EAST CHICAGO | Potentially dangerous levels of several possible cancer-causing and toxic chemicals were discovered in the air on the city's far north side earlier this month, but where they came from remains a mystery.
Using air quality monitoring techniques accepted by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, volunteers with two local nonprofit organizations took samples July 10 on 129th Street just south of BP's Whiting Refinery. They plan to discuss their findings at a news conference scheduled for Thursday morning.
"This stuff is far more deadly than (depletion of) ozone," said Denny Larson, executive director of Global Community Monitor, a San Francisco-based environmental coalition. The group trained local members of the Calumet Project and the Coalition for a Clean Environment in the use of the low-cost devices housed inside a 5-gallon plastic bucket.
Approved by the EPA as legitimate scientific activity in 1996, these "bucket brigades" of local residents keeping track of their area's air quality are active in 20 states and 17 countries.
"The reason we're doing this is because the federal government isn't," Larson said.
Neither is Indiana -- the group used standards set by states that regulate many of these potentially hazardous substances and applied their criteria to the local data, since Indiana has no such "levels of concern," he said.
Two possible cancer-causing chemicals -- thought to harm brain, heart and liver functioning -- and one that may be damaging to the lungs were found in high levels in the samples, along with nine other possible toxic substances, said Bessie Dent, Calumet Project coordinator.
One of the chemicals, considered "acutely toxic" in the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, was found to exceed EPA's reference levels by more than 40 times, Larson said.
"There has been little research into the synergistic effects of multiple chemicals ingested together," said Ruth Breech, program manager with Global Community Monitor. "The air samples demonstrate that people living in the area may be inhaling 14 toxic chemicals with every breath."
Where some of the poisons are coming from remains unknown, Larson said.
Though the samples were taken near BP's fence line, several of the toxic chemicals aren't even used at the refinery, according to its official Toxic Release Inventory -- a listing of substances emitted from the site.
Other chemicals also have been detected by the air monitors maintained by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers around its planned confined disposal facility for sediments to be dredged from the Indiana Harbor and Ship Canal, Larson said.
The news conference is scheduled for 10 a.m. Thursday near Broad and Spruce streets, not far from where the air samples were taken.
