DDT Cleanup Continues for Mid-Michigan Town
St. Louis, Michigan - During recent summers birds were found littered around the town, poisoned with a long-banned pesticide.
This summer? The school athletic grounds, where kids practice football and softball, are being dug up after it was discovered they too are contaminated with DDT.
It is the latest chapter in a seemingly endless effort to rid this small, rural mid-Michigan town of toxic chemicals that have plagued it since the 1960s.
..........the Velsicol Chemical Corp., formerly Michigan Chemical, which manufactured pesticides until 1963 and abandoned loads of DDT, which was banned 40 years ago........While four of those yards have DDT in excess of human health limits, one has excess polybrominated biphenyls, or PBBs, a flame retardant chemical Velisocol also manufactured and, in 1973, infamously mixed up with a cattle feed supplement, which led to widespread contamination in Michigan.
Thousands of cattle and other livestock were poisoned, about 500 farms were quarantined and people across Michigan were exposed to the chemical linked to cancer, reproduction problems and endocrine disruption.........But even though things seem to be moving in the right direction, residents remain skeptical current cleanup efforts will be enough to allow St. Louis to turn the page on this toxic chapter any time soon, Smith said.
“The community learned when this happened a long time ago, when the EPA says things like, ‘trust us we have our experts, and this is what’s going on, and this will work’, we have no choice but to be skeptical,” Smith said.
“We’ve heard all that before, and 30 some years later, we still have all of these problems.”
http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/31568-the-more-they-dig-the-more-they-find-ddt-cleanup-continues-for-mid-michigan-town
