NDCA

Connecticut Post

Milford site cleanup being mapped out

FRANK JULIANO

Article Last Updated: 04/26/2008 11:34:01 PM EDT

MILFORD — Nearly five years after a toxic chemical was reported in the groundwater and soil of an industrial site here, state officials and representatives of four affected companies discussed cleanup plans last week.

But that is little comfort to Debbie Smith, of Ansonia, who believes that her husband, Ed, was at least the second construction worker at the Milford Power Co. site to die of cancer linked to exposure to the chemical.

The conference call Tuesday that included state Attorney General Richard Blumenthal; Graham Stevens, the brownfields coordinator for the state Department of Environmental Protection, and the property owners did not set any timetable for removing the trichloroethylene, or TCE.

Stevens said the four companies: Bic Corp., Milford Power Co., Jordan Realty and Gas Equipment Engineering, are working on their Phase III environmental studies, which detail exactly where on their property the once-commonly used solvent is, and suggest methods to remove it.

A fifth company, Northeast Electronics Corp., is not part of the partial consent order that Blumenthal won in court in 2005, but is engaged in a separate TCE cleanup overseen by federal officials.

“Northeast Electronics has completed much of its Phase III, and this department has already accepted Bic’s study,” Stevens said.

A “hot spot” of known soil contamination on Shelland Street leading into the Milford Power Co. facility has already been remediated, the DEP official said, as has the soil under four buildings at the nearby Caswell Cove Condominiums.

“There were 8,400 tons of impacted soil removed from the area of concern on Shelland Street that were taken to an approved landfill, most likely out of state,” he said.

Debbie Smith said that her husband got very sick working on the power plant construction, developing a large tumor in his neck that turned out to be a very aggressive cancer.

Neil Clifford, the blasting contractor on the power plant construction, died in 2005 of a rare form of cancer that he believed was caused by exposure to TCE. He had undergone a bone marrow transplant in an effort to battle the disease.

Joe Ambrosini, the business manager of Laborers Local 665, said union members suspect that Ed Smith’s cancer was also caused by work-related exposure to TCE. “We’ve always kind of speculated among ourselves; Ed had throat cancer, which isn’t usual.”

In fact, his widow said, Ed Smith didn’t smoke and had no family history of cancer. Smith died last May 9 at age 55.

“He was the first one on the Milford Power job and the last to leave it. My husband really suffered,” Debbie Smith said. “He had two operations and after the second one he lost the ability to speak. He had to be fed through a tube in his stomach. But he wanted to live and he was willing to try whatever treatments they had.”

But Ed Smith was denied workers’ compensation benefits, his widow said, because he had worked at so many construction sites over the years.

“We had a hearing in New Haven and they denied us 3-2 because Ed had also worked on the Raymark site in Stratford, which was contaminated,” she said. “They told us they couldn’t determine whether, if he got it from the job, which job it was.”

Clifford, Smith and other workers would get soaked by the contaminated water, which collected in ponds and sprayed up after blasting, the men’s families said.

Although the DEP doesn’t certify any job site as safe, Stevens said that Bic Corp. officials paid for their facilities to be checked and determined that they were safe for workers. The company has since moved much of its manufacturing to Shelton.

“Bic filed its Phase III report in January,” spokeswoman Linda Kwong said. “Bic will continue to work with the DEP until this investigation is completed and is committed to doing all that is necessary and reasonable as a long-standing, responsible neighbor to provide assurances about the safety of Bic’s manufacturing operations.”

State and city health department officials checked the Milford Power Co. plant itself when construction was completed.

The point of origin seems to be the Jordan Realty Co. property on Bic Drive, where “hot spots” of up to 60,000 parts per billion of the industrial solvent, a suspected carcinogen, were measured, officials say.

The TCE was discovered in 1999 by an environmental analyst hired by the Milford Power Co., which had purchased a portion of the Jordan Realty site to build the 544-megawatt generating plant. But DEP officials at the time failed to follow up on the report, and it wasn’t discovered until 2003 when workers contacted the Connecticut Post.

House Speaker James A. Amann, D-Milford, who lives at Caswell Cove, and then-Sen. Winthrop S. Smith Jr. later pushed through a notification bill that requires that workers be told of any job site contamination.

Debbie Smith said she knows that much has been done to address the problem, but that she still worries about worker safety, especially as her son, Jeremy Smith, 21, begins his career as a laborer with Local 665. “I’m worried about him, sure, but they are being a lot more careful than they were years ago,” she said.