5th and Hill Updates

The last Cheat Sheet update on the 5th and Hill toxic cleanup site was prior to a community meeting and teach-in on the subject last month (video excerpt available here). Since then there has been some local coverage and responses in the news. From the Daily Illini's coverage this past week:

University registered student organizations are working to obtain indoor vapor testing kits for Fifth and Hill, a community that is believed to contain a toxic waste.

Black Students for Revolution UIUC and Students for Environmental Concerns have set up a GoFundMe to purchase the testing kits. They have currently raised $1,756 of their $3,000 goal.

“Your donation will help us buy in-home testing kits and prove that the air this community is breathing is full of benzene, napthalene, cyanide and other volatile organic compounds,” reads the fundraiser page. “These chemicals have serious health effects on the neighbors – from headaches, to reproductive issues, and rare deadly cancers.”

Claudia Lennhoff, executive director at Champaign County Health Care Consumers, said for current residents, it may be too late to prevent health issues.

“People who have already been exposed to contamination, they might be already having health problems and sometimes those health problems don’t manifest right away,” she said.

SECS also organized a Sustainable Tote Bag Sale on Nov. 21, where the proceeds were used to support the 5th & Hill Neighborhood Rights Campaign. 

That full article with a lot of additional information and links here. Updated link (12/12) on cautions for using the test kits from the Daily Illini here. It includes links to Ameren's response last week in reaction to the new attention on the matter, also from the Daily Illini:

“There’s still some soil impact under Fifth Street, not beyond Fifth Street, but just under Fifth Street deep enough that it’s not going to impact anybody working on the road or construction,” [Dave Palmer, Ameren manager of remediation projects] said.

The manufacturing site’s soil has been excavated and filled with clean material, and the company has been monitoring the groundwater for 20 years to ensure its safety...

To the company’s understanding, Palmer said there weren’t any illnesses correlated with the exposure. Since the site was secure, there should not have been any possibility of toxic ingestion and illness.

“We’ve got a legacy facility we’re not using,” Palmer said. “We’d rather repurpose it probably for something productive. We’re not using the property or anything and would rather somebody else use it.”

Currently, the company needs to submit the site into the public records and have a report sent to the Illinois EPA. Without the report the site will not be able to be sold since people do not want to take on liability for the property until they receive the proper documents.

That full article here. For some background on the community concerns about that documentation, this News-Gazette article from April has a good overview of the ongoing concerns and demands for testing and transparency. There was also a letter in the editor today highlighting the issue and the recent meeting in the News-Gazette (available to digital subscribers in this link here).