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Valleycrest is story of broken promises
Health, welfare issues not taken seriously
By Kay Semion
Potential health threat or no potential health threat, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency wants to wash its hands and walk away from Valleycrest landfill. Never mind the health of the residents whose back yards border the North Dayton Superfund site. Or that their properties, through no fault of their own, have become so valueless that one homeowner told me he pays $22 a year in property taxes.
Never mind that a mile or so away sit two regional wellfields, which supply much of the Miami Valley’s drinking water. Even if there is no short-term worry, the threat cannot be taken lightly.
Never mind the 20-year-old promises of the federal Superfund program to clean up the worst polluted sites. The U.S. EPA is ready to throw in the towel, leaving the contaminated Valleycrest ground behind.
Where is the outrage? The homeowners near Valleycrest have been systematically ignored for years. No one paid attention to them when the one-time gravel pit was turned into a landfill in the mid-1960s, and when industrial waste was dumped there in the ’70s and ’80s.
In the past, kids played near the landfill, possibly on the property. And while everyone knew it was an industrial-waste site, no one knew the consequences of toxins there. Polychlorinated biphenyls and other chemicals found on the site are thought to cause cancer.
To be fair, those dumping the wastes also were unaware of the hazards they were causing. Yet that doesn't make it right that those who live near Valleycrest are paying a high price for something they had — and have — no control over. Even now, the residents near the landfill seem to be secondary thoughts in a high-stakes political battle.
Recently, the U.S. EPA held a meeting about Valleycrest in Columbus, not Dayton. And the invitees were the Ohio EPA, the Ohio Department of Health, the federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Excluded were the commissioner of the Combined Health District of Montgomery County and Dayton's state Sen. Rhine McLin; both wanted to attend. As far as I know, invitations weren't sent to anyone in the Miami Valley.
Something is wrong here. There are residents who wake up at 5:30 a.m. every day to the sound of bulldozers at Valleycrest landfill and who look out their windows to see people walking in spacesuit-like garb. Why isn't anyone talking to them?
The truth is, it's unlikely that the U.S. EPA leaders want to hear their story. Guided by the Bush administration, the U.S. EPA is backpedaling on environmental protection. A withdrawal from Valleycrest would symbolize the end of even the pretense that the federal government was going to help clean up Superfund sites.
Even before President George W. Bush took his oath of office, the coalition of industries cleaning up Valleycrest could smell a change in the air. They petitioned the U.S. EPA last fall to end an agreement in which the federal agency was overseeing the coalition's removal of toxic waste.
The U.S. EPA, which has denied a similar petition before, seemed eager this time. The cleanup still continues, but U.S. EPA Director Christine Todd Whitman has indicated that she's ready to grant the petition. Plus, oversight of the Valleycrest cleanup has been reassigned to another staffer in Chicago, signaling a change in direction.
U.S. Rep. Tony Hall, a Democrat, has asked Whitman to reconsider. Dayton Mayor Mike Turner, a Republican, has asked her to reconsider. But I'm not optimistic. Turner is. A meeting between the Montgomery County health district and the U.S. EPA is planned for next week, he says.
The U.S. EPA wants to stop the drum removal while studies go on about what to do next, Turner says. "The city's position is, ‘Don't stop one track until you've defined what you are going to do next.’ " I agree. Still, the history of the landfill cleanup has been one of stalling, not doing.
And to me, Valleycrest, with its white-plastic-covered mounds, seems like a monument to broken promises.
Kay Semion is associate editor of the Dayton Daily News editorial pages.
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