Through the Web, people from Resthaven area in Will County say they have discovered a troubling pattern of diseases they can’t easily explain.

By Joel Hood, Chicago Tribune reporter

Like millions of old friends and classmates reconnecting through Facebook after decades apart, former residents of tiny Resthaven had stories to share.

Their rural hometown in southern Will County had seemed an idyllic place to grow up in the 1970s, but now that they are in middle age, many are troubled by a pattern of serious diseases they can’t easily explain: breast cancers, colon cancers, leukemia, thyroid problems and various autoimmune and degenerative tissue problems.

“Knowing what I know now, I’m not going to sit still until I do right by the people I grew up with,” said Cathy Doolin, 51, a former Resthaven resident whose heavy metal count is so high that doctors once feared someone was trying to poison her. “This is about finding the truth.”
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So, what began as a way to reach out to long-lost friends has become an Erin Brockovich-style quest to find out what they may have been exposed to growing up and whether environmental contamination could explain why many have gotten sick.

No evidence links any of the illnesses to contamination in Resthaven, and health officials warn the cases are so complicated it be might be impossible to ever know for sure. It could simply be coincidence.

Residents in a rural area such as Resthaven are sometimes exposed to potentially harmful contaminants: pesticides from nearby farmland, discharge from power plants, landfill waste, radon gas, polluted well water and other hazardous chemicals that belie the natural beauty of the area.

Resthaven was the site of an illegal toxic waste dump throughout the 1970s, the extent of which was not well known or publicized at the time. Companies such as the former Mobil Oil, Kraft Foods and others dumped chemicals, plastics, oils, greases, solvents and other waste from several production plants stationed in the Chicago region, records show. EPA records indicate as many as 1,000 drums of potentially hazardous materials were buried at the site of an old septic cleaning service. The site was officially cleaned up in 1999, records show.

Soil samples collected at the site in the mid-1980s showed elevated levels of several known cancer-causing compounds, including chromium 6, benzene and styrene, as well as other harmful chemicals. But tests on numerous shallow backyard wells in and around Resthaven found no evidence that the toxins had leaked into drinking water.

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