David Protess’ students aren’t the only sleuths at Northwestern working to free innocent people from the threat of death. But the death row that several environmental engineering students are helping people escape from is a little different. Instead of a row of prison cells, it is a row of townhouses. And the method of execution is not lethal injection; that would be too quick and painless. Instead, the people in this death row have been injected with poisonous chemicals, over a period of more than 50 years, that have killed them with prostate cancer, lymphoma, leukemia, brain and liver cancer, birth defects and miscarriages.
Take a drive down Interstate 90 from Gary, Ind., into Chicago and you’ll see the South Side prison where the 7,500 residents of the Altgeld Gardens housing project reside. Toxic landfills are crammed between industrial facilities, abandoned factories, water treatment facilities. One driver said, “It looks like something out of Blade Runner or Independence Day after the bomb.” And what do these hundreds of industries contribute to their surroundings?
From the Calumet Water Reclamation Plant: benzene, a carcinogen that can cause leukemia and other blood disorders. From Pullman Industries, which allegedly maintained a sewage farm on the Altgeld Gardens site before the project was built in the early 1940s, and Sherwin Williams, a paint company: a legacy of lead and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, or PAHs.
The PAHs cause cancer. The lead hurts the children more than the adults. It comes from the sewage farm, but also from years of car exhaust and house paint before lead was banned from both. It mixes with the dirt the kids play on. They kick it up into the air, then breathe it in, gathering the metal in their bloodstreams that gives them neurological diseases, learning disabilities and behavioral problems. Ever wonder why some inner city kids have a hard time concentrating in school?
From the Chicago Housing Authority itself, we got PCBs, yet more cancer-causing chemicals, that came from oil inside of electrical transformers that janitors used to dump on the grounds.
Lawyer Jackie Hughes of Levy, Leopold and Associates, who is representing residents in a lawsuit against the CHA, has been walking around the projects talking to people about their diseases, à la Erin Brockovich.
“I feel very sad for them,” Hughes said Monday after visiting a family that has seen three members die of cancer, one of a birth defect and two others survive cancer and mental illness. “The majority are children and elderly. They don’t understand why this is happening to them or their families. But it is happening.”
The residents allege that the CHA’s efforts to clean up its own messes were too few and too ineffective and that the organization did nothing to stop the further industrialization and pollution of the neighborhood. The residents hope to get enough money to pay hospital bills and maybe rent in a building that is not located in the middle of an environmental wasteland.
And residents do have another small ray of hope. For the past three years, NU students working with McCormick Prof. Kim Gray have been doing research on how to use plants to remove pollutants from soil. A bit late to help most at Altgeld Gardens, McCormick seniors Joe Fiegl and Bryan McDonnell are hoping the technology will be incorporated into the CHA’s $1.5 billion “Plan for Transformation” that will rehabilitate public housing. Lawyers are also using NU research on Altgeld contamination as background information.
If the CHA wants to spend its money effectively, it should ensure that the environment on and around the projects also is rehabilitated. After years of innocent people dying, it’s probably the least it can do.
