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9486 in the collection
Health risks stack up for students near industrial plants
Kudos to USA Today for
caring enough about this topic to spend this
amount of time and resources putting it in
public view.
By Blake Morrison and Brad Heath
ADDYSTON, Ohio — The growl of air-monitoring
equipment has replaced the chatter of children
at Meredith Hitchens Elementary School in this
Cincinnati suburb along the Ohio River.
School district officials pulled all students
from Hitchens three years ago, after air
samples outside the building showed high levels
of chemicals coming from the plastics plant
across the street. The levels were so dangerous
that the Ohio EPA concluded the risk of getting
cancer there was 50 times higher than what the
state considers acceptable.
The air outside 435 other schools — from Maine
to California — appears to be even worse, and
the threats to the health of students at those
locations may be even greater.
Using the government's most up-to-date model
for tracking toxic chemicals, USA TODAY spent
eight months examining the impact of industrial
pollution on the air outside schools across the
nation. The model is a computer simulation that
predicts the path of toxic chemicals released
by thousands of companies.
USA TODAY used it to identify schools in toxic
hot spots — a task the U.S. Environmental
Protection Agency had never undertaken.
The result: a ranking of 127,800 public,
private and parochial schools based on the
concentrations and health hazards of chemicals
likely to be in the air outside. The model's
most recent version used emissions reports
filed by 20,000 industrial sites in 2005, the
year Hitchens closed.
The potential problems that emerged were
widespread, insidious and largely unaddressed:
• At Abraham Lincoln Elementary School in East
Chicago, Ind., the model indicated levels of
manganese more than a dozen times higher than
what the government considers safe. The metal
can cause mental and emotional problems after
long exposures. Three factories within blocks
of the school — located in one of the most
impoverished areas of the state — combined to
release more than 6 tons of it in a single
year.
"When you start talking about manganese, it
doesn't register with people in poverty," says
Juan Anaya, superintendent of the School City
of East Chicago district. "They have bigger
issues to deal with."
• The middle school in Follansbee, W.Va., sits
close to a cluster of plants that churn out
tens of thousands of pounds of toxic gases and
metals a year.
• In Huntington, W.Va., data showed the air
outside Highlawn Elementary School had high
levels of nickel, which can harm lungs and
cause cancer.
• At San Jacinto Elementary School in Deer
Park, Texas, data indicated carcinogens at
levels even higher than the readings that
prompted the shutdown of Hitchens. A recent
University of Texas study showed an
"association" between an increased risk of
childhood cancer and proximity to the Houston
Ship Channel, about 2 miles from the school.
The 435 schools that ranked worst weren't
confined to industrial centers. Illinois, Ohio
and Pennsylvania had the highest numbers, but
the worst schools extended from the East Coast
to the West, in 170 cities across 34 states,
USA TODAY found.
IN DANGER? Toxics can affect kids, adults
differently
In some school districts, emissions from the
smokestacks of refineries or chemical plants
threatened students of every age, preschool
through prom. Outside those schools, reports
from polluters themselves often indicated a
dozen different chemicals in the air. All are
considered toxic by the government, though few
have been tested for their specific effects on
children.
Scientists have long known that kids are
particularly susceptible to the dangers. They
breathe more air in proportion to their weight
than adults do, and their bodies are still
developing. Based on the time they spend at
school, their exposures could last for years
but the impact might not become clear for
decades.
That was the case in Port Neches, Texas, where
more than two dozen former students of Port
Neches-Groves High School have been diagnosed
with cancer several years after they graduated,
according to court records. So far, 17 have
reached legal settlements with petrochemical
plants located less than a mile from the
school. In court filings, the plants' operators
had denied they were to blame for the
illnesses.
The U.S. EPA, which has a special office
charged with protecting children's health, has
invested millions of taxpayer dollars in
pollution models that could help identify
schools where toxic chemicals saturate the air.
Even so, USA TODAY found, the agency has all
but ignored examining whether the air is unsafe
at the very locations where kids are required
to gather.
If regulators had used their own pollution
models to look for schools in toxic hot spots,
they would have discovered what USA TODAY
found: locations — in small towns such as
Lucedale, Miss., and Oro Grande, Calif., as
well as in large cities such as Houston — where
the government's own data indicated the air
outside schools was more toxic than the air
outside the shuttered Hitchens.
"Wow," says Philip Landrigan, a physician who
heads a unit at Mount Sinai School of Medicine
in New York focused on children's health and
the environment. "The mere fact that kids are
being exposed ought to be enough to force
people to pay attention. The problem here is,
by and large, there's no cop on the beat.
Nobody's paying attention."
Factories, chemical plants and other industries
are the lifeblood of many towns, providing the
jobs and the tax base that sustain communities.
The industries and the schools nearby often
have co-existed for decades. For just as long,
residents in cities large and small have tried
to accept — or simply ignore — the tradeoffs:
air pollution that leads to breathing problems
or worse.
To identify locations where dangers appear
greatest, USA TODAY used a mathematical model,
developed by the EPA, called Risk-Screening
Environmental Indicators. It estimates how
toxic chemicals are dispersed across the nation
and in what quantities.
With the help of researchers from the Political
Economy Research Institute at the University of
Massachusetts Amherst, USA TODAY plotted the
locations of schools to rank them based on
chemicals likely to be in the air outside. Some
of the schools — and the companies responsible
for the chemicals — may have closed or moved
since the government collected the data. Others
may have opened. The rankings showed 435 of
those schools with air more toxic than the air
outside Meredith Hitchens.
The good news: The model showed levels of
industrial chemicals declined at three-quarters
of U.S. schools since 1998, a trend that
mirrors improved air quality across the nation.
The more ominous news: Outside one-quarter of
schools, the model showed students were exposed
to higher levels of industrial pollution in
2005 than they were 10 years ago.
Regulators caution that conditions at some
schools may be far different than the model
makes them appear. That's because the data used
in the model are based on estimates submitted
by the companies themselves. Clerical errors or
flawed interpretations of what needs to be
reported can result in misleading impressions
about what's released.
Of the 435 schools that ranked worse than
Hitchens, Ohio EPA toxicologist Paul Koval
believes about "half of those could be better
but half could be worse." The economist who
helped create the model for the U.S. EPA, Nick
Bouwes, takes a different view. The modeled
results, he says, "may be a gross
underestimate," in part because companies only
approximate what they release. Without long-
term monitoring, Koval and Bouwes agree, no one
can be certain which schools have problems and
which might not.
Among the hot spots that might justify
monitoring, the government's model identified:
• Deer Park, Texas, near Houston, where
students at elementary, middle and high schools
faced dangerously high levels of butadiene, a
carcinogen, and other gases from petrochemical
plants on the Houston Ship Channel.
• Lucedale, Miss., where kids at five schools
faced air with high levels of chromium, a metal
that, in one form, has been linked to cancer.
• Oro Grande Elementary in California's Mojave
Desert, where students breathed a variety of
metals, including chromium, manganese and lead.
BEST OR WORST: Where does your school's air
quality rank?
The likely exposures weren't simply the product
of living in a part of town where pollution is
heavy. In thousands of cases, the air appeared
to be better in the neighborhoods where
children lived than at the schools they
attended, USA TODAY found.
At about 16,500 schools, the air outside the
schools was at least twice as toxic as the air
at a typical location in the school district.
At 3,000 of those schools, air outside the
buildings was at least 10 times as toxic.
But in all of these cases, precisely what risk
children face remains a mystery — to parents,
school officials and government regulators
responsible for protecting public health. No
laws or regulations require the sort of air
monitoring that would tell them.
"There are health and safety standards for
adults in the workplace, but there are no
standards for children at schools," says Ramona
Trovato, the former director of the EPA's
Office of Children's Health Protection, who has
since retired from the agency. "If a parent
complains, there's no law that requires anybody
to do anything. It's beyond belief.
Cancer found Matt Becker before he turned 16.
It gave him nosebleeds that lasted for hours
and a melon-size tumor inside his chest. It
kept him in the hospital for weeks at a time, a
tube draining quarts of fluid from the lining
of his lungs. It stole his sophomore year of
high school and almost took his life.
"I never thought a kid my age could go through
what I went through," he says now, as calmly as
if he were recounting a boring day at school.
For eight years, Matt went to school across the
street from his house, at Sayler Park School in
the Cincinnati neighborhood of the same name.
Now, at 17, he's back in the classroom, in a
different school not far from where he lives
with his parents and younger brother. His
cancer, a non-Hodgkin lymphoma, was diagnosed
in 2006 and has since gone into remission, and
his life seems much the same as it was before
he got sick.
He goes fishing and shoots pool. His hair,
closely cropped, has grown back brown and full.
Except for a 7-inch purple scar along his right
shoulder blade — where doctors went in for
exploratory surgery — cancer appears to have
left no marks.
Matt knows better. His life has barely begun,
but already he harbors a fear no child
deserves: He worries that the chemotherapy
needed to save his life may have left him
sterile. "There's a good chance," says his
mother, Pam.
The causes of many cancers, especially those in
children, are varied and often unknown.
Epidemiologists usually fail to pinpoint the
culprits, and no one knows what caused Matt's
cancer. His mother is haunted by a fear: that
the same chemicals that prompted the shutdown
of Meredith Hitchens Elementary, 2 miles away,
might be to blame.
Like most kids, Matt spent much of his
childhood outdoors. He remembers seeing and
smelling what came out of the plastics plant.
But, like most kids and many parents at schools
across the country, he seldom considered what
he was breathing and how it might affect his
health.
After the diagnosis, "my doctor … asked me if
there was any kind of pollution where I lived,"
Matt recalls. "It never really crossed my mind
how bad it could be."
The model used by USA TODAY indicated the
school where Matt spent kindergarten through
eighth grade — Sayler Park — and his home
across the street were touched by the same
chemicals that led to the closure of Hitchens.
Although the concentrations of carcinogens
outside Matt's school were not nearly as high
as those found at Hitchens, the model indicated
elevated levels there, too.
Ohio EPA's Koval, who supervised monitoring at
Hitchens, says concentrations from the model
showed cancer risks at Sayler Park would have
been about six times higher than what the state
considers acceptable.
The company cited by the Ohio EPA — Lanxess
Corp. — no longer runs the plastics plant. But
a company official who used to manage the
Addyston facility says state regulators
overstated the dangers. "The situation wasn't
so dire that there was a serious public risk,"
says A.J. "Sandy" Marshall, now president and
managing director for Lanxess Inc., the
company's Canadian subsidiary. In 2005, Lanxess
reported emitting 55,000 pounds of butadiene
and acrylonitrile, both considered carcinogens
by the Ohio EPA.
Marshall says the state EPA used flawed or
outdated studies to claim that cancer risks
were high. Although Marshall says Lanxess took
major steps to curb its emissions, he says the
company does not believe the 369 kids moved
from Hitchens faced any serious dangers.
The Ohio EPA says otherwise.
In its air-quality study issued in December
2005, the agency explained how it determined
the risks outside Hitchens were 50 times higher
than acceptable. The state considers an
"acceptable" cancer risk as one additional
cancer for every 100,000 people, based on the
idea that residents would breathe the air there
for 70 years.
At Hitchens, the air showed concentrations of
chemicals that the state concluded could cause
50 more cancers for every 100,000 people. It
also noted that "children may be at higher
risk" than adults.
During the years Matt was growing up, Koval
says, equipment problems at the plastics plant
meant emissions of one of the carcinogens
probably were much worse than what monitoring
found. That's because an industrial flare, a
tall flame used to burn off butadiene, wasn't
working properly, Koval says. That problem,
Koval says, and fewer regulations on what the
plant could emit likely meant butadiene was
being released at levels Koval calls
"alarming."
Lanxess' Marshall says the company believes it
ran the flare properly and met its permit
requirements. How much butadiene Matt or the
children at Hitchens breathed will never be
clear.
Marshall cites a study released in 2006 by the
state and county health departments, which
found a higher-than-expected number of cancers
in Addyston and concluded that "smoking history
and multiple other risk factors are likely to
play a role" in the excess cancers. But the
study also said that "exposures from the
Lanxess facility cannot be ruled out" as a
cause. It never examined cases in Matt's Sayler
Park neighborhood, nor did the state monitor
there.
Children's health experts such as physician
Landrigan say "it's plausible" that Matt's
cancer might be related to his exposure to the
chemicals. Too little is known — about
childhood cancer and toxic chemicals — to ever
be certain, and Landrigan made clear he did not
examine Matt or his medical records.
Lanxess' Marshall also cannot say. "I feel for
the family," he says of the Beckers. "When
these diseases hit, there certainly is a lot of
questioning as to what happens, what causes it
and so on."
That's no comfort to Pam Becker. She worries
when Matt loses weight; every pound he drops
might be the cancer returning. And she frets
about her younger boy, Nick. At 13, he only
half-jokes that he holds his breath near the
plant.
"How guilty do we feel if we gave our kid this
because of where we live and where we sent him
to school?" Pam Becker asks. "What if Nick's
next? What if we're next?
A few blocks beyond the trees around Port
Neches-Groves High School in Port Neches,
Texas, gray towers jut into the air. The towers
help cool factories that use chemicals to make
rubber and plastics — the kind of chemicals
that former students there say gave them
cancer.
The federal government built the plants in Port
Neches during World War II, searching for a
substitute for rubber supplies that had been
cut off. Now they're owned by ISP Elastomers
and Texas Petrochemicals.
MEASURING TOXICITY: Many chemicals hit schools
IN DANGER? Toxics can affect kids differently
For decades, butadiene was released from the
plants, often at levels that state monitoring
showed could be harmful. So much escaped that
it sometimes formed sweet-smelling clouds
hovering over roads near the school, remembers
Dave Cerami, who graduated in 1984.
Cerami, 43, is in his fourth bout with cancer.
This time, it has spread to his brain.
"The last time I was diagnosed, that was a big
kick," he says. "It's like, how many times can
you dance this dance? How many times can you
push your luck before your luck runs out?"
It is one of many questions that he — and those
he grew up with — cannot answer. Another: How
bad was the air at their schools?
"If you lived here and you have kids in the
school, you don't want to believe it's harmful.
And if you're the school, you don't want to
believe that having a school there would be
giving kids cancer," says Dale Hanks, a
Beaumont, Texas, lawyer.
Hanks has represented 27 graduates of Port
Neches schools, including Cerami, who sued the
chemical plants, their former owners and others
after being diagnosed with cancer. The
emissions they blamed took place before the
plants' current owners took over.
Seventeen of those cases have been settled out
of court since the late 1990s, and
confidentiality agreements bar the plaintiffs
from discussing agreements. Ten more complaints
are pending. No trial dates have been set.
Five years after Cerami graduated, state
regulators tried to find out how bad the air
was. When Texas authorities looked in 1989,
their monitors detected levels of butadiene
near the schools that were more than four times
higher than the state's safety standard. A
decade later, state workers sent to monitor the
air reported dizziness, nausea and "facial
numbness," according to a 1999 report by the
state Commission on Environmental Quality.
Another report, in 2003, noted butadiene levels
as much as 120times higher than the state's
standard.
After monitoring began, the state pressed the
chemical plants to upgrade their equipment to
curb emissions; butadiene levels fell sharply.
Texas considers its efforts a success.
But Vic Fair, head of the commission's regional
office until he retired in 2001, says he never
talked to the school district about what the
monitors showed, and the school district never
asked. "We didn't really have a way to tell
people whether this is dangerous or not," he
says. "What can we say?"
Regulatory responses, even slow ones, remain
more the exception than the rule — especially
at schools. Children's health experts have
tried, with limited success, to push the EPA to
make better use of its own tools.
As early as 2002, an EPA advisory committee now
led by Melanie Marty, a California EPA
toxicologist, questioned the agency's failure
to be more proactive. The group, called the
Children's Health Protection Advisory
Committee, is composed of 30 experts from
industry, state governments, academia and
advocacy groups. It reports to EPA
Administrator Stephen Johnson.
Hundreds of pages of correspondence reviewed by
USA TODAY show that among the committee's
recommendations were calls for the EPA to
develop better information about the exposure
of children to toxic chemicals. One letter,
sent by the committee to then-EPA administrator
Christie Whitman on May 2, 2002, urged a more
aggressive approach by the EPA to
"environmental health threats at schools."
Although the letter focused on concerns about
air quality inside schools, it asked the EPA to
"identify environmental considerations" that
communities could consider as they select
school sites. Among them: proximity to
"hazardous facilities."
"School communities need reliable information
about the risks to children's health from
exposure to environmental contaminants," the
letter read.
A response came almost three months later, from
Assistant Administrator Jeffrey Holmstead,
restating the agency's commitment to children
and listing a variety of programs it supported.
The letter did not mention proximity of schools
to hazardous facilities.
The EPA has taken many steps toward making
children safer.
It has worked with schools to improve air
quality inside buildings, primarily by
identifying toxic cleaners and other chemicals
that might harm students.
Today the EPA is investigating whether athletic
fields made with synthetic turf expose children
to unsafe levels of toxic chemicals.
What the agency hasn't done is use its models,
as USA TODAY did, to look for potential
problems around schools — then follow up by
testing for toxic chemicals. "Honestly, it
didn't occur to me to do this study when I was
there, and if it had, we would've initiated
it," says Trovato, who directed the EPA's
children's health office from 1997 to 2002.
"This isn't something you want to ignore," she
says of what USA TODAY found. "If I were still
in that job, the only thing I'd feel is, 'I
wish I'd thought of it.' "
The current head of the children's health
protection office, Ruth McCully, sees her role
differently. "It's not my job responsibility to
initiate those types of activities," says
McCully, who took over this year. "Do I
personally have any idea of the chemicals that
might be outside kids' schools? Well, I'm not
going to answer that," she says. "I'm not out
there doing air monitoring."
That's precisely the problem, critics contend:
a lack of urgency and initiative on the part of
EPA.
"That's the argument EPA puts up: 'We don't
know so we don't have to act,'" says Lois
Gibbs, executive director of the Center for
Health, Environment & Justice, an advocacy
group that focuses on children and schools.
John Balbus, chief health scientist for the
Environmental Defense Fund and a member of the
EPA children's advisory committee, frames the
problem more practically. "To me, the greatest
failure of this administration has been the
failure to focus on where problems may be
occurring now and take action."
At Meredith Hitchens, the Ohio EPA concluded
the risk of getting cancer was 50 times what
the state considers acceptable. If a school is
one of the 435 where the model indicates air
worse than at Hitchens, what should parents do?
"If it were me, I would be going to the school
board. I would be going to my legislators and
raising Cain," says Marty, the California
toxicologist.
And the companies near schools? "I would think
that responsible industry would be very
supportive of monitoring," says Rick Hackman, a
former member of the EPA advisory committee and
the associate director of regulatory and
technical relations for P&G North America.
And what about regulators, state or federal,
primarily responsible for protecting health and
safety? Says the EPA's Bob Lee, an economist
who directs the team that manages the pollution
model: "I'd suggest they go do some
monitoring."
Contributing: Mark Hannan
— Blake Morrison and Brad Heath
USA Today
2008-12-08
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/environment/school-air4.htm
INDEX OF OUTRAGES
Pages: 380
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