Pratt & Whitney has accumulated a long list of toxic leaks and spills on its 7000 acre property dating back to at least 1979 - including one that spread into the neighboring JW Corbett Wildlife Management Area. In the 1980s the company also made headlines with its own on-site cancer scare.
Residents are urging the state Department of Health to investigate the possible brain cancer cluster and have launched a Web Site (http://www.theacreagecancerstudy.com) featuring a section on Pratt & Whitney spills.
"There's little to no migration of groundwater impact off our site," Pratt Spokesman Tom Callaghan said. "We developed a robust remediation plan to ensure that there was no risk to the environment and human health," The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the state Department of Environmental Protection "determined that conditions here don't pose a risk to human health or the environment."
One contaminant, 1,4-dioxane, did migrate 800 feet into the JW Corbett Wildlife Management Area. The US Department of Health and Human Services considers this contaminant to be a human carcinogen. In 2003 Pratt did report this problem and placed six sampling wells on the Corbett property. In April, the tests showed that one of the six wells did have concentrations slightly above acceptable limits.
Over the years Pratt has dumped and spilled cleaning solvents, jet and rocket fuel, and toxic chemicals, including cancer-causing polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs. A buried waste oil tank leaked volatile organic compounds. In the early 1980s, the facility had its own cancer worried due to one leak.
In 1979 there was a spill of TCE leaking from a Pratt storage tank and contaminating the company's water supply. The company followed with a $1 million cleanup and commissioned a 1981 University of Miami study that showed these degreasing materials may have increased employees' death and cancer rates.
The company rejected the report and a National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health study conducted two years later refuted the univertisy's study.
Cleanup began in the early 1980s and was overseen by the EPA. Around 1985 the DEP began overseeing the cleanup operation. In 1988 a state Department of Health report concluded that the site was "of potential public health concern because of the risk to human health caused by the possibility of exposure to hazardous substances via chemicals in groundwater and air."
In 1999 the company reported that it had excavated 22,000 tons of contaminated soil and recovered 14,000 gallons of fuel from groundwater in that years. It also said it had finished 70 percent of soil cleanup and 85 percent of groundwater cleanup.
There will be an interim meeting Thursday to dicuss the state investigation into whether a brain cancer cluster exists in The Acreage. The meeting will be held at the Clayton E. Hutcheson Agricultural Center, Exhibit Hall A, 559 N. Military Trail in West Palm Beach.
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This very same(National Institute of Safety) report would be used as evidential in nature of a study of several plant employees to determine for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services National Toxicology Program that Tricloroethylene just years later was indeed known to be human carcinogen used in the Pratt Facilities. California would list it in the top chemicals of human carcinogen with further investigations. The question arises if Pratt Employees at the time were specimens themselves as the report under “Report on Carcinogens Background Document for Trichloroethylene, 2000″ (RoC Background Document for Trichloroethylene) gave several years study of rats given TCE and stated the incidences of cancer were inline with the same rate as recorded in humans; those studies of humans came from the above HHE report.
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