GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. - Neighbors to an old landfill in Grand Rapids fear the contamination at the property may be linked to a cancer spike near Indiana Avenue SW.
"My aunts and uncles were children [and] they were playing in these dumps," said Kari Johnson, whose family spent generations living on Indiana Avenue. "And that is the generation right now that we just see dropping."
The landfill closed in 1973 due to improper operations and was classified as a Superfund site by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in 1992. The property accepted waste from titans of West Michigan industry and commerce including Amway Corporation, Meijer Inc. and Wolverine Worldwide.
Johnson and her neighbors saw a pattern of cancer diagnoses and calculated 70 cases on Indiana Avenue in the last few decades.
The joke around the block years ago was the Indiana Avenue curse—where everybody died, Johnson said.
"And then...it was almost every year or every six months, someone from this street was starting to pass away," she said.
Johnson and her neighbors started the Facebook group, "Westside Cancer Crisis," which now has almost 300 members. She said they currently know of 150 families in the area with one or more people diagnosed with or killed by cancer.
"It's hard to believe that it's just genetics when we laid out the ribbons, and it was one to two per home on a street," Johnson said. "And that just seems very unreal to me."
►Related: Kent County Health Department PFAS FAQ
According to EPA records, some of the primary chemicals of concern found at the site were antimony, arsenic, chromium, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) and 1,1-dichlorethane.
The landfill was capped with clay in 2000.
"The remedy is and has been protective since the completion of construction and is protecting from the above identified risks," the EPA said.
It's not easy to make a connection between an exposure to contamination and cancer right away, said Brian Hartl, an epidemiologist at the Kent County Health Department.
"The [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] in their protocols talk about hundreds of these [cancer spikes] being reported to the CDC over the course of time," Hartl said. "And very few of them have actually seen an association between a cancer type and an environmental exposure. It's just a challenging thing."
The Health Department is helping the group organize its data collection before analyzing the findings. Hartl said a cluster of rare cancers would lead to a deeper analysis.
"The thing that we struggle with sometimes is if there's multiple forms of cancer," he said. "All those cancers have different causes and different...behavioral factors or environmental factors that cause those cases. So if you see a randomized clustering of those cases then it's very challenging to prove anything in terms of commonalities in the causation."
Hartl said this is the second possible cancer cluster the department is investigating, along with a study of how PFAS-ridden waste dumped by Wolverine Worldwide may have affected those who drank contaminated groundwater in northern Kent County.
The Kent County Health Department has released some answers to frequently asked questions about PFAS. You can view that here.
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