Asbestos danger on Illinois’ beaches

Jeff Camplin (center) walks the shore of Illinois State Beach Park with Paul Kakuris and NBC Chicago's Carol Marin. Photo provided.

by Paul Peters

Jeffery Camplin and Paul Kakuris believe that the beaches of Lake Michigan in Illinois, from Chicago up to the northeastern edge of the state, may pose one of the greatest environmental health risks in the country.
The beaches, they say, contain several forms of asbestos in high levels.
This includes amphibole asbestos from Libby, Montana, a remote town of about 2,600 in the northwest corner of a sparsely populated state. According to the Center for Asbestos Related Disease Libby amphibole has caused the death of at least 290 people and the sickening of almost 2,000 more, and has been shown to cause a deadly form of cancer, mesothelioma, even at low doses.
To this day, CARD says 10 new cases of asbestos disease are diagnosed each month in Libby, and it is widely considered to be the most deadly Superfund site in the nation.
Yet Camplin and Kakuris believe what they have discovered in Illinois may be worse, as 2 million people are annually visiting beaches contaminated with Libby amphibole, and studies have shown that the counties along the shore have some of the highest asbestos disease rates in the country.
They also believe that, should the International Olympic Committee discover this pollution, it could jeopardize the Chicago’s chance to hold the 2016 Olympics.
And they assert that government agencies, like the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR), the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, (U.S. EPA), and several offices in the state of Illinois know about this problem and are actively covering it up, with the ATSDR committing scientific fraud in an effort to hide the dangers of this contamination.

A statement like this naturally invites skepticism. And, at first glance, it would be easy to dismiss Camplin and Kakuris as conspiracy theorists.
The ATSDR completed its most recent report on Illinois State Beach Park (ISBP) on March 10, 2009.
The report draws its conclusions using data from a September 2007 U.S. EPA study. It concludes that “recreational use of the beach is not expected to harm people’s health.”
The EPA study, which made the same conclusions, was proceeded by another ATSDR report released in 2007, a report by the University of Illinois, Chicago released in 2006, a report done by ATSDR and the Illinois Department of Public Health in 2000, and finally a 1998 report by the Illinois Department of Natural Resources (IDNR).
Each report states the same thing the 2009 report did, i.e., the park poses no threat.
On top of that, the site was been declared “a success story” by the EPA in 1991, when the agency finished its Superfund cleanup there.

When Jeff Camplin first heard about possible asbestos contamination at the Illinois Beach State Park (IBSP) in nearby Waukegan, he was a skeptic.
Camplin knows quite a bit about asbestos. Since 1988, he’s been an EPA-accredited asbestos abatement instructor. He is a certified professional environmental auditor, president of an environmental services company, and was named Environmental Safety Professional of the Year by the American Society of Safety Engineers in 2006.
In the late 1990s, while teaching asbestos abatement classes in Mundelein, Illinois, he heard about pieces of asbestos containing material (ACM) being found by workers at nearby Illinois Beach State Park (IBSP), and the cleanup effort underway.
At the time, he says, “I thought it was a waste of taxpayer’s money.”
He had heard from the local news, and from students who had worked cleaning the beaches that the asbestos was “non-friable” meaning it was safely contained in pieces of cement or other materials, and could not turn into breathable dust.

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