Asbestos danger on Illinois’ beaches

Aerial photo of Midwest generation plant (left) with Johns-Manville site (right).

The state park bordered a former Johns-Manville plant Superfund site, where asbestos products had been manufactured for 60 years, so he didn’t think it was surprising that ACM would wash up.
“When I had heard that a few pieces were showing up on the beach, and I saw that the state was paying guys to put on moon suits and respirators to clean it, my first reaction was that seemed like a little overkill to me,” Camplin says.
But in April of 2003, Camplin got a call from Paul Kakuris. Kakuris was – and still is – president of the Illinois Dunesland Preservation Society, the environmental organization that co-founded Illinois Beach State Park in 1948. He is also a coastal processes scientist.
Kakuris, Camplin says, “Tends to talk really intense and really dramatic,and he was trying to tell me ‘Hey, there’s asbestos all over this beach,’ and I said ‘Look, I teach in this industry, I’m a professional in this industry, and from what I’ve heard, it’s not really a big deal.’”
But Kakuris persisted, and Camplin finally agreed to meet with him at a cafe near the beach.
When Camplin walked into the cafe, he found Kakuris waiting.
“He had a stack of documents that had to be a foot high, and he pushes them across the table at me.”
Kakuris started telling him about how state and federal agencies were involved in a conspiracy to cover up asbestos pollution at the beach, and were rigging test data.
“I’m thinking to myself, the next thing we’re going to see, there was an Elvis sighting there, a UFO sighting, I mean to me it was just crazy talk,” says Camplin.
Finally, Camplin asked to see where, exactly, this asbestos was.
Kakuris took him to a nearby section of beach, near the Johns-Manville Superfund site. The EPA had recently done a final clean up there, so Camplin didn’t expect to see anything.
“We went to this little beach, where people were fishing, and this whole entire beach was literally covered with crushed asbestos,” he says. “So I looked at Paul and I said, ‘Oh my God, this is horrible.’”
He took the stack of documents Kakuris had offered earlier and stayed up through the night reading them.
Like a lot of people who have come into contact with asbestos issues in the U.S. Camplin was hooked.
“I did this to be a good citizen, to volunteer a few hours of my time,” Camplin says. “I’m on my seventh year of being involved with this. If you would have told me five years ago that I’d be challenging the chief science officer of the Center for Disease Control on some of their studies, and testifying in front of congress, I would have said, ‘You’re nuts.’”
So how could five separate studies of the Illinois shoreline be wrong?

To understand Camplin and Kakuris’ argument, it’s necessary to understand how they believe the beaches came to be polluted in the first place.
Illinois Beach State Park consists of two separate parcels, known as the north and south units. Both are located just south of the Wisconsin state line.
On the southern border of the park is the Johns-Manville Superfund site, where from 1922 to 1988, the company manufactured asbestos products, including piping and brake pads.
Kakuris and Camplin believe this to be the chief source of asbestos pollution in Lake Michigan. For a number of years, the site had a pipeline that dumped asbestos-laden waste directly into the lake, and water from the site has drained into a nearby forest preserve. These issues are described in this Illinois EPA document.

(Story Continues)

Page : 1 2 3 4 5ALL