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American Morning
Residents of Town in Rhode Island Believe They're Under Threat from Their Landfill
Aired September 07, 2001 - 11:36 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
JEANNE MESERVE, CNN ANCHOR: Many residents of a town in Rhode Island believe they're under threat from their landfill, and they've been raising a stink about more than the stench. The people of Johnston are convinced the waste site is responsible for illnesses running through the community.
CNN's Bill Delaney spoke with worried townspeople, as well as environmental officials, who say the fear and anger are not unjustified.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
BILL DELANEY, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): In the little town of Johnston, Rhode Island, outside of Providence, New England's largest landfill, the so-called central landfill, 154 acres, second largest waste site on the west coast. Declared a Superfund site in 1986 because of liquid industrial waste disposed there in the mid '70s.
And a place local people say, for years now, has made them sick.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: That's the house with cancer.
DELANEY: Patricia Major's home is about 2, 000 feet from the landfill.
PATRICIA MAJOR, JOHNSTON RESIDENT: This family, oh, young family, the wife had, oh, a tumor in her throat. This woman is suffering terribly with cancer. These people have been nauseous.
DELANEY: A litany of dozens of illnesses Patricia Major and her neighbors blame on toxins from the landfill leaking into their drinking water.
MAJOR: This is the house that his wife his breast cancer and asthma.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: We have more toxic waste...
DELANEY: Allegations targeted at officials of the Environmental Protection Agency at a bitter public hearing in late August.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We are the endangered residents. Put up the money!
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: If you can't sit down and conduct this meeting and then I will adjourn.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Then go home.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: There is a health issue. Wake up and smell the coffee!
DELANEY: Anger, fear, distrust the EPA considers seriously misplaced. The two studies, one in 1993, one released just this summer, concluded contaminants that declared the landfill to be declared a Superfund site do seep in the groundwater, only not in a manner or in sufficient amounts to cause humans harm.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: You people are telling us that everything is OK.
DELANEY: Not calming a community over the years shaken to its foundations.
(on camera): These abandoned houses were once within a thousand feet of the landfill. Several years ago, though, the Rhode Island Research Recovery Corporation, the part private, part governmental concern that runs the landfill, bought these houses out.
(voice-over): Twenty-six million, 80 home, many actually detached from their foundations and moved away from the landfill and failed hopes of reselling them.
Some 20 other home, though, farther from the landfill, 2,000 feet away, were also bought out and were eventually resold, homes like Patricia Majors, purchased three years ago from Resource Recovery Corporation. Major says she wasn't aware of the area's controversy in what seemed a pleasant, leafy Providence suburb, and now asks why millions would be spent out to buy homes if there weren't environmental problems? Problems, she says, should have been warned about, not to mention the times of the strong smell from the landfill, she says, causes her nausea and her husband breathing problems.
DELANEY: Landfill officials, though, say, back in the late 1980s, politicians forced the buyouts to win favor in Johnston and the corporation insists that those two EPA studies and their own $10 million study repeatedly found the landfill safe.
SHERRY G. MULHEARN, R.I. RESOURCES RECOVERY CORP.: This land fill is not a danger, to the are residents or to the community at large.
DELANEY: Still, to cope with what contaminants have been found at the site, Resource Recover is spending $30 million to protectively cap the entire site in special coating of polyethylene. To what people in Johnstone respond, what's needed now is a definitive study in the illness in their community, or another buyout.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: This is my town, sir! UNIDENTIFIED MALE: You just told me...
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: This is not your town.
DELANEY: A town where people say they are just sick of where they live.
Bill Delaney, CNN, Johnston, Rhode Island.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
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