Quincy, MA Patriot Ledger: Environmental Vigilance

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March 31, 2002

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LOCAL NEWS | SPORTS | LIFE & LEISURE | OPINION | DEATH NOTICES

OPINIONOUR VIEW: Environmental vigilance

By The Patriot Ledger

Residents have learned to stand up for themselves when it comes to environmental safety. It's a healthy sign after far too many years of ignorance and apathy over the dangers posed by pollution.

In Stoughton, Canton Street residents have taken the lead in investigating industrial pollution that they say threatens their health and devalues their property. A $2 million lawsuit filed by 13 Canton Street residents is part of the continued fallout from contamination fears that arose three and a half years ago, when the state ordered four families evacuated from their homes. A company linked to the contamination bought the homes and demolished two of them.

In Canton, residents are now learning that a long-closed airport off Neponset Street is polluted with a high PCB level, 9,000 times what is considered safe. The site, once home to an airport and later a scrap metal business, was presumed environmental safe for years. Now residents are being told a portion of the site - on the edge of the environmentally significant Fowl Meadow - has been an undiscovered environmental hazard for 30 years.

In Weymouth, officials are preparing a community health study of unprecedented scope and expense. More than 5,000 residents will be surveyed this spring to examine issues ranging from household accidents to disease outbreaks in neighborhoods. The study is prompted by longstanding worries among North Weymouth residents that cancer cases in their neighborhoods were connected to contamination from industrial properties along the Fore River. The survey will also be distributed to residents in Abington, Rockland and Hingham, where residents wonder if multiple sclerosis, asthma and other illnesses may be linked to contamination at the former South Weymouth Naval Air Station.

In Quincy, environmentalists and others are raising important questions about the conversion of three abandoned landfills into the Quarry Hills golf course project, which involved trucking about 13 million tons of Big Dig dirt into the area. They claim runoff from the huge mounds of dirt and clay stockpiled at Quarry Hills for the past four years has worsened flooding in Quincy and choked wetlands well downstream of the site.

In these examples and countless others, citizens are banding together to ask questions and pushing local officials for proper environmental monitoring and inspection. They may not have the answers, but they have questions and concerns, and they are right to take them to the proper authorities.

The nation is still dealing with the fallout from decades of ignorance or complacency over industrial pollution. The fight is not over, but citizens have learned to pay attention and ask questions.

Increasing public concern in the 1960s and 1970s over how chemical wastes might affect public health and the environment led to the creation in 1980 of the Superfund program to clean up after years of pollution and neglect. So it's disheartening here in 2002 to watch as the Bush administration says it will not seek to reauthorize the taxes that the chemical and oil industries have paid to finance the Superfund program. Any attempt by the administration to lighten the regulations governing hazardous material disposal or cleanup should be stopped in its tracks.

Citizens here on the South Shore and throughout the country are still struggling with the unhealthy aftereffects of past ignorance and shortsightedness surrounding environmental pollutants. Cutting the economic legs out from under the Superfund legislation helps no one.

copyright 2002 The Patriot Ledger

Transmitted March 30, 2002

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