EAST LIVERPOOL – At the KSU Environmental Justice Conference Saturday, Lauraine Breda spoke about her experiences battling landfills that degrade the quality of the natural world and the health of the people who live around them.
Breda lives adjacent to a Lafarge Corporation demolition-debris landfill in Trumbull County. After becoming alarmed about the lack of ground-water and air-quality controls and suspicious about the quantity of cancer-causing airborne metals, she started conferring with her neighbors. They formed an activist group, Citizens Against Lordstown Landfills (CALL).
Legitimate demolition debris includes wood, shingles, bricks and even asbestos. The material that she watches the trucks unload every day from her front porch often is a gray powdery substance. This is the form of the waste after it is pulverized and processed so that it is easier to spread and ship by rail car.
Breda pointed out that the rail cars do not have lids to prevent the loose material from blowing out during shipment, and pulverizing makes the material impossible to identify.
She showed aerial photographs of the Lafarge property where it drained the wetlands and filled the void with dangerous red slag. Hundreds of fish had died from this stigma and rotted, releasing a repugnant odor. As Breda pointed out the green, moldy slime and maggots, she remarked, “This is what is left of the wetlands.” Lafarge did remove the red slag after being required to do so, but the wetlands never recovered.
On Martin Luther King Blvd. in Youngstown, Warren Recycling released opaque clouds of dust into the neighborhood and the residents there suffered from chronic sinus issues and pink eye. According to Breda, the EPA could find no reason to shut down the site despite an obvious urgent public health hazard and pleas from the people. She talked about the children who lived in the home across the street who suffered nightly with pillow-soaking nosebleeds. Eventually the company filed for bankruptcy and the cost of clean-up soared to $12 million, according to Breda.
She outlined the importance of facing these landfill issues by correlating them with social, economic, health and environmental problems. Not only is the immediate wildlife and its ecosystem destroyed, but residents suffer from a shared list of illnesses, including asthma, thyroid, skin and reproductive disorders and various cancers.
Breda and her neighbors have peculiar skin blotches that she referred to as “arsenic patches” because they are attributed to heavy-metal poisoning. Private testing of their properties has revealed the presence of unnatural arsenic.
A man in the audience pointed out that an odor is not just a smell, but a chemical release. To smell something is to be exposed to a chemical of some kind, he said.
"Write and speak to your legislators," Breda urged. "Share information and encourage others. Notify the authorities and the EPA about citizen concerns and refuse to give up."
She implored the audience not to allow these companies to divide, intimidate, frustrate, and retaliate. According to Breda, these are the tactics with which they operate when faced with complaints. Destructive businesses of this nature tend to select run-down, economically depressed locations to “victimize.”
“When will we say enough is enough?” she asked. “If not us, then who? If not now, then when?”
