Sunday, June 06, 1999
Study of dump a start
Payment pleases neighbors
BY ERIN GIBSON
The Cincinnati Enquirer
Sixteen years ago, Linda Briscoe's three children got sick. They developed rashes, viruses and asthma. The cause was a mystery, Ms. Briscoe said, until she uncovered the identity of their playground.
“My kids were playing on the dump,” she said. “We didn't know it was a dump. We thought it was a hill.”
That hill, the ELDA dump, is near the Briscoe home in Winton Hills. On Tuesday, elated neighbors won an initial $2 million in a settlement with the dump's owner, Houston-based Waste Management Inc., to study and remedy the environmental and health hazards it may have caused.
More money should follow, af ter the study unearths the full cost of fixing the problem.
Winton Hills residents including Ms. Briscoe said they felt pleased to have won the legal battle, but expect a full remedy for the dump's health threats to cost many millions and to take many years.
Some said the settlement didn't
go far enough, and the first $2 million payment wouldn't pay for enough health examinations. Others said the dump's health effects couldn't be determined, because Winton Hills is ringed by industry of all kinds.
All described the settlement as welcomed and hard-won.
“I'm glad that it's done and there is money there for a study to be done,” said Marilyn Evans, executive director of Communities United for Action
(CUFA). “We just want it to be cleaned up and done with.”
The Rev. Solomon Lundy, a Winton Hills pastor, said that after years of struggle, years of work remains.
“It's a long haul, and we just trust that enough money will be provided — that the $2 million will help,” he said. “It's a good start.”
For more than a decade, residents of Winton Hills have blamed ELDA for their common and chronic respiratory problems, itching eyes, rashes and headaches. Ms. Briscoe goes further, citing some residents' kidney cancer and a host of surgeries on infants as the effect of her neighborhood's pollution.
“We have a health epidemic,” she said, and one source is the methane gas the dump produces.
ELDA's operator captures some gas and sells it, but can't capture it all. So the colorless, odorless gas wafts through neighboring homes, Ms. Briscoe said.
She and other neighbors spent 16 years trying to shut down the landfill before its close on Feb. 5, 1998. At that point, the dump had taken Cincinnati's garbage every day for 27 years.
Both Ms. Briscoe and Ms. Evans said the first $2 million of the settlement didn't come soon enough or go far enough in funding a study of that many years' worth of health hazards or in cleaning up the dump site.
Ms. Evans said she wanted to have the gas leaks stopped and all medical exams wrapped up by now. They have yet to start, and she expects both processes to take another three to five years.
In the next 30 days, Ms. Evans and others at CUFA will meet and develop a time line for environmental studies and health exams with the $2 million. CUFA will spend $800,000 on environmental studies and the other $1.2 million on health exams and treatment, she said.
She had hoped the initial settlement money would pay for health exams for 1,000 Winton Hills residents. Half that is realistic now, she said.
Residents with asthma, allergies, other respiratory problems and rashes will get priority, she said. CUFA has yet to limit the scope of possible dump-related health problems that will be treated, she said, but should in the next month.
Although the settlement is won, the source of Winton Hills residents' health problems remains controversial.
The Cincinnati Health Department has yet to determine whether the dump and its methane caused such health problems in Winton Hills, said Dr. Malcolm Adcock, health commissioner.
The city doesn't have the resources for such a study, he said, and the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has refused to help several times because of the number of industries that could have possibly polluted the area.
“In their opinion, it would be impossible to be able to attribute it or single out any one source,” Dr. Adcock said.
Ron Perry, president of the Winton Place Community Council, said some people get paranoid about industry-related pollution and their health and called some neighborhood industries, including Sun Chemical Corp., good neighbors.
But he approved of the ELDA settlement.
“We're fighting the good fight here.”
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