Residents Develop New Proposal to Deal with Asbestos Removal

A new campaign is developing in Stratford, Connecticut concerning the removal of asbestos from the town. A petition is currently circulating to urge the Environmental Protection Agency officials to remove any and all asbestos contaminated soil from within the city limits. The soil is known to be located in over twenty separate locations and the current plan is for all soil be collected and combined in one specific area in Stratford.

Not everyone is happy with the current plan. The soil, which would have a protective covering, would still be in close proximity to some residents of Stratford and they worry their health is in jeopardy.

Asbestos exposure can lead to a number of deadly diseases such as asbestosis and malignant mesothelioma, a fatal form of cancer. The exposure occurs when a person inhales the airborne asbestos fibers which are then lodged into the soft tissue of the lungs. The diseases can typically take twenty to fifty years to show notable symptoms. The latency of the illnesses, along with the fact that it shares many symptoms with other diseases, makes it difficult to diagnose. Many times it is discovered too late to provide any effective treatment.

Currently, the petition has over four-thousand signatures. The new petition asks that all the asbestos contaminated soil be moved out of Stratford and to a decontamination site in Buffalo, New York. If that were to happen there would be a total of five thousand truckloads of soil to be transferred. The cost of the current proposal, that keeps the soil in town limits, is approximately $21 million. To move the soil to Buffalo, that number could reach as high as $60 million. The contaminated soil originally came from the break and clutch manufacturing firms Raybestos-Manhattan Inc. and Raymark Industries which closed in 1989.