06/10/2019
My old neighbor just found out about this in our old backyard in niagara county .
LEWISTON - PORTER SCHOOLS,
Balmer Road B.R.E.T.S. Balmer Road Elementary Temporary School et al
Article Five-THE BOMB THAT FELL ON NIAGARA Page 10
And I'm Never Going Back to My Old School
August 16-August 22, 2001 V12N33 ...
ARTICLE FIVE
The Bomb That Fell on Niagara
And I’m never going back to my old school
by Geoff Kelly and Louis Ricciuti
Out on Balmer Road near Lutts Road in the towns of Lewiston and Porter there are a couple of gated access roads leading into what used to be the Lake Ontario Ordnance Works, a 7,500-acre parcel of land the U.S. Army bought
in 1942 for a TNT factory. After just ten months the TNT factory closed, and there begins the sites long, bizarre and shadowy history. It has been used at one point or another by a number of federal agencies to various purposes. The Army Corps of Engineers dumped radioactive and chemical wastes associated with arms production there. The waste materials from animal and possibly
human radiation experiments conducted in Rochester--syringes, body parts, etc. contaminated with plutonium--were shipped to the LOOW and buried in wooden crates. There is evidence that biological and chemical warfare
materials were stored and perhaps tested and manufactured on the LOOW site. The FBI trains its agents in urban, house-to-house warfare in a simulated city on the site.
Most of the former LOOW site has been sold off parcel by parcel over the years. The Niagara Falls Storage Site, a 191-acre parcel, is still owned by the Department of Energy. It is home to the worlds largest depot of radium-226, among other toxic chemical and radioactive wastes.
The US military, in cooperation with a company called Olin Matheson, produced and tested experimental jet and rocket fuels on LOOW property behind one of those gated fences on Balmer Road. That property, which had been known as Air Force Plant 68, now belongs to businessman John Syms, who bought the property in 1969 to expand his Tonawanda business. Two years later Syms was told by the New York State Department of Health that the land was hopelessly and dangerously contaminated and he must cease all operations there. For 30 years Syms has been trying to force the federal government to acknowledge and clean up the waste its agencies left behind.
Across a five-foot gully from Syms current property is Chemical Waste Managements facility, one of the only landfills in the Northeast still
accepting toxic chemical wastes. CWM is only the most recent operator of
that landfill, and the company recently asked the town of Porter for
permission to expand the facility. The public hearing on the proposed
expansion three weeks ago was a madhouse--residents were, by and large,
outraged by the possibility.
That second gated fence leads into CWM’s property, but years ago it led
to a compound of brick and cement buildings that had been a part of Air
Force Plant 68s boron fuel experimentation facilities. Ostensibly Air
Force Plant 68 was testing high-powered, boron-based jet and rocket
fuels, even though experts had known for years that boron-based fuels
weren’t practical--they gummed up jet engines and the production process
was too volatile. Indeed, explosions at Air Force Plant 68 claimed
several lives, and the by-products of jet-fuel experimentation and
whatever other projects may have been conducted there under its cover
left the land, water and air poisoned.
Meanwhile, by the early 1960s, the Lewiston-Porter School District was
overflowing with students and needed space. There were two red brick
schoolhouses, one in Lewiston and one in Youngstown, but the towns had
outgrown them, and construction on the current school buildings could
not keep pace with the population. So, in an act either of absolute
ignorance or unforgivable callousness, the Lewiston-Porter schools set up
classes in an abandoned building on Air Force Plant 68.
A woman who attended third grade in 1968 recalled the place: the
classrooms looked like offices (because that’s what they had been) and
the walls and floors were covered in an institutional white and
green-gray tile. The windows were metal-framed. The school districts
administrative offices were housed in another abandoned Olin Matheson
building, and there was a kitchen set up in a separate building that
made hot lunches for the children.
On nice days the children would play outside after lunch. Outside--on
property where barrels of waste were dumped in ditches and buried
haphazardly under a few feet of soil. Less than a hundred yards away
barrels of uranium sludge--the by-product of Niagara Falls industries
contribution to the building of the first atomic bomb--stood beside
railroad tracks, exposed to the elements, corroding and leaking. The
radium-226 that is now isolated in underground storage facilities (read
cellars) was stored above ground in the open air and in a topless
silo, emitting plumes of radon gas that prevailing winds would blow
directly across the site of the old Air Force Plant 68.
The woman, who asked to remain anonymous because she currently works for
the Lewiston-Porter School District, says she was in a class of 20 or 30
students. A lot of wealthy families wouldn’t send their kids to Lew-Port
schools, she says--they’d go away to private schools like Stella Niagara
instead. She wonders if those families, with their connections to the
businesses and industries that poisoned the area, kept their kids away
because they knew about the pollution.
Often, when confronted with a story like this, people fall back on the
those were different times story--the if we knew then what we know
now rationalization. But scientists had known, from practical
experience, that radiation was lethal since at least the 1920s. They had
started collecting clinical evidence in 1942.
As for non-scientists, they didn’t need laboratory studies. Workers in
factories got sick, and they knew why; guys who drove trucks laden with
barrels of sludge from places like ElectroMet and Titanium Alloy
Manufacturing and National Lead got sick, and they knew why. There are
hundreds of apocryphal stories--about strange fires, a barn full of cows
dying overnight, about the things you stumble across in the woods on the
former LOOW site, about the things you see and smell in the drainage
ditches that criss-cross the property--all of which suggest a certain
degree of sophistication regarding the dangers posed by the toxic
chemical and radioactive wastes that were dumped in massive quantities
in Lewiston and Porter.
Despite what they know and what they hear, Lewiston-Porter residents and
school administrators seem unwilling to confront how badly their
environment has been corrupted (though the majority did not at the CWM
expansion meeting). You don’t ask questions, says another
Lewiston-Porter School District employee, who also asked to remain
anonymous. You just live your life and never question these things.
The woman who attended third grade on the former Air Force Plant 68 has
lived her whole life understanding that the factories in Niagara Falls
were unhealthy places, and that they produced unhealthy things. Her
father worked at Ho**er Chemical. At the end of each day he’d change out
of his work clothes at the plant, scrub himself clean in the showers,
and change into the fresh street clothes he kept in a locker. Despite
that effort, he still brought his work home with him.
He’d cough and you could smell the chemicals, she says.
Now her 14-year-old son goes three-wheeling in the woods on the old
LOOW. One day he and his friends went tooling around near Air Force
Plant 68, the site of her old school.
He said to me when they came back, Mom, I just went somewhere that I
think you don’t want me to go.
When classes were finally consolidated at the new Lewiston-Porter
schools, the classroom on Air Force Plant 68 was once again abandoned.
However, Lewiston-Porter students and teachers were, if anything, even closer
to the environmental dangers posed by the LOOW at the new schools.
Twenty-five hundred yards away is the Niagara Falls Storage Site and its
massive concentration of radioactive waste. Two sewer lines and an
underground stream run from the storage site and across school
property--in fact, the schools sewer lines join the lines originally
built by the Army to carry runoff and waste into the Niagara River. A
drainage ditch stretches across the back of the school property, also
dug by the Army during World War II.
The LOOW is a swampy piece of land, poorly suited as a storage site for
toxic chemical and radioactive wastes. All these sources of running and
standing water present an exposure risk to students. The old cellars in
which the radioactive waste is stored are considered by the Army Corps
of Engineers to be adequate for 50 years maximum; the Corps is currently
considering what to do with the waste. Meanwhile, the LOOW lies in a
200-year flood plain and on top of a fault line.
The Army Corps of Engineers has said they take frequent readings for
some forms of radioactivity along the perimeter of the 191-acre site.
They says there is no leakage, that the site is secure. But they don’t
test for everything, and they don’t test everywhere. The Corps admits
that the soil around the school is abnormally high in heavy metals such
as mercury, manganese, copper, selenium and lead. But then the Corps
suggests that the lead contamination is probably the result of hunters
shotgun shells.
Curiously, there is a trailer behind the Lewiston-Porter schools that
contains some sort of monitoring equipment--some sort of probe hanging
from cables. Employees at the schools have never seen anyone come in or
out of the trailers, and no one seems to know what the equipment is
monitoring.
They do know that lots of students and teachers at Lewiston-Porter
schools get sick and have died. No formal study has ever been done, and
one is certainly needed, but once again practical knowledge indicates a
problem. There are numerous cases of unusual cancers at the school. One
woman says that everybody gets sick in April and October. Its
difficult to breathe, she says, and everyone in the school coughs.
Family members of school staff have been stricken with cancer,
respiratory ailments and organ failure. One of the women has suffered
mercury toxicity, and was recently diagnosed with multiple sclerosis.
I just want my children safe, she says. “I don’t care what happens to
me. I’ve lived my life.”
Three generations of Lewiston-Porter residents have been placed at risk
in that school system. For those people, its too late--they’ve been
exposed or they haven’t--and only a comprehensive health study of
Lewiston-Porter graduates will spell out the consequences. If a formal
study corroborates the impression of those who work at Lewiston-Porter
schools, those consequences are devastating.
