Hazardous chemical found in northwest Missouri soil

July 1, 2009 - Environmental investigators went looking for hazardous chromium 6 where it shouldn’t be — in northwest Missouri farm soil — and they found it.

Indeed, questions linger in a controversy that for several years has consumed the Cameron area, where residents fear that something has been causing brain tumors.

A new suspect emerged in April when a lawsuit was filed claiming that a St. Joseph tannery had spread waste sludge containing chromium 6, a dangerous chemical, on farmland.

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Toxic leak upsets Beachwood California homeowners

January 6, 2009 -

When Debra Fenner and her husband bought their Beachwood-area home in the Summit Meadows development in September, there were some things they didn't know.

They said they were not told, for instance, that Ranchwood Homes, which built their house, was being sued over polluted floodwater as part of a class-action lawsuit in a Fresno federal court.

Nor were they told, they said, of the toxic leak under the neighborhood caused by a subsidiary of the pharmaceutical giant Merck & Co. (Merck's lawyers have argued that although there was pollution of the water by its subsidiary, there's no evidence anyone got sick from it.)

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Lawsuit says pharmaceutical firm polluted ground water in Merced, CA

December 18, 2008 - Under the ground on a plot of half-empty industrial land just off Santa Fe Drive, a huge plume of contaminated ground water floats unseen.

A water treatment plant and a series of infusion wells on the property were used in the long process to clean the area's polluted water. The cleanup has been going on since the early '90s.

And a lawsuit over the pollution and its alleged connection to the sickness of local residents in the Beachwood area also continues.

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Chromium 6 at center of suit in CA

December 15, 2008 - Residents from the Beachwood neighborhood here have filed a lawsuit in federal court in Fresno claiming that a nearby cooling tower fabrication plant contaminated their drinking water and soil, exposing them to cancer-causing chemicals including chromium 6.

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Toxics battle in San Francisco neighborhood

December 14, 2008 - The Azevedos bought their acre of land because they wanted their son to grow up in the country. The Briggs family liked their home's low price. Melissa Standish loved her acre because it reminded her of her childhood on an Ohio farm.

Today Dawne Azevedo's husband is dead from cancer. Alameda Briggs keeps a list - now up to about 20 - of neighbors she says are dead or dying from cancer. And Melissa Standish says no one will want to buy her land here in the heart of the San Joaquin Valley.

These people are among 2,200 residents of Merced's Beachwood neighborhood who say a nearby cooling tower fabrication plant contaminated their drinking water and soil, exposing them to cancer-causing chemicals.

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