Cancer in Cheshire
"The town [of Cheshire, Connecticut] perceives itself as a clean and green suburb. But we've got at least two problems: the very high number of toxic waste sites, and the TCE in the drinking water."
-- Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies professor Dan Esty, "Toxictown, Connecticut." New Haven Advocate, Jan. 13-19, 2000.
"The major implication of the new findings is, of course, that human exposures at potentially dangerous levels may have occurred for years or decades, even after a site was recognized and (as we thought), satisfactorily addressed. We may presume that our relative ignorance in this arena will unfortunately have contributed to some number of additional cancers or other illnesses that could have been prevented."
-- Walter Mugdan, Director, Division of Environmental Planning and Protection, US EPA, in Vapor Intrusion, The Next Big Thing, August, 2006
Updated February 2008
We have added a Google Map of Cheshire’s
17 EPA-id'd sites of concern, depicting locations of contamination sites (red) and the location of
public supply wells (blue). We’ll be
adding more detail to this map over time.
We have also added a 2nd Google Map - it reveals the same sites and wells above (in red/blue) and adds locations of toxins detected by 1985 after migrating away from their sites of origin (in green). We'll be providing further updates on toxic migration in the weeks and months to come.
For more information regarding toxic migration and our concern for the risk it poses to Cheshire's health, please see this 2006 paper, Vapor Intrusion: The Next Big Thing by Walter Mugdan of US EPA.
We have mapped Cheshire's contamination sites, vapor intrusion risk areas, and cancers (as reported through this website).
We've also opened the archive of emails from the cancerincheshire.com mailing list (via yahoo groups) since it contains more recent updates on this issue.
Updated June 14, 2006
After discovering that 1 hazardous waste site was left out of the Cheshire Public Health Assessment because WE never provided the name to the state DPH, we have added Microtech to our list of EPA-identified contamination sites. Microtech has been heavily contaminated with at least TCE and PCE and known to officials since at least the mid 1980's. TCE and PCE levels were detected on the rise in 2001 at levels greater than 200 X EPA's maximum contaminant level for groundwater.
We have discovered that many of the EPA identified hazardous waste sites in Cheshire have not been cleaned up. The toxins underneath the ground at those sites (including TCE, PCE, TCA, Benzene, MTBE, and Vinyl Chloride) have been migrating underground for years unchecked. 2 of these sites, Microtech and Ball and Socket, have been listed by DEP as known hazards since 1998 and remain listed as hazards to this day.
Feb 19, 2005
The TCE Blog has launched*. It's about all things TCE (Trichloroethylene) related. As you may know, TCE was one of the main contaminants of concern in Cheshire. Not only can you jump directly to CT related News and read their coverage of the Cheshire PHA, but this website, Cancer in Cheshire, has been added as a permanent link to websites for communities exposed to TCE.
Final Public Health Assessment released. Based on review of existing data, findings confirm:
We hope you will read the PHA findings.
We hope you will tell people about this website. We hope you will contact us with your thoughts.
Other:
We have added detailed contamination summaries for many of Cheshire's EPA-identified contamination sites.
More than 75 unique Cheshire sites identified on List of Contaminated or Potentially Contaminated Sites compiled by CT Department of Environmental Protection, Feb 2004 (see pgs 64-67).
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* Disclosure: One of the Cancer in Cheshire website's cofounders is also founder of the TCE Blog.