Is Underground Chemical Plume Causing High Cancer Rates in Bexar County Texas?

September 18, 2007 - Vilma Moran seemed an unlikely candidate for cirrhosis of the liver, which her doctor said explained her swollen abdomen and yellowing eyes. In her 60 years of life, she had consumed probably 10 alcoholic beverages. She didn't smoke, didn't have hepatitis.

She was diabetic, which is a risk factor. But when it was found later that she had liver cancer, the surgeon asked if she'd ever worked in a chemical plant. The type of cancer she had suggested a chemical exposure, he said. No, she told him, she worked with special education children at Lowell Middle School.

Then she and her husband recalled a letter they had received four years earlier, inviting them to a neighborhood meeting to discuss a plume of contaminated groundwater linked to the shuttered Kelly AFB. They had ignored the invitation. She had lived near Kelly almost all her life. Her father had maintained the base golf course.

In February 2006, Moran attended another neighborhood meeting from her wheelchair. She listened as Tim Aldrich of East Tennessee State University, an expert in cancer clusters, announced he had been hired to look into reports of elevated liver cancer in neighborhoods surrounding Kelly.

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