The Autoimmune Epidemic: Bodies Gone Haywire in a World Out of Balance--and the Cutting-Edge Science that Promises Hope (No Series) (15 page)

The coalition decided to go door to door and try to find out who else was ill. Rhonda, along with others, started going from house to house, handing out pamphlets, encouraging residents to come to their meetings to talk about the excessive number of neighbors suffering from autoimmune diseases and whether or not the toxic site at 858 East Ferry might have anything to do with their debility.

“On just the two streets that I canvased we found seventeen people with lupus—eight on Bissell and nine on Moselle,” Rhonda recalls. “Some had already died by the time we started knocking on doors.” Bissell and Moselle were each only three blocks long. By the end of that process the group had found thirty-seven residents in the immediate vicinity with lupus.

Headlines announcing “East Side Residents Fear Site May Be Causing Lupus” and “Decision to Shelve Cleanup Draws Fire” began to appear in the local
Buffalo News.
The number of concerned citizens who wanted to learn more about the toxic waste site multiplied. Darius Pridgen of True Bethel offered his church as a meeting site to allow the Toxic Waste/Lupus Coalition to accommodate its increasing membership. Still, while the coalition’s numbers were growing, their clout remained nil—despite two city council members spearheading their cause. They were a group of African Americans in a downtrodden neighborhood. No one cared. No one was paying attention.

They needed reinforcements. And they had a hunch as to where they might get just that. At the coalition’s request, Dr. John Vena, then a professor in the Department of Social and Preventive Medicine and director of the Environment and Society Institute (ESI) at the University at Buffalo, joined their cause and agreed to organize a university-community partnership. The institute occasionally provided funding to examine environmental problems relevant to the regional community; helping the residents of East Ferry with their environmental health crisis was exactly in keeping with the institute’s mission statement.

Having secured Vena’s involvement, the Toxic Waste/Lupus Coalition decided to call a community-wide meeting at True Bethel Baptist Church, the windows of which looked directly out upon the toxic waste site at 858 East Ferry. The coalition invited local residents, Vena, and David Locey, a midcareer environmental engineer who had been working for New York’s Department of Environmental Conservation for more than a decade and who had overseen the initial evaluation of 858 East Ferry Street.

As the date of the meeting approached, Afrika held an unusual press conference. He stood alone in the toxic field of 858 East Ferry and told reporters about the dangerous levels of lead and PCBs the DEC had found there. He related how for more than a year the Toxic Waste/Lupus Coalition had been asking the city and state to deal with the problem, but still nothing was being done to remediate the site or to fence off the area. It was an effective strategy. On April 22, 2001, the
Buffalo News
came out with a photo of Afrika standing alone in the open, contaminated lot. The caption announced that the next day there would be a community awareness forum at True Bethel open to all residents of the City of Buffalo.

Twenty-four hours later, after having known about the property for four years, the city suddenly located the funds to pay for a fence and erected one around the entire site. A sign went up stating No Trespassing, but the words “hazardous waste” were not mentioned.

On April 23, 2001, Betty Jean Grant, Ausur Afrika, Antoine Thompson, John Vena, Rhonda Dixon Lee, Marion Jordan, and Judith Anderson as well as nearly fifty others from the community gathered at the True Bethel Baptist Church. They wanted answers from the Department of Environmental Conservation.

That night, they would learn not only about the unexpected extent of the problem at 858 East Ferry Street, but about two other toxic waste sites in their midst that had also been leaching contaminants into the area for decades without residents’ knowledge.

“THE SITUATION IS WORSE THAN YOU THINK”

That night was the first time the community heard about the full extent of the pollution on the East Ferry site from the DEC’s representative, David Locey. Many sat there in utter disbelief and horror as they listened to the report: the lead ash, which in some areas existed at a concentration nearly forty times higher than the EPA’s safety limit, sat two inches to as much as two feet thick on the surface of the property. Not only was the soil full of lead, but PCB-contaminated sediment had been found on and near the lot from industrial debris—tires, televisions, and construction rubble—illegally dumped at the locale. The lead contamination, the DEC suspected, probably extended to the ground under the used-car lot west of the site, which was as large as the lot at 858 East Ferry itself. Usually, the DEC would run more soil and water tests to determine if the surrounding area was affected, but the Superfund, as everyone knew, was bone dry. The property at 858 East Ferry could not be cleaned up until the state put more money in the Superfund, Locey informed residents. The DEC had no way of knowing if or when that might happen.

Afrika was incensed. “Now you’re talking about doing more surveys,” he said. “Why are you wasting time with more surveys when you’ve already issued a recommendation for remediation?”

The meeting was fraught with conflict, which only intensified when the State University of New York at Buffalo environmentalists working with Vena presented a map to residents that night charting two other major waste sites that had, for years prior to being cleaned up, lingered unaddressed in the East Ferry and Delavan-Grider neighborhoods. The history of the sites and their rampant contamination—and how long it had taken for them to be addressed—left residents doubly infuriated.

The first of these other sites, located at 537 East Delavan Avenue, sat two blocks south of both Marion Jordan and LaShekia Chatman’s homes and two blocks north of East Ferry Street. The lot had been owned by a company named Vibratech Inc., which had for years manufactured trucking and railroad parts. The industrial facility, in operation since 1927, had also been used as a paint coating operation, a tire warehouse, and, most recently, an automobile operation that dismantled cars for their recyclable materials.

The DEC had investigated the site in the mid 1980s and found the 6,250-square-foot locale to be heavily contaminated with degreasing solvents such as trichloroethylene (TCE), vinyl chloride, and other particularly dangerous toxic agents commonly used in the manufacturing of metal items to clean off oils, greases, and other petroleum products, as well as a large number of other volatile organic compounds, known as VOCs. VOCs vaporize easily at room temperature and enter the surrounding atmosphere, where, studies show, vapors can linger as pollution for long periods of time.

The VOC contamination was the result of repeated and frequent industrial spillage over the past fifty years. In addition, ten ten-thousand-gallon tanks full of degreasing solvents as well as other chemicals—four below ground and six above—that had never been disposed of were leaching chemicals onto the site. PCB spills from transformers also soaked some areas. The local Scajaquada Creek, which accepted the majority of stormwater overflow in this area of Buffalo, was located about eleven hundred feet south of the property. The DEC survey in the mid 1980s reported that TCE-contaminated runoff from the site was found in high concentrations in nearby groundwater along the creek as well as down along a railroad spur area in the rear of the Vibratech facility. Rains caused TCE-laden runoff to course into the stream and railroad spur area, and TCE and other VOCs were continuing to leach slowly into the area groundwater from the facility’s chemical spillage. Full remediation of the soil would be a huge and costly challenge.

Little was done in the 1980s to address the problem. At that time, only the four below-ground tanks of degreasing solvents, fuels, and unknown chemicals were emptied. Despite the fact that the soil and groundwater were contaminated at what were termed “high concentrations,” the state classified the site as an inactive hazardous waste site—the area was not deemed as “presently constituting a significant threat to human health or the environment.” The reasoning was thus: the area was restricted from public use, and the localized contaminated groundwater did not affect public drinking-water supplies since drinking water in the area came from public water storage sources. Cleaning it up was not a priority.

A decade later, in 1995, the same year that LaShekia Chatman, who lived amid this constellation of contaminated locales, was diagnosed with lupus, the DEC finally began full remediation at the East Delavan site two blocks away from her home. Much of the TCE-and PCB-contaminated soil was turned up and excavated from the facility. The six remaining full tanks of chemical waste were emptied, and the basement hazardous waste storage area was closed off. Even so, in May 1996, follow-up testing showed that volatile organic compound contamination still existed in the groundwater, albeit at lower levels—slightly half of what it had been prior to remediation in 1994. However, in one monitored area, the contamination level of VOCs had actually risen after the cleanup.

In March 1997, the DEC filed its final report, the record of decision, indicating that the site at 537 East Delavan was taken care of. The VOC-polluted soil, runoff, and groundwater that still exist there flowed down to the nearby sewer and were pumped away, with the sewer surge acting as a kind of natural barrier preventing any outward migration of contaminated soil and water from the spot.

The cleanup process had taken ten years. Aside from the question of whether the cleanup was fully complete, the fact would always remain that TCE—a highly volatile organic chemical that quickly and invisibly vaporizes into the surrounding air, including when the toxic vapors are unearthed as the soil is excavated during cleanup—had seeped into the environs for decades.

That night was also the first time residents learned of a third toxic hotspot—a PCB “inactive hazardous waste site” located at 318 Urban Street—a few blocks south of East Ferry Street and little more than a stone’s throw from Rhonda Dixon Lee’s home. The site had been investigated in 1990 but was not remediated until 1999. The New York Department of Environmental Conservation investigated the site, which was owned by General Electric and the Pyramid Steel Corporation, as part of its routine oversight into industrial manufacturing plants. They found it to be heavily contaminated with PCBs, which had been seeping into the ground for decades. Although the manufacture of PCB had been outlawed in the United States in 1976, it was used for decades prior to that as an industrial adhesive—a kind of toxic glue—in manufactured heat and ventilation systems, appliances, and electrical parts. The building had been used to store such electrical equipment. Both the surface and subsurface soils were discovered to be heavily contaminated by PCBs escaping from the equipment.

Starting in 1999, the area soil was removed and the PCB-laced drains leading from the facility into the sewer system were cleaned. But such environmental cleanup can never return an area to its former unblemished state. Residents learned that night that traces of the chemical remained in nearby sewers and that the sewer system ran through a heavily populated part of the East Ferry area, where, local advocates worried, PCB levels might still pose some health risk.

Together, this string of waste sites formed a kind of toxic Orion’s belt that stretched across the East Ferry and Delavan-Grider neighborhoods—only this Orion’s belt remained dangerously invisible to the naked eye. All three of these sites, all within less than a mile of Grant’s Variety Shop, contained contaminants that were known to be implicated in immune dysfunction and, in many cases, were tied directly to autoimmune disease.

Lead, a well-documented neurotoxin, is not a substance that scientists have studied a great deal as a trigger of autoimmune disease, or autogen. But that isn’t because researchers don’t believe it is one. By the time scientists fully recognized autoimmunity and its umbrella of diseases in the 1970s, lead was already on its way to being understood as one of the most noxious substances on earth. Asking the question of whether it could also promote autoimmune disease was pushed aside by the pressing scientific effort to understand lead’s role in impairing neural development in children. Nevertheless, in 2005, in research unrelated to the Buffalo lupus cluster, researchers set out to discover whether one of the additional legacies of lead hidden in our environment might be that it also tampers with the human immune system. Indeed, exposure to lead in lab animals disrupts immune-system cells that normally control runaway immune responses and prevent the autoimmune response from happening.

In the years between 1985 and 1995, as the site at East Delavan Street was going through various stages of DEC investigation and remediation, scientists in labs across the globe—including California, England, Italy, and France—were becoming extremely concerned about the emerging connection between TCE exposure and autoimmune disease, be it through vapor inhalation, skin contact, or ingestion. Occupational studies of workers exposed to the chemical through their jobs had already begun to show that those workers had a higher risk of developing lupus, scleroderma, and other autoimmune diseases. Indeed, in 1997, when the DEC filed its record of decision on East Delavan Street and deemed it remediated, Arkansas scientists Kathleen Gilbert and Neil Pumford were already immersed in research that would lead to their series of groundbreaking studies proving TCE to be a highly potent autoimmune-disease and lupus trigger.

During those same years, residents had been exposed to leaching PCBs at 318 Urban Street. PCBs, like plastic additives such as bisphenol A (BPA) and common pesticides, are endocrine-disrupting chemicals that have been shown in numerous lab studies to stimulate increased production of autoantibodies—antibodies against self—which are the hallmark of autoimmunity in action. Indeed, as we have seen in the previous chapter, the science demonstrating the way in which estrogen disruptors such as PCBs promote autoimmune disease is emerging with profoundly disturbing conclusions.