Mapping Hometown's toxic threats

I came across these useful maps today while wandering the Internet, at the website My McAdoo Home. They show various sources of toxic pollution in the area around Hometown, Pa., including coal ash dumps, Superfund sites, industrial operations and waste coal-burning co-generation plants.

The maps are not completely comprehensive -- for example, they don't include acid mine drainage sites, or gas stations where leaking underground tanks contaminated groundwater. But they do give a good sense of the scale of the environmental health problem facing the area, where a consultant recently told local residents that he hadn't before seen a community that's suffered so many different "environmental insults."

Click on map to see a larger version:

Polycythemia vera and the price of death

The same evening the first meeting of the Community Action Committee took place in Hometown, Pa. for the U.S. Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry's polycythemia vera cluster investigation in Schuylkill, Luzerne and Carbon counties, I attended a lecture at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill given by my friend Bob Del Tredici, a Montreal-based photographer who specializes in documenting the nuclear industrial complex and founder of the Atomic Photographers Guild.

I had hoped to attend the CAC meeting, but my travel plans were scuttled due to my getting a bad case of the flu. Getting to hear Bob talk was a wonderful consolation prize, though.

I already had a copy of Bob's book "The People of Three Mile Island", which features the photographs he took in the immediate aftermath of the 1979 meltdown at the nuclear power plant near Middletown, Pa. That book serves as a powerful witness of how what really happened at TMI was covered up by an official story that denies anyone was hurt by the radiation released during that disaster.

Last week I got a copy from Bob of another one of his books, "At Work in the Fields of the Bomb," which won the 1987 Olive Branch Book Award for its contribution to world peace.

As I was paging through it, I was particularly struck by one of Bob's photographs, which had special resonance for me given where my heart was at last Wednesday:

Posted here with Bob's permission, it's a photograph taken on Aug. 5, 1983 at the Aiken Community Hospital in South Carolina that shows George Couch, who worked for 22 years as a maintenance worker at the Savannah River Site, a nuclear materials processing center near Augusta, Ga. Bob writes in the caption:

Shortly before retirement, [Couch] contracted polycythemia vera, a rare form of blood cancer associated with radiation exposure. He was fired without compensation.

"There is no way of telling how many people have already died from polycythemia vera. The only way to know would be to check your people while they're living, except they say it's very expensive. But what is the price of death? How much is a person's life worth?"

To see more of Bob's photos from "At Work in the Fields of the Bomb," click here.

Update on polycythemia vera research in Hometown area

I was hoping to be back home in Pennsylvania last month to attend the Oct. 24 public meeting in Tamaqua organized by the federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry updating the community on research happening around the cluster of the blood cancer polycythemia vera in Schuylkill, Luzerne and Carbon counties.



Unfortunately, I got seriously ill with what my doctor thinks was swine flu and couldn't make the meeting. Fortunately, the local press covered the story extensively.

The ATSDR didn't release the results of the first round of genetic testing at the Oct. 24 gathering but is waiting until the second round of testing is completed early this month, according to the Republican Herald. Of the $5.5 million in federal funding allocated so far to study the cluster, $3.753 million will go to other organizations for various projects, the Times News reported:

* The Myeloproliferative Disorder Research Consortium -- a nonprofit funded by the National Cancer Institute to conduct research on the genetic and cellular mechanisms of blood cancers -- will set up a tissue bank for polycythemia vera patients. That project will be led by Dr. Rona Weinberg, a professor at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine.

* Dr. Ronald Hoffman and Dr. Ming Xu of the Mount Sinai School of Medicine will conduct genetic analyses and a toxicology study.

* Under the leadership of Dr. Paul Roda, the Geisinger Clinic will look at patterns of the disease, educate area physicians about polycythemia vera, and look at clinical outcomes for patients with the disease. It will also study the prevalence of polycythemia vera in the Danville and Selinsgrove areas to compare to rates in the tri-county area.

* Dr. Arthur Frank at Drexel University's School of Public Health in Philadelphia will conduct a case-control study of polycythemia vera rates in the tri-county area.

* The Pennsylvania Department of Health will get funding to continue to monitor blood cancer in the area and to work with the University of Pittsburgh to conduct a comparison study, while the state Department of Environmental Protection will examine potential environmental causes.

* Funds will also go to the new Community Action Committee (CAC), which will be coordinated by Dr. Henry Cole of Henry S. Cole and Associates in Upper Marlboro, Md., with Joe Murphy of Hometown serving as the lead local representative. The group will serve as an "information conduit" between the agencies and the community.

Another $1.746 million will go the ATSDR itself for what's being called an "exposure investigative team" environmental and geospatial analyses, technical support and oversight of the outside researchers, and efforts to improve reporting by doctors of polycythemia vera and other so-called myeloproliferative disorders.

The Times News also reported on the first meeting of the CAC, which took place on Wednesday, Oct. 28 at the Hometown Fire Co. The group will be working with an advisory panel of scientific and legal experts that includes:

* Attorney Tom Gowen of the Locks Law Firm, who with Murphy was involved in an effort to bring a civil lawsuit over contamination at the McAdoo Associates Superfund site. That former abandoned mine-turned-waste dump is located near the polycythemia vera "ground zero" on Ben Titus Road in the Still Creek community where numerous cases of the disease first came to light. In 2006, the Locks firm concluded that it did not have a legal basis for proceeding with a civil action due to a lack of evidence that poisons dumped at the site have migrated to nearby wells or the Still Creek reservoir, which provides drinking water for the Hometown-Tamaqua area.

* Water contamination and public health expert G. Fred Lee of G. Fred Lee and Associates in El Macero, Calif.

* Robert Martin, the former ombudsman for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency who resigned after the Bush administration tried to silence him for raising questions about former administrator Christine Todd Whitman's financial ties to the owner of a Denver Superfund site and a firm that provided insurance around the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan. The EPA under Whitman falsely assured Manhattan residents that they didn't need to worry about environmental contamination after the towers collapsed on 9/11.

According to the Times News, Cole told attendees of the CAC meeting that in his 40 years of working in his field, he might not have seen a community that had suffered so many different "environmental insults." Cole also said that it was very rare for the government to actually acknowledge a cancer cluster.