets maximum exposure limits for
many dangerous chemicals. However, the research
behind those tolerances came from studies of
"healthy men in the middle of life" - not
pregnant women and newborns, said Dr. Alan
Greene, a faculty member and pediatrician at the
Stanford University School of Medicine.

"We've only recently begun to consider the
effects on the elderly, women and kids," Greene
said. "We don't know what the safe levels are for
these groups. Kids have been ignored for far too
long."

Greene, whose family eats only organic produce,
said the study should be "alarming and
reassuring" for pregnant women.

"It's alarming because there were so many
chemicals found, and we don't know their health
effects, but at the same time the data coming in
shows that decreasing your exposure to these
substances does make a difference," he said.

There have been dramatic drops in the levels of
DDT and its byproducts since it was banned in
1972. A 2002 study of preschoolers in Seattle
showed that children who ate a conventional diet
had nine times the level of pesticides in their
urine as counterparts who ate organic, Greene
said.

The Environmental Working Group conducted the
study in collaboration with Commonweal, a
California nonprofit health and environmental
research institute. EWG is a nonprofit
environmental watchdog/research organization
that, according to its Web site, claims to "bring
to light unsettling facts that you have a right
to know. It shames and shakes up polluters and
their lobbyists. It rattles politicians and
shapes policy. It persuades bureaucracies to
rethink science and strengthen regulation. It
provides practical information you can use to
protect your family and community."

Critics, such as David Martosko, research
director Center for Consumer Freedom, said "a
typical EWG study is a pseudo-science ruse meant
to scare the ordinary American to death about the
food we eat and the air we breathe." CCF is a
nonprofit coalition of restaurants, food
companies and consumers "working together to
promote personal responsibility and protect
consumer choices."

"They never met a square on the periodic table of
elements that they couldn't turn into a sound
bite," Martosko said. EWG "represents a political
movement in the U.S. that wants to dump the
world's finest farming system in favor of organic
agriculture, a backward scheme that threatens to
build a bridge back to the 19th century,"
Martosko wrote on the CCF Web site.

Prior studies have tested for chemicals and
pesticides in umbilical cord blood. However, the
Environmental Working Group study is the first to
attempt to detect so many chemicals, pollutants
and pesticides - a total of 413. Of these, 307
had never been targeted in cord blood tests.

The study focused on cord blood, which mirrors
the mixtures of chemicals the baby was exposed to
while in the mother's womb. Before the cord is
cut, the equivalent of 300 gallons of blood a day
will flow through it, providing the baby with
nutrition and removing waste.

In the Environmental Working Group study, the
cord blood from 10 randomly selected, healthy
babies born in August and September 2004 in U.S.
hospitals was collected by the American National
Red Cross as part of the organization's volunteer
cord blood collection program. The costs of the
testing - $10,000 per sample - and the lack of
laboratories equipped to perform the testing
prevented the organization from testing more
samples.

The organization hopes the findings will
encourage the Centers for Disease Control in
Atlanta to include testing of newborns in its
National Exposure Report, due out later this
month.

"This is the first time anyone has looked at this
wide a range of chemicals, and in a way, that's
kind of sad," said Kropp. "Whether it's the Food
and Drug Administration or the EPA, you would
think they would want to know the basic
attributes of the most sensitive population. If
these children are being born with these
chemicals, we need to know they're safe. We
shouldn't have to wait until children are harmed
to do something."

Copyright © 2005, The Palm Beach Post

I am out of here

-- Edited by dovey at 14:09, 2005-07-24

worthyopponent wrote:

---

Previous posters have questioned the integrity of our NCHD.  Don't get me wrong, I am questionning them as well. It has been posted several times - "What can the NCHD test, do they have a lab?" I don't believe that they can test the water. Let me explain why I believe this.  If you can remember, there was an incident in Niagara County where approx. 34 school children went to area hospitals.  Water from a drinking fountain was being sampled and tested by the NCHD to see if this was the problem. I have recently obtained a copy of those test results.  The lab performing testing was the Erie County Public Health Laboratory.  Ironically, this lab completed a chemical examination but only tested for Coliform. I thought the kids smelled odors of "rotten eggs" and "marker fumes"?? So if the NCHD can't test drinking water in a Niagara County school, then who is testing the drinking water for the ENTIRE county?        

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The NCHD is certified to test the water, but a yearly drinking water test is different from a spot check. The State Health department has a lab, but the counties use independent labs for the most part. In house labs are to expensive to run. The yearly drinking water tests are predetermined. They don’t pick what is tested for, that is done by the EPA. That is why they can’t produce documents regarding pu, they don’t test for it.

The Starpoint issue is a bit different. In that case the Niagara County Emergency response team was activated. That sets off a chain of events that ultimately put the NCHD as at agency in charge. Unfortunately the NCHS has trouble finding it’s way out of a box with directions. They took very specific water samples and instructed the lab on what to test for.

That brings us back to the question asked on this forum. How can you find what you don’t test for?

I can try, but keep in mind this would be my best guess and not an official answer.

Who decides what is to be tested?

I assume we are still talking about the December Starpoint issue. In this case the NC emergency response team made NCHD the department in charge. Given that the NCHD would have made that call.

Should there be a chain of custody for the water sample taken from the school?

I don’t know what the County protocol dictates in this situation. Should there be probably, is it require who knows.

Are public health documents available to the public?

Not necessarily, the NCHD was collecting all information including the medical statement. I don’t believe that anything involving medical information is available. The same goes for an ongoing public health threat. These documents were probably still considered part of an ongoing investigation and not available to you.

You may not be aware that a parents' group in the school district FOILED for all documents regarding the incident on 12/14/04. The document from the NCHD did not exist and was subsequently denied. Several months later this document surfaced and became available.(From the same agency that was originally foiled - the school district). The date of the NCHD letter to the school district was dated 12/17/04.If the test results were negative, why withhold the public document confirming this?

Again these records were not being withheld in violation of the foil laws. You are simply not entitled to something because you want it. Could they have released it, sure. Would it have been wise due to the potential litigation from the victims, no. They were operating within the law.

hot off the press ; another low level exposure risk is identified . but i was not aware of an increase in skin cancer in niagara county ? that does not mean it does not exist , only that i was not aware of it. as a child i remember my dear departed mother had something removed from her skin , upper thigh area . .... - MOTM



I had a mole removed from my hairline a couple of years ago that had been there as long as I can remember, but definitely not in baby pictures. But the thing is I'm not from here, so it's not a WNY thing. Also it was not tested for cancer.

-- Edited by kspeer at 22:32, 2005-07-17

kspeer wrote:

---

 I had a mole removed from my hairline a couple of years ago that had been there as long as I can remember, but definitely not in baby pictures. But the thing is I'm not from here, so it's not a WNY thing. Also it was not tested for cancer.-- Edited by kspeer at 22:32, 2005-07-17

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KS I thought I remember you posting you are from Ohio, but I don't remember. Where are you from, that may still be a factor.

I'm from Lake County, Ohio. It's only about 4 hours from here on the shores of Lake Erie. I went to Middle School and High School in Perry. There is a nuke plant there, but it wasn't operational until maybe 1984. There is nothing else in Perry. It is the nursery capital of the world ("nursery" as in bushes and shrubs).

Pesticides, maybe?

-- Edited by kspeer at 22:18, 2005-07-18

in todays gazette ;

                   where is nuclear Lou ?

Environmental agency should obey own law
By Amy Witryol
Tuesday, July 19, 2005

I was disappointed to read in the July 13 Niagara Gazette that New York State Department of Environmental Conservation official Dan David stated the agency is close to action on "renewing" CWM hazardous waste landfilling permits in Niagara County. Such action would be unethical, not to mention illegal, because the permit has undergone wholesale changes since the public was allowed to comment on it more than two years ago, and because DEC’s own regulation deems this permit application a new application.

DEC says there are now a host of radiological testing requirements in the CWM "renewal" where there were none in April 2003 — the last time we saw DEC’s draft.

DEC still refuses to respond to public comments made in April 2003 until it acts on CWM’s permit renewal — why bother, after the fact?

CWM’s most recent radiation test plan falls way short of fully characterizing its former Manhattan Project dumpsite property or adequately assessing all operating risk (due to a legal tactic change by CWM attorneys.) Even so, DEC’s latest draft permit for CWM contains dramatic changes deserving public comment, before, not after, they are approved.

The DEC and EPA stood behind a 20-year-old U.S. Department of Energy assessment of radiation safety at CWM, but last year the New York State Department of Health Radiation Protection Bureau took great exception. The Army Corps of Engineers takes precautions when working on the CWM property that CWM failed to incorporate into its worker safety practices. And in the past two years radiological waste from nuclear weapons production and experiments were found at CWM, almost by accident, not by adequate investigative design.

Moreover, there was extremely dangerous nuclear material stored on CWM for which there has never been any investigation conducted. It is worrisome to consider that we have documentation of nuclear reactor and weapons production waste that came to CWM property, but we have no accounting of where it all went. We only know it was grossly mishandled on premises.

The public deserves the right to see and comment on the DEC’s latest attempt to renew CWM permits that expired many years ago, not just because of past failures and false information, and not just because it’s the law, but because it’s the right thing to do.

Amy Witryol

Lewiston

I know all about Painesville. It's right next to Perry. There's a huge stretch of abandoned factory land (miles and miles) that's just rusting away (like Bethlehem Steel). I do believe it was once owned by Diamond Shamrock (at least some of it). The only plus in that situation is that it's not right on the water (like Lorain and Toledo).

As teenagers, that was THE place to break into and have a party. How scary is that? I bet that kids do the same at some of the abandoned sites around here. There's no security guards to stop you.

kspeer wrote:

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I know all about Painesville. It's right next to Perry. There's a huge stretch of abandoned factory land (miles and miles) that's just rusting away (like Bethlehem Steel). I do believe it was once owned by Diamond Shamrock (at least some of it). The only plus in that situation is that it's not right on the water (like Lorain and Toledo). As teenagers, that was THE place to break into and have a party. How scary is that? I bet that kids do the same at some of the abandoned sites around here. There's no security guards to stop you.

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Ks it looks like you too are one of Niagara Counties forgotten children. Thank you Lou, for sending this to me. Your play ground was our waste.

 

The Bomb That Fell on Niagara  
The Poison Pill
by Geoff Kelly & Louis Ricciuti

DEVELOPMENTAL DISORDERS

What is the single greatest barrier to revitalizing the City of Niagara Falls’ moribund economy? To borrow a phrase from Clinton campaign strategist James Carville, “It’s the environment, stupid.�

According to Joseph Mason, director of public finance at Fitch Ratings, environmental considerations are among the hidden costs his company must evaluate when advising potential investors about the viability of doing business in Niagara Falls. He says Fitch is “actively concerned� in discovering what those hidden environmental costs might be.

“Love Canal has had a lingering economic impact,� says Mason. “Niagara Falls is the last place a corporation would want to locate.�

Fitch Ratings is a municipal bond rating service in New York City that determines the credit worthiness of municipalities. The City of Niagara Falls, for example, is rated one step above the point at which virtually no one, except lenders demanding prohibitive interest rates, will lend the city money. The city is currently the subject of a negative rating watch, which means Fitch is considering dropping the city’s rating that final step into the “bad credit risk� file.

When asked about environmental issues and economic development, city officials invariably turn the subject to brownfields reclamations projects.

Here’s how that works:

The owners of abandoned industrial property are often loathe to sell it because liability for environmental contamination becomes an issue as soon as ownership changes hands, and that liability remains with the original owner. Brownfields reclamation programs are designed to relieve previous owners of that liability by putting cleanup in the hands of a government agency, so that new investors are working with sites that supposedly have clean bills of health. Dormant property goes back on the market at a good price, new commercial activity is generated on that property, tax revenues are generated (assuming taxes are not forgiven as part of an investment incentive plan) and everybody makes out.

But brownfields reclamation only works if the government agency owns up to the full breadth and depth of the contamination. If the property is not really clean, then a horrible headache erupts when the remaining contamination comes to light. Witness the debacle in Buffalo’s Hickory Woods neighborhood, where the city developed housing on former industrial property without first assuring that the land had been thoroughly remediated.

In Hickory Woods, the City of Buffalo committed a sin of omission: It built and sold houses without bothering to investigate the site. In Niagara Falls, officials are poised to commit another sin of omission: They are ignoring the very worst toxic waste sites and the very worst contaminants that are a legacy of the city’s chemical and metallurgical industries. They are looking for firecrackers where bombshells are buried.

If the City of Niagara Falls looks for dioxin and lead, both dangerous contaminants that are plentiful in Niagara Falls, on a former Union Carbide property, but doesn’t look for tailings from uranium milling or radioactive heavy metallic waste, then who is liable ten years down the road when the property’s new owner discovers that his recent acquisition is the site where Union Carbide buried 500 tons of uranium sludge? This sludge, by the way, was buried in ordinary barrels that surely have been leaking their contents into the soil and water for decades.

Most likely, the original owners are liable, so don’t expect Union Carbide, TAM or Occidental to offer up their most contaminated properties to the City of Niagara Falls for brownfields reclamation. It’s safer and cheaper to sit on those properties than to risk having to pay for the cleanup of waste that’s unearthed by a developer’s backhoe.

And don’t expect many new investors to develop reclaimed brownfields in the City of Niagara Falls. Those who do any research into the area’s industrial history will be far too wary of locating on property that might carry unseen and unwanted baggage.

“Without state and federal aid, companies are unlikely to consider locating or relocating in an area of question,� says Mason.

Hot SPOTS All Over

And what questions there are. Niagara Falls is riddled with toxic hot spots. There is the site of Union Carbide’s ElectroMet division, on 47th Street off Pine Avenue, which for years was the nation’s leading experimental laboratory, production center and refinery for uranium and other radioactive metals. It was, according to experts, an environmental nightmare even by the relatively lax standards of the 1940s and 1950s. It generated tons of radioactive waste material, and the dust from the milling of uranium endangered workers and surrounding neighborhoods. The ElectroMet site has never been adequately investigated or remediated. It is not currently on the FUSRAP (Formerly Used Sites Remediation Action Program) list of sites to be studied and investigated by the federal government.

Ferro Electronics, just north of the city and within a quarter mile of Niagara University, was once TAM Ceramics, and before that Titanium Alloy Manufacturing, a division of National Lead of Ohio, an important government contractor in weapons material production. Before that it was the site of Humphrey’s Gold. TAM was granted a source material license in 1947, one of the first such licenses to handle materials issued by the Atomic Energy Commission. TAM, whose experience with radioactives probably predated the existence of such licenses by at least five years, was primarily involved in the production of titanium, zirconium, uranium, thorium and the reprocessing of radioactive metals.

Tons of radium, thorium and uranium waste are buried in TAM’s back lots and have never been removed. Records say that radiation levels there are more than 50 times background level. Again, they are just a short walk from Niagara University. Ferro’s plant, the former TAM Ceramics, is also not on the FUSRAP list.

Former atomic sites aren’t the half of it, and Love Canal, which gave birth to the Superfund and turned a national spotlight on this region’s environment, is the tip of the iceberg. The CECOS landfill holds 186,000,000 pounds of hazardous solid and liquid wastes. That’s more than four times as much as was found in Love Canal. The Hyde Park landfill, adjacent to Niagara University, also dwarfs Love Canal in size. Yet Niagara University is currently building new student housing right on top of it.

Then there’s the site of the current Niagara Falls Convention Center, NFTA transportation center and proposed casino. It used to be home to a company called Aeronautical Manufacturing, which likely handled radium and radium paint used to make aircraft instruments and dials visible to fliers at night. The dangers of radium paint were made famous by the case of the “radium girls,� workers whose exposure to radium paint for glow-in-the-dark watches in the 1930s caused horrible sickness and death. The site was never tested for radioactive contamination 30 years ago when it was paved over and redeveloped.

For decades, Niagara Falls chemical and metallurgical plants spilled poisons into the air, ground and water and blighted the neighborhoods in which the workers at the plants lived. Enormous quantities of hazardous waste are generated in the milling of a uranium bar, the creation of a rare metal, or the distillation of a volatile chemical. The operators dumped their waste material in fields, in the streams and gullies that bordered their lots, and in wells they dug on their own property. In the old days, when production rates were more important and more closely monitored than the ugly end of the process, Niagara Falls industries dumped waste wherever they could. They dumped it in their own backyards—which happened to abut the backyards of Niagara Falls residents, a significant number of whom also worked in the plants. People are still living next to these plants and wastelands, which, whether they are active or not, pose a significant environmental danger.

Who can say how many sites have been contaminated by illegal, undocumented dumping? What has been the impact on human health of this rampant, haphazard disposal of toxic chemical and radioactive waste?

The Fuss Over FUSRAP

FUSRAP was created by the federal government to address environmental contamination of sites where the federal government or its contractors worked with hazardous materials for weapons production. It especially targets sites involved in the Manhattan Project, the mammoth effort to create the first atomic bomb during World War II, but also includes sites where radioactive materials were handled in the decades after the war ended. Once a Department of Energy project, the funding and responsibility for FUSRAP was shifted to the Army Corps of Engineers in 1997. (The Corps was happy for the funding, and the legislators involved were happy to deliver a slap to the Clinton administration by stripping the DOE of an important project.)

One can argue that the Corps, which was the agent of the Manhattan Project and therefore partly responsible for much of the waste that effort deposited in the creeks and ditches and empty lots of Niagara Falls, is not the right agency to oversee FUSRAP. One can certainly make a case that the Corps is doing a lousy job with FUSRAP. But at least FUSRAP represents an admission by the federal government of responsibility to clean up the mess it and its contractors made. It’s more than just an admission; it’s a cleanup, paid for by the federal government. (Which is to say, the taxpayers, a bitter irony to be sure.)

One would think that a city as cash-strapped as Niagara Falls would chase any funding available to address its environmental problems. An official in the city’s engineering problem admitted that the city is unable to pay for investigation, let alone remediation, of suspected hot spots. So why haven’t the Niagara Falls City Council and Mayor Irene Elia’s administration lobbied to have TAM, ElectroMet and half a dozen other potentially eligible sites within the City of Niagara Falls placed on the FUSRAP list?

Toxic waste is the poison pill that kills any plans for economic revitalization in Niagara Falls. It is also a potent conversation-stopper. Mayor Irene Elia has not returned numerous phone calls over several months to discuss the subject. Only two city councilmembers, Frances Iusi and Vince Anello, responded to an email suggesting that contaminated sites in the city might qualify for FUSRAP investigation. Neither addressed the matter of pushing to get those sites on the FUSRAP list.

Maybe the City of Niagara Falls is trying to conceal its environmental problems rather than address them. If that’s the case, Mayor Elia ought to call Buffalo Mayor Anthony Masiello and ask him how the Hickory Woods situation is playing out. She ought to have talk with Lois Gibbs. What she’s sitting on is far worse than Hickory Woods and Love Canal put together.

MEANWHILE, BACK AT THE LEW-PORT SCHOOLS…

Last month Congressman John LaFalce called for health studies in the neighborhoods surrounding several atomic toxic waste sites in Tonawanda, Lockport and Lewiston, for some reason omitting the City of Niagara Falls.

Now he is omitting Lewiston neighborhoods, too. Last week LaFalce sent a letter to New York State Department of Health Commissioner Dr. Antonia Novello requesting that DOH consider conducting health studies of teachers and students at the Lewiston-Porter schools.

Cancer mapping suggests that cancer rates in Niagara Falls are significantly higher than cancer rates in those areas targeted in LaFalce’s original request for health studies. Why didn’t LaFalce include the City of Niagara Falls in his letter to DOH Commissioner Novella? Why has he isolated the students and teachers of Lewiston-Porter schools for health studies? If there is a concern for the school’s safety, aren’t surrounding residents also at risk?

Gary Luzak, LaFalce’s communications director, seemed surprised by the question. At any rate, he didn’t have an answer ready, but promised to get one and call back. At press time, LaFalce’s office had not called back and not responded to further inquiries. DOH also had not responded to inquiries.

LaFalce’s second letter to DOH may have been prompted by recent activism and startling revelations related to the Lewiston-Porter schools.

On January 22, Citizens Environmental Coalition held a press conference at the Lewiston-Porter schools, which they included in a list of 24 schools in Niagara and Erie Counties that are located within a half mile of toxic waste dumps. The Lewiston-Porter schools, which serve 2,500 students, are within a mile of the Niagara Falls Storage Site, a federal repository for radioactive waste; Chemical Waste Management’s (CWM) Model City facility, the only dump in the Northeast licensed to accept hazardous chemical waste and at one time the largest such facility in the country; and Modern Landfill, a sprawling repository for municipal and nonhazardous waste which is located atop former military dump sites. All these facilities, including the Lewiston-Porter schools, are built on property which was once the U.S. Army’s Lake Ontario Ordnance Works, a 7,500-acre parcel that was used for decades as a dumping ground and storage site for toxic chemical and radioactive waste. With a number of experimental laboratories having been documented on the site, it may also have been a production area for biological as well as radiological materials.

On January 26, over 200 people gathered in the Youngstown brick schoolhouse to protest the Town of Porter’s October decision to grant an expansion permit to CWM. Some protesters suggested that the expansion would enable CWM to accept the PCB-laden silt that will be dredged from the bottom of the Hudson River over the next several years. Some estimates say there will be nearly a million truckloads of material sent to CWM.

In November, about 50 protesters marched outside CWM gates at the urging of 103.3 The Edge morning radio hosts Shredd and Ragan, who had been reporting that NBC news anchor Tom Brokaw’s anthrax-contaminated desk had been shipped to CWM for disposal. Their reports drew dozens of phone calls from outraged listeners.

In October, dozens of residents attended a meeting of the Army Corps of Engineers Residents Advisory Board, which ostensibly offers the Corps advice on its study and remediation of former LOOW property. They were told that high levels of lethal radon gas had been discovered in the northeast corner of the Lewiston-Porter campus. It had been detected by a single sensor somewhere on school grounds.

They were also told that the radon gas posed no threat. But the Army Corps of Engineers insists that they are not in the business of providing health risk assessments; their concern is the integrity of the NFSS and the cleanup of contaminated sites on the FUSRAP list.

Despite the volume and nature of the waste disposed of at CWM and the NFSS, and despite the documented history of hazardous chemical and radioactive waste dumping elsewhere on the former LOOW—and despite the anecdotal evidence of unusual illnesses provided by former students, parents and faculty of the Lewiston-Porter schools, as well as by nearby residents—there have never been formal health studies conducted in the area. Twenty-five years ago a physicist from SUNY at Buffalo conducted an informal study of deer who lived on the LOOW (he found a high rate of gross mutations). Niagara University students conducted a pet health survey in the University neighborhood but were specifically instructed not to ask questions or record responses that pertained to human health.

Apart from informal conversations among the residents whose friends and families have been struck ill, suffered birth defects in children or worse—some have called it “counting caskets�— that’s it. Cancer mapping, however, suggests that cancer rates are unusually high throughout the areas LaFalce has targeted for health studies. They are also high in many ignored or forgotten areas. Cancer rates are, in fact, unusually high throughout the Niagara region as a whole.

Anecdotal evidence is not given much weight in legal and scientific circles because it is considered subjective, insufficiently documented. In the case of health problems, it’s difficult to assign cause and effect based on anecdotal evidence. But the stories people tell about themselves and the place they live is surely sufficient to warrant a closer look. And the people around Lewiston-Porter schools have been saying for years that they’re sick, that their water tastes funny, that their kids are told not to drink from the fountains at school. That the school’s windows are closed in the spring because something in the air irritates everybody’s lungs. People who work at Lewiston-Porter schools know a lot of people who have died of unusual cancers, and many are sick themselves or have sickness in their families. One employee says there’s a red phone with a direct line between the school’s administrative offices and CWM, and an evacuation plan in case of a catastrophe at the facility.

Lewiston-Porter school superintendent Walter Polka believes that the campus is safe and clean. While he expects that he and the school board will issue a joint statement in favor of health studies, he says there have been at least 24 separate studies done at Lewiston-Porter in the past dozen years. All these studies indicated there was nothing to worry about, according to Polka. On the phone, he sounds frustrated with people’s unwillingness to accept answers to the questions they ask, even as he affirms their right to ask those questions.

“People don’t want to believe the Army Corps of Engineers,� he says.

WHY WOULD THEY?

The Army Corps of Engineers hasn’t been exactly trustworthy. The Corps set a new low in environmental cleanup standards when it addressed the Linde/Praxair site in Tonawanda. The Corps has tried to refute documented evidence that radioactive waste from the Tonawanda sites was dumped illegally in the Schultz Landfill in Cheektowaga. The Corps has been reticent to share its information about the LOOW with the public apparently preferring to confirm or deny whatever information the public unearths by itself. The Corps recently acknowledged a published report that, in the 1960s, Lewiston-Porter elementary students attended class at a temporary school in abandoned buildings on a chemically and radioactively contaminated section of the former LOOW on Balmer Road. Shouldn’t the Corps’ investigators have had that information at their fingertips? Why didn’t the Corps come forward with the information on its own initiative?

And the Corps’ representatives regularly contradict themselves. Dr. Judith Leithner, who represents the Corps at public meetings, has insisted that no radioactive materials have been moved off site from the former LOOW or the NFSS. But, when asked about contaminated animal carcasses and medical equipment that was buried at the Rochester Burial Site on the former LOOW, she claimed that material had actually been unearthed and taken to Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Leithner has produced no documentary—or even anecdotal—evidence to support that claim.

What’s more, federal documents show that over three million pounds of radioactive steel was shipped off the old LOOW to a site in Painesville, Ohio in the early 1950s. Is Leithner ignorant of the site’s history or is she deliberately misleading the public? Three million pounds of radioactive steel is pretty difficult to overlook. Is the Corps worried that a well informed public might ask what the Army was doing on the former LOOW in the 1950s to contaminate three million pounds of steel?

The Corps refuses to answer questions about the health risks posed by the radioactive and chemical waste they are investigating, saying that human health is not their job. Then they turn around and make assurances, as in a press release issued early last week describing a recent study, that radiation levels detected at the Lewiston-Porter schools are harmless:

“The results of the study showed radiation levels were typical of a developed property such as a school, and no radiation levels that would present a hazard to the public were found.�

Do they assess human health risks or don’t they? Are they engineers or physicians? Human health is clearly not the Corps’ expertise, or its representatives would know that today’s experts say there is no such thing as a “safe� exposure to radiation.

And what does the Corps mean by “developed property?� Does that term encompass property developed as a military facility dealing with highly toxic and experimental substances? Are they saying that radiation levels are about what you’d expect if you’re located next to a radioactive waste storage facility?

In any case, the study contracted by the Corps—at a cost of $100,000 to a private contractor for what appears to be two month’s work—was not designed to determine whether radiation levels at the Lewiston-Porter schools were within an “acceptable� range, and it is misleading to present the results of the study as evidence that students and faculty are not in any danger.

The study was designed to determine average “background� radiation levels in the area of the former LOOW. By “background� we are supposed to understand the Corps means “normal� or “naturally occurring�—a phrase the Corps itself used erroneously in last week’s press release. “Background� does not equal “naturally occurring,� at least not to the Army Corps of Engineers. They are trying to set a standard by which to measure whether a specific section of the area under study is more or less contaminated than the area surrounding it.

To determine the background radiation level at the LOOW, the Corps took readings at three sites: one spot was on the NFSS, the world’s largest depot for radium-226; another was on a heavily contaminated military site just off Balmer Road; and the third was on the campus of the Lewiston-Porter schools.

The school was guaranteed to produce the lowest radiation levels of the three. One would expect abnormally high levels of radiation on the first two sites.

In fact, one would hope the Lewiston-Porter schools would not belong in the company of those first two at all, but perhaps the Corps knows something we don’t. After all, radon gas has been found on the northeast corner of the school grounds, opposite the direction of the prevailing winds relative to the NFSS. That means one of two things: Either the wind sometimes blows opposite the prevailing pattern and carries radon gas leaking from the NFSS containment facilities onto school property, or there is material on school grounds that is producing radon gas in large enough quantities to be significantly detectible.

The upshot of choosing these three sites to determine background radiation levels for future investigations of the LOOW is not that Lew-Port schools are safe, as the Corps misleadingly claims. Rather, it’s that by choosing contaminated areas as representative of “normal� contamination levels, the Corps has set a standard by which only the most heinously radioactive waste will exceed their “background� levels.

And it’s setting a standard for cleanup the former LOOW, and perhaps the rest of the region, to “background� levels that far exceed what can accurately be called “safe� or “naturally occurring.�

Sins of commission, sins of omission. In Lewiston, the Army Corps of Engineers is lying to the public. In Niagara Falls, city officials are burying their heads in the ground. Not the safest place to be.

This is the eighth in a series of articles examining the history and impact of chemical and radioactive industrial waste on the Niagara frontier. The authors can be contacted by email at NiagaraNet@aol.com or ghkelly@hotmail.com. The entire series is available at http://www.ask.ne.jp/~hankaku/english/niagara_fall.html, a website hosted by The Tokyo Physicians for the Elimination of Nuclear Weapons (TPENW), an association of Japanese physicians and scientists dedicated to stopping the proliferation of nuclear weapons.