LeROY, N.Y. — The residents of LeRoy would like their town back.
Many hoped life in this tidy village in western New York, upended by a bizarre outbreak of Tourette’s-like symptoms since the fall, could return to normal after doctors diagnosed nearly 20 teenage girls in the town with conversion disorder — in other words, mass hysteria.
But in LeRoy, where months of national scrutiny have trained a harsh light onto the town’s murky environmental past, the diagnosis has failed to quiet fears that something else may be to blame. And it has raised broader questions among neighbors about whether the town, home to one of the largest Superfund sites in New York, is safe.
“We aren’t buying what you’re selling!” Patrick Frauley, a parent in the district, shouted at school officials during a recent public meeting about the outbreak in a packed auditorium at LeRoy High School.
Frustrated experts and school officials have warned that refusing to accept the diagnosis of stress-related “conversion disorder” could exacerbate the girls’ symptoms. But suspicion has come easily in LeRoy, where unanswered questions over a decades-old chemical spill have sown fear into the tight-knit community. Parents have turned their heads toward the natural gas wells standing amid the school’s athletic fields. And suddenly, in this town of just over 7,000 people, residents are not sure who they can trust.
“The kids are afraid. The parents are afraid. Everyone is afraid,” said Don Antinore, the owner of Cafe LeRoy Plus on Main Street. “Even if this thing with the kids isn’t connected to all these environmental issues we have, we’re not protected. Nobody is protecting us. We know that now.”
“It’s as if somebody is holding a giant magnifying glass over this town,” Antinore said. “And we’re going to see things like we never saw before.”
That sentiment has spread quickly through LeRoy, a town surrounded by rail lines where neighbors pause to chat over coffee between errands downtown and discuss the latest on the more than 15 teenage girls, one teenage boy and 36-year-old woman whose lives have been interrupted by uncontrollable tics. Many of the young women are said to be improving. But as residents learn more about the Dec. 6, 1970, train derailment that unleashed a ton of cyanide crystals and 30,000 gallons of the toxic industrial chemical trichloroethene, or TCE, into the woods just outside LeRoy, the panic in the town has proven more difficult to contain.
In the days following the derailment, residents say, teenagers in LeRoy ventured out to the wreck where they partied and collected the beer bottles that spilled out of the train cars, unaware of the toxic brew of chemicals beneath their feet. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, the Lehigh Valley Railroad cleaned up the cyanide but left the TCE untouched.
A year later, after residents nearby complained of an unusual smell, the railroad used fresh water to try to flush away the TCE but only succeeded in forcing the chemical further into the ground, where it contaminated the town’s aquifer and at least 49 private wells in the area.
For the next 20 years, the state has acknowledged, the carcinogen flowed freely in a four-mile-long toxic plume. The plume flows east, away from the high school, and the EPA began monitoring the site and installing filtration systems in the affected homes in the early 1990s. But health officials say it’s impossible to know for how long or to what extent people living near the spill were exposed to the trichloroethene.
In fact, until the outbreak of tics attracted the attention of environmental activists, most people in the town say they had no idea they were living next to a Superfund area — a federally designated hazardous waste site.
“Nobody told me anything was spilled and nobody came to test my water for years,” said Tom Yauchzee, who lives within the plume. He and his wife, who had a newborn at the time, said they first suspected something may be wrong when they noticed a foul smell a few days after the spill. A week later, the rubber appliques in their bathtub began to dissolve.
“It puts a lot of doubt in your mind about whether you can believe these officials, any of them,” he said. “And I’m sure that’s what these people are thinking up at the school. You can’t blame ’em. There’s just a lot of mistrust.”
The lack of transparency has made many in LeRoy particularly skeptical of assurances by experts and medical professionals that the tics have no environmental cause. When a expert panel presented its environmental findings at the school meeting in a dizzying ramble of figures and technical language, parents grew frustrated.
“You’re talking to these people like they know what you’re talking about,” Frauley complained to the school officials. “We come down here and you tell us ‘CDC this and that’. I just want to know, what are you doing to protect my kid? What are you doing to protect these peoples’ children?”
Nearly four miles away, just off a country road, workers clad in white, space-suit-like hazmat gear moved rusting barrels filled with soil from the 1970 spill. The EPA said the soil in the barrels is nontoxic, but acknowledged that the cleanup of the Superfund site has yet to be completed.
Melissa Cianci and her husband Craig looked out at the scene through the bare trees and shook their heads. “Half the town feeds their kids venison from the deer we hunt out there,” said Cianci, who lives close to the spill. Cianci’s teenage daughter does not have tics but started to suffer from migraines a few months ago, debilitating headaches the family believes are related to the Superfund site behind their property.
Now national environmental groups and figures like Erin Brockovich, the environmental crusader who linked a cluster of cancer cases in California to contaminated drinking water in 1993, have descended on the small town, and they’re asking tough questions about why the cleanup has taken so long to complete.
In 1997, the state Department of Environmental Conservation recommended that the railroad complete the cleanup through “soil vapor extraction,” a step that has not yet taken place. A spokeswoman for the EPA said the agency is currently reviewing plans for the process but declined to comment further.
Lois Gibbs, a parent-turned-activist who in the 1970s helped expose the buried toxic waste and water contamination in Love Canal, less than 70 miles west of LeRoy, has weighed in on the scare over the girls’ Tourette’s-like symptoms.
“Even after the girls get better, people will spend a piece of every day wondering if it’s going to come back or wondering if they’re going to get cancer,” said Gibbs, whose group, the Center for Health, Environment and Justice, has called for town officials to conduct a more comprehensive environmental assessment. “The longer this goes on without any clear answers, it’s going to do real damage to this town. Not just physically but psychologically as well.”
Antinore agrees: “We are country folk. Rednecks. Just tell us what it is so we can fix it.”
Mara.Gay@thedaily.com
Many hoped life in this tidy village in western New York, upended by a bizarre outbreak of Tourette’s-like symptoms since the fall, could return to normal after doctors diagnosed nearly 20 teenage girls in the town with conversion disorder — in other words, mass hysteria.
But in LeRoy, where months of national scrutiny have trained a harsh light onto the town’s murky environmental past, the diagnosis has failed to quiet fears that something else may be to blame. And it has raised broader questions among neighbors about whether the town, home to one of the largest Superfund sites in New York, is safe.
“We aren’t buying what you’re selling!” Patrick Frauley, a parent in the district, shouted at school officials during a recent public meeting about the outbreak in a packed auditorium at LeRoy High School.
Frustrated experts and school officials have warned that refusing to accept the diagnosis of stress-related “conversion disorder” could exacerbate the girls’ symptoms. But suspicion has come easily in LeRoy, where unanswered questions over a decades-old chemical spill have sown fear into the tight-knit community. Parents have turned their heads toward the natural gas wells standing amid the school’s athletic fields. And suddenly, in this town of just over 7,000 people, residents are not sure who they can trust.
“The kids are afraid. The parents are afraid. Everyone is afraid,” said Don Antinore, the owner of Cafe LeRoy Plus on Main Street. “Even if this thing with the kids isn’t connected to all these environmental issues we have, we’re not protected. Nobody is protecting us. We know that now.”
“It’s as if somebody is holding a giant magnifying glass over this town,” Antinore said. “And we’re going to see things like we never saw before.”
That sentiment has spread quickly through LeRoy, a town surrounded by rail lines where neighbors pause to chat over coffee between errands downtown and discuss the latest on the more than 15 teenage girls, one teenage boy and 36-year-old woman whose lives have been interrupted by uncontrollable tics. Many of the young women are said to be improving. But as residents learn more about the Dec. 6, 1970, train derailment that unleashed a ton of cyanide crystals and 30,000 gallons of the toxic industrial chemical trichloroethene, or TCE, into the woods just outside LeRoy, the panic in the town has proven more difficult to contain.
In the days following the derailment, residents say, teenagers in LeRoy ventured out to the wreck where they partied and collected the beer bottles that spilled out of the train cars, unaware of the toxic brew of chemicals beneath their feet. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, the Lehigh Valley Railroad cleaned up the cyanide but left the TCE untouched.
A year later, after residents nearby complained of an unusual smell, the railroad used fresh water to try to flush away the TCE but only succeeded in forcing the chemical further into the ground, where it contaminated the town’s aquifer and at least 49 private wells in the area.
For the next 20 years, the state has acknowledged, the carcinogen flowed freely in a four-mile-long toxic plume. The plume flows east, away from the high school, and the EPA began monitoring the site and installing filtration systems in the affected homes in the early 1990s. But health officials say it’s impossible to know for how long or to what extent people living near the spill were exposed to the trichloroethene.
In fact, until the outbreak of tics attracted the attention of environmental activists, most people in the town say they had no idea they were living next to a Superfund area — a federally designated hazardous waste site.
“Nobody told me anything was spilled and nobody came to test my water for years,” said Tom Yauchzee, who lives within the plume. He and his wife, who had a newborn at the time, said they first suspected something may be wrong when they noticed a foul smell a few days after the spill. A week later, the rubber appliques in their bathtub began to dissolve.
“It puts a lot of doubt in your mind about whether you can believe these officials, any of them,” he said. “And I’m sure that’s what these people are thinking up at the school. You can’t blame ’em. There’s just a lot of mistrust.”
The lack of transparency has made many in LeRoy particularly skeptical of assurances by experts and medical professionals that the tics have no environmental cause. When a expert panel presented its environmental findings at the school meeting in a dizzying ramble of figures and technical language, parents grew frustrated.
“You’re talking to these people like they know what you’re talking about,” Frauley complained to the school officials. “We come down here and you tell us ‘CDC this and that’. I just want to know, what are you doing to protect my kid? What are you doing to protect these peoples’ children?”
Nearly four miles away, just off a country road, workers clad in white, space-suit-like hazmat gear moved rusting barrels filled with soil from the 1970 spill. The EPA said the soil in the barrels is nontoxic, but acknowledged that the cleanup of the Superfund site has yet to be completed.
Melissa Cianci and her husband Craig looked out at the scene through the bare trees and shook their heads. “Half the town feeds their kids venison from the deer we hunt out there,” said Cianci, who lives close to the spill. Cianci’s teenage daughter does not have tics but started to suffer from migraines a few months ago, debilitating headaches the family believes are related to the Superfund site behind their property.
Now national environmental groups and figures like Erin Brockovich, the environmental crusader who linked a cluster of cancer cases in California to contaminated drinking water in 1993, have descended on the small town, and they’re asking tough questions about why the cleanup has taken so long to complete.
In 1997, the state Department of Environmental Conservation recommended that the railroad complete the cleanup through “soil vapor extraction,” a step that has not yet taken place. A spokeswoman for the EPA said the agency is currently reviewing plans for the process but declined to comment further.
Lois Gibbs, a parent-turned-activist who in the 1970s helped expose the buried toxic waste and water contamination in Love Canal, less than 70 miles west of LeRoy, has weighed in on the scare over the girls’ Tourette’s-like symptoms.
“Even after the girls get better, people will spend a piece of every day wondering if it’s going to come back or wondering if they’re going to get cancer,” said Gibbs, whose group, the Center for Health, Environment and Justice, has called for town officials to conduct a more comprehensive environmental assessment. “The longer this goes on without any clear answers, it’s going to do real damage to this town. Not just physically but psychologically as well.”
Antinore agrees: “We are country folk. Rednecks. Just tell us what it is so we can fix it.”
Mara.Gay@thedaily.com
