Cancers prompt request for IEPA meeting
By KEVIN P. CRAVER - kcraver@nwherald.com
State legislators are asking the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency to meet with McCullom Lake residents to address concerns about industrial pollution blamed in lawsuits for two dozen brain cancer cases.
Village President Terry Counley and McHenry County Board member Tina Hill wrote state Sen. Pam Althoff, R-McHenry, to ask her to arrange the meeting. Counley wrote that residents are no more educated on the situation than they were when an attorney filed the first lawsuits 31⁄2 years ago, blaming the brain cancers on groundwater and air pollution from Ringwood manufacturers Rohm and Haas and Modine Manufacturing.
“As a resident, as well as the President, the part that is the hardest to take is that we really do not know what we are facing here and the feelings we all have are overwhelming,” Counley wrote in his Sept. 29 letter. “The residents, and myself included, feel that we are left to fend for ourselves.”
Counley said that he reached out to the attorneys for both sides, the IEPA and the McHenry County Department of Health to meet with residents for updates after his election in April. Only plaintiffs’ attorney Aaron Freiwald responded and talked to residents, Counley said.
Althoff said that she had contacted agency Director Douglas Scott, and would facilitate the meeting. Counley also wrote state Rep. Jack Franks, D-Marengo, who responded that he had asked the IEPA for the same. Agency spokeswoman Maggie Crane confirmed that the IEPA received the request.
Morton International, which previously owned the Rohm and Haas plant, first reported to the IEPA in 1983 that a plume of contaminated groundwater was oozing from a closed 8-acre, 15-foot-deep disposal pit. Modine discovered in 1990 that its much smaller disposal pit also had leached chemicals into the groundwater.
The chemicals, including vinyl chloride, vinylidene chloride and trichloroethylene, are blamed in 30 lawsuits to date for 22 brain cancers, six pituitary cancers, one plaintiff with both, and a case of liver cirrhosis of unknown origin. A federal class-action lawsuit is seeking Rohm and Haas, which bought Morton International in 1999, to pay for medical screening and lost property values. Modine Manufacturing settled out of court last year.
The plaintiffs include the older sister and three childhood friends of Hill, R-Woodstock, who grew up in the Lakeland Park subdivision on the McHenry side of the lake. She wrote Althoff that she would like to open up any IEPA sit-down to McHenry residents for that reason.
“We would like to understand the process more of how to find out what could cause a cancer cluster and to ensure the process the IEPA uses in cleaning up contaminated sites,” Hill wrote in her Oct. 6 letter.
The Rohm and Haas and Modine sites are enrolled in the IEPA’s voluntary remediation program, meaning the companies supervise their own cleanup by hiring outside firms to chart it and develop plans to eliminate it. Those firms are required to file regular updates with the IEPA.
Studies since the 1980s conclude that the contamination plume is limited to the shallow aquifer, and is flowing southeast away from McCullom Lake and its private wells. But a 2007 investigation by the Northwest Herald raised questions about the conclusions and the integrity of the research process.
It revealed, among other things, that the Morton plant’s owners knew about the contamination a decade before reporting it, and that authors of more recent studies privately expressed concerns about the accuracy of their work. Also, the deep aquifer that is supposed to be protected by a thick clay barrier tested positive near the Rohm and Haas plant for man-made volatile organic compounds.
Counley said he would like to talk to the IEPA about allowing the manufacturers to supervise their own clean-up.
“In my eyes, that’s kind of like giving the fox the keys to the hen house,” Counley said.
No village well sampling conducted to date by the McHenry County Department of Health has shown positive test results for the chemicals in the lawsuit. But the department, whose 2006 analysis of the cancers was scrutinized in the newspaper’s investigation, tests the same dozen or so wells each year.
McHenry Analytical Water Lab has offered to send residents’ well samples for testing at a 50 percent discounted rate of $100 each. The business is co-owned by state Rep. Mike Tryon, R-Crystal Lake, whose legislative liaison is Tina Hill.
The lawsuits also blame air contamination for the cancers. While the IEPA imposes air emission limits on the manufacturers, the lawsuits allege that residents inhaled decades of natural evaporation from the mile-long contamination plume. The Illinois Pollution Control Board investigated Morton in the late 1970s because of numerous complaints about odors from the site.
The investigation
Ringwood manufacturers Rohm and Haas and Modine Manufacturing since the 1980s have tracked a plume of contaminated groundwater oozing from their disposal sites. Their numerous reports to date conclude that contamination is flowing away from McCullom Lake and is limited to the shallow aquifer, contrary to 30 lawsuits blaming the contamination for brain and pituitary cancers. But a 2007 Northwest Herald investigation raised questions about the validity of the companies’ conclusions:
• The Rohm and Haas plant’s former owners, Morton International, first learned of the groundwater contamination in 1973, a decade before reporting it to the IEPA.
• Consultants hired by Morton, and later Rohm and Haas, to map the extent of the contamination have expressed doubts in internal e-mails about the accuracy of their work.
• The maps from the report questioned by the consultants became a key component of the McHenry County Department of Health’s analysis in 2006 that the contamination never reached the village. The newspaper concluded that the health department’s investigation into the cancers was rushed and scientifically unsound.
• The clay barrier that Rohm and Haas’ experts say protected the deep aquifer from contamination might not be uniform. A 2006 test of three new deep monitoring wells near the plant and an existing on-site deep water well found traces of man-made volatile organic compounds.
To this day, no trace of the contamination alleged in the lawsuits has been detected in McCullom Lake’s private wells. The lawsuits also allege that residents breathed contaminated air.
