Opinion: The road to health

A Times Editorial

The road to health

A federal agency's report on the Stauffer Chemical property provides some helpful information on possible health hazards for former workers and those who live near the site.

There is good news and bad news in a federal agency's new assessment of possible health hazards at Pinellas County's only Superfund site, the former Stauffer Chemical property north of Tarpon Springs. For former Stauffer workers and those who live nearby, there is special comfort in having their fears finally treated seriously by national experts.

Earlier this month, earnest experts from the federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry sat with residents around tables in a Tarpon Springs meeting room, answered their questions and jotted down their concerns in notebooks. Charts, graphs and maps stood on easels around the room, and each table had a hot-off-the-press copy of the agency's 370-page Public Health Assessment for the Stauffer Chemical Co., a report almost two years in the making.

The report's major finding: The phosphorous processing plant was a public health hazard to those who worked there and lived in the area while it operated from 1947 to 1981. That finding is not much different from the conclusion reached in a 1993 assessment by state health officials. Both reports found that the plant's processes polluted soil, water and air with about 30 toxic substances, some of them known carcinogens. The reports also found that those contaminants could have affected the health of people regularly exposed.

The new report by ATSDR, which is the top federal agency examining the health impacts of hazardous waste sites, is most interesting for some new information experts gleaned from examining existing data and subjecting them to computer modeling. Most important:

-- While potential impacts on children who used to attend Gulfside Elementary School across the street from the operating Stauffer plant have been a focus of concern for years, meteorological data show that the wind usually blew away from the school and often toward neighborhoods southwest of Stauffer in the city of Tarpon Springs. Potential impacts on that area have received little attention.

-- Sulfur dioxide, an airborne pollutant that can cause coughing, wheezing and an increase in heart rate, may have drifted farther from the plant while it operated than anyone previously understood -- past New Port Richey to the north and into northern Clearwater to the south.

-- People who worked at the plant or lived in the community immediately around it before 1982 may have breathed in particulate matter, which is solid particles or liquid droplets that can contain pollutants and has been linked to heart and lung problems. No one knows what level of particulate matter is safe to breathe in. But ATSDR reports that people who lived or worked southwest or west of the Stauffer plant or at nearby Flaherty Marina were exposed to particulate matter, and children and the elderly would have been especially at risk of serious consequences.

-- There are huge gaps in the data. For most of the time the phosphorous plant spewed out pollutants, no one was collecting data to determine health and environmental impacts. For example, the only off-site soil samples collected were at Gulfside Elementary, even though pollutants from the site would have blown or been washed in other directions. No one has tested fish in the Anclote River for elevated levels of Stauffer-related toxins, even though runoff from the site went into the river.

The good news, according to ATSDR's report, is the now-defunct Stauffer site is no longer a danger to residents. Fenced and posted, it would pose hazards only if developed.

The health assessment will be completed and printed after a 30-day comment period, but ATSDR, unlike some other agencies, does not intend to close the book on the Stauffer site. For the next two years, the agency will work with the Florida Department of Health to monitor the incidence of certain diseases in the communities near Stauffer. And later this year ATSDR will host a workshop of health experts in Atlanta to consider ways to follow up.

ATSDR's work should provide residents with the health information they need and allow attention to refocus on finding a safe, effective strategy for cleaning up the Stauffer property.