Editorial: Residents deserve detailed reassurance about plants' chemical emissions
A spokeswoman for the Illinois Environmental Protection Association says "conversations have been had" with key players in connection with how officials have handled the possible release of toxic emissions from two chemical plants in Lake County.
Surely officials know that having conversations is not enough.
Yet, so far they have not said or done much more than that in the wake of reports that the plants may be releasing unsafe levels of a cancer-causing chemical into air breathed by tens of thousands of suburban residents.
The Lake County plants are a Medline Industries Inc. facility in southeast Waukegan and a Vantage Specialty Chemicals Inc. operation in Gurnee. A Chicago Tribune report last week cited documents showing ethylene oxide emission levels around the Vantage plant higher than those at a controversial Sterigenics chemical plant in Willowbrook that the state attorney general and DuPage County state's attorney have sued to shut down.
The U.S. government classifies ethylene oxide as a "known human carcinogen," and it is more than a little troubling that people living near facilities that use it are getting so little information about whether, or how much, they are in danger.
In the wake of the Tribune report, Illinois Senators Dick Durbin and Tammy Duckworth and U.S. Rep. Brad Schneider, whose district includes the plants, have petitioned the federal EPA to test the air around them and monitor the levels of ethylene oxide that more than 40,000 people may be breathing.
They also want the agency to revise downward the levels of the chemical considered safe. That judgment, of course, needs to be based on science, not politics, but considering the disturbing lack of information that has been provided to the public so far on all these cases, the need for a federal review of the situation is undeniable. One of the big question marks in the Lake County issue - the precise levels of emission at the Vantage plant - stems from a state EPA listing of Vantage's ethylene oxide emissions as "zero," when in fact the company, in a 2014 report, had left blank what its emission levels were.
Lake County Health Department officials are appropriately concerned and want meetings with the Illinois and U.S. EPAs. They should have them. Gurnee officials say they are monitoring the Vantage situation and that the company has assured them it is cooperating with EPA and has agreed to "provide additional information." Gurnee residents, as well as those in Waukegan and Willowbrook, will be pardoned if they are less than reassured. They deserve information about what is in the air they are breathing and guarantees that the levels of contaminants being released into the atmosphere are low enough that they will not increase their risks for cancer.
It took a public outcry and combined action from the state and county to produce even the appearance of a sense of urgency around the Sterigenics situation. Officials should be doing more than holding conversations about whether they need to act to protect residents who may be in danger in Lake County.