Were White Lake Area Citizens Exposed?

The EPA defines an exposure pathway as the way a person can come into contact with a hazardous substance, and lists the three basic exposure pathways: Inhalation, Ingestion, or Direct Contact.

Inhalation

Air pollution experiences of White Lake area residents are reported in these excerpts from two reports: Cost-Efficient Contamination (Trost, 1981), and White Lake Moves Beyond its Toxic Past (Lynch, 2014).

“Chemical fumes from the Hooker plant had always bothered the residents nearby on Old Channel Trail, but no one quite knew what to do. In the early 1970s, [a resident] wrote the state’s Air Pollution Control Commission about the strange fumes wafting from the Hooker plant. The odor was odd, like a mixture of laundry bleach and geraniums… She surveyed residents within a 2-mile radius of the plant and they told her the strongest fumes were between midnight and 8 a.m. People had difficulty breathing, their eyes and noses itched and watered. Sometimes children had to be brought in from playing outside when the fumes were strong. Six people reported the death of trees in their yards. Hooker had replaced two of them. It was the odor of C56, later found in concentrations of 17 parts per billion in the air near the barrel dump. By contrast, 10 parts per billion is the established threshold limit for human exposure to C56” [Trost, 1981, par. 35-36].

“Even in the earliest years, Hooker’s operation caused occasional problems for the community. Emergency crews had to evacuate parts of Montague in May 1955 when the plant released a cloud of chlorine gas. Problems became more commonplace when the company expanded its operation” [Lynch, 2014, par. 16] Cancer Mapping Project participants described their experiences with air pollution during the industrial era. They told stories about the stench, the fumes, waking up choking, the chemical releases and visible clouds (or a “green mist”), having to go inside and close their windows, the evacuations and school closings, damage to trees and window screens (replaced by Hooker), and the long battle to have their voices heard.

The fumes were said to have traveled not just to nearby neighbors: one lakeshore resident told of fumes coming from across the lake that were foul enough to cause their family to leave town to go to another lake to swim, and a spear fisherman told of strong chlorine odors crossing the lake that would make him gag. A celery farmer had commented that the celery in his fields would be lying flat in the mornings, which he suspected to be related to the nightly emissions.

A participant reported that her screens were corroded and she had been unable to get flowers to grow in her yard. Another told of going to a yard sale at her neighbor’s house, where the neighbor was using oxygen tents as covers for some of the furniture pieces. The neighbor said, “That’s how many times my baby had pneumonia.” Others spoke about their pets getting cancer and dying, and newborn foals dying for unknown reasons.

Ingestion

The 1987 RAP had reported that “Surveys conducted since 1952 indicated that White Lake experienced conditions causing the occurrence of nuisance algal blooms, tainted fish flesh, loss of white bass fishery, reduction of walleye, perch and northern pike populations, fish contamination, sediment contamination, nutrient enrichment, dissolved oxygen depletion and degradation of the benthic community” [1987 RAP, p. 31]. The 1995 and 2002 RAP Updates provided information about White Lake fish studies and State of Michigan fish advisories.

The 2002 RAP pointed out that groundwater is the main source of drinking water for the White Lake community and summarized the severity of the groundwater contamination problem associated with industrial discharge and leaching. In addition to the highly publicized contaminated groundwater plume discharging from Hooker Chemical to White Lake beginning in the 1950s (and continuing until their pump and treat system went into effect), the list of known or suspected groundwater contamination sites had grown to ten throughout the White Lake area. In the neighborhoods where a household’s drinking water was confirmed to be contaminated, residents of the neighborhood were provided with bottled water until municipal water lines could be extended.

The White Lake Public Advisory Council and Muskegon Conservation District remained vigilant through analysis, cleanup activities, and education to assure that all known threats to clean drinking water were addressed prior to the delisting of White Lake as an AOC in 2014.

Several Cancer Mapping Project participants expressed their concerns about whether their drinking water was safe. Others told of eating a lot of fish out of White Lake: one said that he used to fish off of the orange tanks by Hooker, but when he brought the fish home they “stunk so bad” of chlorine that he would feed them to the bird dog. (When asked how the dog fared, he commented that dogs come and go on the farm, and no one pays much attention.) A few participants expressed concern about having eaten venison that had been shot on Hooker property.

Direct Contact

The 1987 RAP reported that “in 1977, the West Michigan Shoreline Regional Development Commission (WMSRDC) determined that White Lake failed to meet the 1983 ‘fishable and swimmable’ goal, set forth by Public Law 92-500 (The Federal Water Pollution Control; Act of 1972)” [1987 RAP, p. 31]. The restricted recreational activities were thought to be due to high phosphorus and algal blooms.

Indeed, Cancer Mapping Project participants spoke about the emergence of algae and weeds in the previously clear lake and told of their methods for clearing the weeds, including dragging a weed cutter or bedspring behind their boat to keep the weeds cleared from their motor so they could head to Lake Michigan. A few participants recalled swimming in the lake and developing a rash. Regarding the tannery area, one person mentioned that people would think that they had arrived at the shore but discovered that it wasn’t the shore — it was animal hides. The final removal of contaminated sediments and debris took place in 2013, and the Final Site Report mentions the use of bails of tanned leather along the shore to control erosion.

Participants described possible direct contact situations involving playing on industrial property as children. Some described climbing on the lime piles at DuPont or climbing inside their discharge pipe which at one time protruded out through the sand dune at Lake Michigan. Others spoke of playing in the lagoons by the tannery. The son of one participant recalled playing in the settling ponds near Hooker and finding “weird frogs and tadpoles at various stages turning into frogs, with five legs or disproportionate-sized limbs.” Other participants spoke of horseback riding on DuPont and Hooker properties and seeing junk dumped in the woods.

Proximity to Industry as a Risk Factor

While looking at research on family members with concordant and discordant cancers living in the same household to try to understand whether these cancers among family members were more likely to be due to inherited factors, lifestyle factors, or to family members being exposed to the same industrial pollution, it occurred to me that I was searching for the wrong keywords. I needed to search for studies that looked directly at proximity to industry and cancer.

Although industrial pollution is often mentioned as a source for a wide range of negative health impacts, I had difficulty finding research that actually studied cancer diagnosis or mortality in people living specific distances from a pollution source. But then I stumbled on a series of population-based multicase-control studies that were conducted in Spain.

Beginning with a paper in 2007, García-Pérez, J. et al. studied data published through the European Pollutant Emission Register (EPER), realizing that EPER would allow researchers to study the possible consequences of reported industrial pollution sources on the health of neighboring populations. They reasoned that they could analyze geographic mortality patterns of different cancer types with reference to the industrial emission of pollutants labeled as carcinogens. They found that a few industrial plants were responsible for the highest percentage of emissions, which would simplify the researchers’ task in their efforts to study the possible health effects on the surrounding populations.

Then, in 2015, Castaño-Vinyals et al. (a group that included some of the same researchers as the 2007 study) conducted a large population-based case-control study (MCC-Spain) of five common tumors to evaluate environmental exposures and genetic factors. The protocol is described: between 2008-2013, 10,183 persons aged 20-85 years were enrolled in 23 hospitals and primary care centers in 12 Spanish provinces, including cases of a new diagnosis of prostate, breast, colorectal, and gastro-oesophageal cancers and chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL), and population-based controls matched by frequency to cases by age, sex, and region of residence.

MCC-Spain participants completed a face-to-face computerized interview on sociodemographic factors, environmental exposures, occupation, medication, lifestyle, and personal and family medical history. The protocol also included a self-administered food-frequency questionnaire and telephone interviews. Blood samples were collected, while saliva samples were collected from CLL cases and from participants refusing blood extractions. Clinical information was recorded for cases and paraffin blocks and/or fresh tumor samples were available in most collaborating hospitals. Genotyping was done. Multiple analyses were planned to assess the association of environmental, personal, and genetic risk factors for each tumor.

This comprehensive effort created a huge database of information which made the following studies possible:

Garcia-Perez et al. (2018) studied the association between breast cancer risk and proximity to industries. They found excess risk near organic chemical plants, food/beverage sector and ceramic; excess risk near plants involved in surface treatment of metals/plastic; and excess risk near industries releasing pesticides and dichloromethane.

García-Pérez, J. et al. (2019) explained the methodological approaches they used to study cancer risk in the vicinity of pollution sources to analyze the excess risk of childhood cancers in the vicinity of industrial and urban areas. Their results indicated that by applying this methodology, associations between proximity to specific industrial and urban zones and risk of leukemias, neuroblastoma, and renal and bone tumors have been suggested.

Garcia-Perez et al. (2020) “analyzed the association between colorectal cancer risk and residential proximity to industrial plants, according to pollution discharge route, industrial groups, categories of carcinogens and other toxic substances, and certain industrial pollutants…” Distances (from 1 km to 3 km) were computed from subjects’ residences to each of the 134 industries located in the study area. Excess risk of colorectal cancer was detected near industries overall for all distances analyzed. In general, industries releasing pollutants to air showed higher excess risks than facilities releasing pollution to water. By industrial sector, excess risk was found near production of metals, surface treatment of metals, glass and mineral fibers, organic chemical industry, inorganic chemical industry, food/beverage sector, and surface treatment using organic solvents.

I have looked for similar studies being conducted in the United States. One promising new effort is the University of Michigan’s Michigan Cancer and Research on the Environment Study, MI-CARES, funded by a grant from the National Cancer Institute. MI-CARES plans to enroll at least 100,000 people from diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds who live in environmental hotspots throughout Michigan. This multi-year study will regularly collect blood and saliva samples, conduct surveys, and check for cancer biomarkers that may suggest risk of cancer in the individual. MI-CARES was announced in 2021, so there will not be results for quite some time.