|
Heavy Metals Contaminate Northeast Denver Community
Lorraine Granado lives in the Swansea community, where 40 percent of the residents are under 18, making them especially vulnerable to the lead and arsenic that poison the area.(1) After four years of community organizing and work with the EPA to clean up the toxic mess plaguing their neighborhood, Granado and her neighbors have recently been informed that their Superfund site will receive no money for cleanup this year. Granado, a founding member of CEASE (Clayton, Cole, Elyria and Swansea Environmentalists), says that cleaning up toxic pollution that threatens people's health seems to be a very low priority for President Bush. "He does not want to hold polluters accountable. He doesn't want polluters to pay. And now 33 sites won't get funding. There will be fewer cleanups and they will be less stringent. It's our kids who will be paying for these cuts with their health."(2) While most people who drive through northern Denver see only the large factories and rows of industrial buildings, several residential neighborhoods are tucked between the massive industrial plants. Strung out along I-70 are the predominantly lower-income Latino neighborhoods of Southwestern Globeville, Elyria, Swansea, Cole, and Clayton that comprise the Vasquez Superfund Site (also known as VB-I70). These communities are full of residents who are angry and anxious about the lead and arsenic contamination with which they live. Four years ago local residents took action, founding CEASE, a community-based group representing each of the five affected neighborhoods. After a series of community meetings, residents and members of CEASE began pushing for Superfund listing and began working with the EPA. Since there was no responsible party remaining to clean up the mess, they felt the Superfund was their only alternative. Members helped to develop an education project for health providers who were poorly informed about the risks local residents, especially children, were facing. The group worked with the Agency for Toxic Substance and Disease Registry (ATSDR) and the University of Colorado Health Medical Center to develop and implement a lead and arsenic health study for children under six.(3) At first the process went well. The community attended "work group" meetings with the EPA, and a consulting firm was hired to publicize and facilitate the meetings as well as take minutes and distribute them. But after the first few months the consulting firm stopped showing up. Now, Granado says, there are no minutes for meetings in which the EPA and community members discussed specific means for addressing environmental justice (EJ) at the site. Because the site meets environmental justice criteria (per President Clinton's Executive Order on Environmental Justice), the EPA would have been required to implement education and involvement measures beyond those required at non-EJ sites. Despite meeting all of the requirements of an EJ community, however, no mention of EJ issues or of the pertinent demographics is made in the EPA's proposal for the Vasquez site.(4) CEASE members also say that the Community Health Education Plan, part of the EPA's preferred alternative for the site, would not only fail to meet the particular needs of the community and the EPA's environmental justice obligations; it would also fail to reduce risk for residents. The plan supposedly allows for "community education, biomonitoring for children, and source identification and referral for lead abatement for the approximately 4,500 homes located in the site," but residents don't believe that one staff-person working less than full-time (as allotted in the budget) can accomplish all that is proposed. Further, the health plan fails to provide for families of children who are shown to have arsenic and lead poisoning. And to make matters worse, the budget for the plan would be reduced by 5 percent each year for the following five years.(5) Alternative 4, the EPA's preferred alternative, also fails to protect children from arsenic and lead poisoning. In comments to the EPA on the original Superfund cleanup proposal for the site, the ATSDR (a unit of the Department of Health and Human Services) states that "ATSDR is concerned that alternative #4 for the VB-I70 site does not adequately protect children because some children will remain at risk for exposure to harmful effects from arsenic and lead in soil. A major drawback to alternative #4 is that a child who lives at a property with soil and arsenic levels less that 128 ppm or soil lead levels less than 540 ppm must be tested and found to be exposed before soil removal action is taken."(6) Lead and cadmium residues from old smelter operations pose a critical health risk to the development of the youngest members of the community. Potentially affecting every organ in the human body, lead affects children the most because of its ability to stunt a child's mental and physical growth. Exposure to lead can also cause catastrophic problems for pregnant women and their fetuses, including premature births, smaller babies, decreased mental ability of the child, learning difficulties, and reduced physical growth potential.(7) The risk of childhood ingestion of arsenic is high enough in the Vasquez site that symptoms of poisoning might include "nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, headache, facial swelling, fatigue, chills, and sore throats in humans," while long-term exposure is known to cause cancer.(8) In its proposal, the EPA suggested that arsenic be cleaned up when contamination has been found to be at least 128 ppm.(9) Residents were horrified to discover that a single flawed test on pigs was used to establish a cleanup action level for the Vasquez site, and that this level was significantly higher than in other Superfund sites around the country. CEASE states in its comments to the EPA that "In Eureka Mills, Utah, a community that is 99 percent white, the action level for arsenic was 77 ppm."(10) They also noted that at industrial sites around the country, arsenic cleanup levels ranged from .56 ppm to 42 ppm. The EPA's proposed cleanup level for lead at the Vasquez site is 540 ppm, while the level for cleanup at Eureka Mills was 231 ppm and the EPA's own national screen level is 400 ppm. The EPA's regional office requested $7 million for this site for 2002, but received no funds.(11) This news came to the residents less than two days after the final public comment meeting, where they voiced their concerns about the EPA's proposed plan. After four years of fighting to get the EPA to take action at the site, residents were sorely disheartened by the funding cuts. "We are dealing with the lives of our children and we keep getting mixed messages [from the EPA]," says Sandy Douglas, a community leader in the Cole neighborhood. "This is a system that is messing up our babies."(12) A recent editorial in the Denver Post agrees: "This project [isn't] feel-good government pork; it represents a serious, much needed attempt to protect children from harmful substances."(13) Bonnie Levelle, EPA project manager for the site, says that they will request money again next year, and she is hopeful the site will be funded. She also hopes the EPA will be able to better address some of the community's concerns next time around.(14) But residents remain understandably skeptical. Says Sandy Douglas: "A certain level of trust between EPA and residents was established in the VB-I70, after working with EPA since l998, providing hundreds of hours of volunteer service, establishing relationships, providing resident input and perspective. Now, the government can say, 'sorry, all that work was for nothing, we are cutting off your funds anyway.'"(15) Up to Top HOME | Email Signup | About Us | Contact Us | Terms of Use | © 2008 Sierra Club |
||||||||||||
