gabewg
Registered: December 2010
City/Town/Province: Arden
Posts: 1
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In January 2010, I became involved in a cleanup effort at a Superfund site near my home. The former electroplating facility, run by components-giant CTS Corporation out of Elkhart, Indiana, shut down in 1986 after almost thirty years of use. The company used the chemical trichloroethylene (TCE) as a degreaser, and TCE and many other chemicals (hexavalent chromium, cyanide, benzene, vinyl chloride, cadmium, methylnaphthalene) were showing up in recent groundwater tests.
That January, I attended a community meeting where the North Carolina Department of Public Health consistently denied that there was a contamination problem at the site. Despite 49 cases of Non-Hodkins Lymphoma in a one mile radius of the CTS of Asheville site, the state had determined that there was no cancer-cluster at the site. When activists and local residents stood up to talk after the state department’s presentation, I was shocked to hear the extent of contamination. A woman who lived next to the site testified to her thyroid cancer, her husband’s brain tumor, and her father-in-law’s death of esophageal cancer. Another member of the community said he’d lost ten family members to cancer.
One activist stood up and talked about how one woman’s well tested with 21,000 parts per billion (ppb) of TCE, 7,000 times the state’s legal limit of 3 ppb. Another activist claimed the state’s report was flawed because a 2002 release from the EPA called for immediate cleanup and said no more studies should be conducted.
All the while, the North Carolina Department of Public Health continued to claim there was no contamination in the area.
I myself endured thyroid cancer at age eleven. Though I recovered, I was always confused that the doctors could never explain why I contracted the rare disease—pediatric thyroid cancer only affects one in one million children. Then, at this meeting in January, I was slowly overcome by the realization that my house sat only 1.5 miles from the CTS site, and that my brother and I had played in the creeks and streams near the site all the time when we were younger.
One year prior to this meeting, in 2009, my brother was diagnosed with a benign bone tumor.
After the meeting, I began doing my own research into the site. I scoured archived articles of one of the local papers to find reports on the site. I searched the internet to find more about TCE. I downloaded PDFs from the EPA. I called local politicians to inform them of the situation. I invited local activists over to my house and interviewed them. And then I started writing.
My article on the CTS site was published in my school newspaper in May 2010, and included a series of conclusions about my school’s proximity to the site. My high school, which relies on well water, sits about three miles from the toxic factory.
This past summer, however, was when the real work started. I contacted the New York Times to see if they would be interested in writing a story on the site. I informed Greenpeace of the toxicity of CTS of Asheville. I completed an in-depth article on the site and posted it online. I created a facebook group, Clean up CTS Asheville, to protest CTS Corporation’s disregard of the environment. While at a young writers’ workshop in Ohio, I broke a story to local activists about CTS Corporation suing a property owner at the site, Mills Gap Road Associates.
As the summer finished, I was invited to give a TEDx NextGenerationAsheville talk on my experience with cancer and my fight for CTS site cleanup. I spoke at this organization, a branch of the national TED Talks program, in August, and have used the YouTube video of my talk to promote awareness of the site (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbOBbYIasVI).
As the school year started back up, I continued my fight for a full-scale cleanup at the site. A local newspaper, the Mountain Xpress, interviewed me about my involvement (http://www.mountainx.com/features/2010/090810green-scene-testing-the-waters). I helped organize a vigil that the community held outside the parking lot of the facility (http://www.mountainx.com/news/2010/photo_essay_area_residents_demonstrate_at_cts_site). At the beginning of November, I started an internship with the Mountain Xpress, a local newspaper, to further research and investigate the goings-on at the site.
My work to promote cleanup of the CTS of Asheville site is ongoing. I will not rest until the site is cleaned up and the health of residents is no longer jeopardized. More than anything, my advocacy for CTS cleanup has solidified my stance that government must strengthen its actions to protect the environment; and citizens, as inhabitants of the earth, must serve as stewards for its health. Despite obstacles the cleanup effort has faced, I still believe that the site can get the full cleanup it deserves. When the soil is renewed, when the brick walls of the building are torn down, and when the streams stop channeling toxic waste, then the community can take a collective deep breath—and know that the water they are drinking is pure, and the air they are breathing is safe.
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