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They say toxic site made them sick

Residents of a Hernando neighborhood are trying to figure out how to prove their health issues were caused by the toxic county site next door.

By ASJYLYN LODER
Published April 30, 2006

[Times photos: Keri Wiginton]

Leaves cover the headstone of Terrence Clark Jr., the third child of Ja'Wanna Waddy. Terrence died in 2001 after a premature birth in Waddy's fifth month of pregnancy.

	Ja'Wanna Waddy, here in her doctor's office, has given birth to three premature babies.
	Bertha Winslett speaks at a community meeting held at Holy Band Church in Brooksville. Winslett said that her mother has given permission to exhume the body of Winslett's father if it could help prove that exposure to contamination from the public works site contributed to his death.

BROOKSVILLE - Three tombstones lie under a tree. On two, just a name and a year. On the third, the pink-painted concrete shows nothing legible anymore.

Under each, a polystyrene casket, the sort funeral directors call a two-foot. Each contains an infant - two sisters and a brother - all born prematurely, 14 days the longest any of them lived.

The overgrown graves open the sort of story told in a courtroom, and it looks like that's where this one is headed.

"I have to know," said Ja'Wanna Waddy, mother of the three. Nearing 17 weeks with, among other things, the carcinogens arsenic and benzene. Waddy's family has lived less than 50 feet from the site for 22 years.

In her lap, Waddy had a contract from Darryl Rouson, a St. Petersburg lawyer and former president of the city's chapter of the NAACP. Like many of her neighbors, she's thinking about signing it.

Rouson drove up from St. Petersburg one recent evening to a meeting at Holy Band Church in South Brooksville. Neighbors have been gathering at the small chapel to talk about their health, those who have died and history.

Some complain of breathing trouble, of feeling like they always have a cold. Others talk about relatives and neighbors who died of cancer. They suspect pollution at the site made them sick.

But they want proof, and vindication. They want a judge or a jury to tell them that what they suspected all along is true. They want the county to pay.

Their talk often turns to the past, and what it has long meant to be black in this place. It's a community that owes its start to the segregated South, when a city ordinance didn't let blacks live outside a nearby section of South Brooksville. The law stayed on the books until 1972, about a decade after blacks started building the Mitchell Heights subdivision behind the slowly expanding public works compound.

To those assembled in the small chapel, their skin color explains how the compound came to be contaminated, and why it has taken so long to clean it up. That's the way they told their story to Rouson.

The lawyer gently explained that they might not be able to tell the story that way in court. A class-action lawsuit is expensive and unrealistic. Personal injury cases are hard to prove, and each case will have to stand on its own merits. Not everyone will have a case good enough to take to court. Proving property damage is easier and less expensive.

After Rouson finished his pitch, he asked if anyone there had been told by a physician that they might have suffered bodily harm.

Ja'Wanna Waddy raised her hand.

Waddy's pregnancy had just reached 15 weeks when her picture appeared on the front page of the St. Petersburg Times on April 9, with a story about the contamination behind the house where she grew up.

"There's nothing like picking up your paper, looking at the picture on the front page, and going, "Oh my God. This is my patient,' " said Dr. Elliot Cazes, Waddy's obstetrician.

Her case had Cazes stumped. She had lost three pregnancies, all three just after 20 weeks. Most miscarriages occur in the first trimester, Cazes said.

Waddy's previous doctor had diagnosed her with an incompetent cervix, incapable of supporting the weight of a late-term pregnancy. But she showed none of the usual physical symptoms, Cazes said, and typically women with that condition lose the baby earlier with each successive pregnancy.

Cazes had scheduled her for a cerclage, a procedure to stitch the cervix shut. After he read the story, he changed his mind.

"The thing that caught my eye is the high levels of arsenic and the high levels of benzene," he said. Exposure to either can increase the risk of miscarriage, he said.

"It's pretty hard to ignore the fact that a healthy, 20-something-year-old woman, without any other medical problems, would have three 20-week miscarriages," he said. "You really have to be suspicious. It's really hard to prove causation, but it's also really hard to write it off as a coincidence."

Waddy canceled the surgery.

She had lived behind the public works depot from age 5 until she left for college at 17. She moved back in with her mom in 2000, the year before she lost the third baby. She divorced in 2003.

That same year, she took a job with the county's Public Works Department. She left after little more than a year, after filing a claim with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission alleging discrimination. The commission never charged the county in her case.

Last year, she moved with her boyfriend to Tampa, where she works as an insurance processor. She is working toward a bachelor's degree in criminology at the University of South Florida.

She plans to ask her doctor if they can test her blood to see if contaminants have affected her health. But she's not willing to have any test done that might risk a fourth premature birth.

As she nears 20-weeks of pregnancy, she remembers how she lost the first three. Dazjah lived 14 days. Kahja took a single breath. Terrence Jr., the only boy, Waddy's husband took from the doctor's hands and for a long time refused to let him go.

"My future is just up in the air, my health, and my child's health," Waddy said. "I'm right now in panic mode because I don't know how long I'll be able to hold this child."

The county bought the site on W M.L. King Jr. Boulevard in 1955, when the street was still called Summit Avenue and segregation was still the law in South Brooksville.

Over the next 30 years, as the community behind it grew, the compound expanded to house mosquito control, road striping and repair operations, as well as truck repair and refueling.

Tanks and drums held pesticides, paint, paint thinner, hydraulic fluid, gasoline and diesel fuel. Through leaks and careless handling, many of those chemicals ended up in the ground, contaminating the soil and the groundwater.

The county first took note of the contamination in 1991, but has done little over the next 15 years to clean it up. The county abandoned the site in 2003.

Recent tests found arsenic above the allowable residential levels along the south and east fence lines. One of those tests was less than 50 feet from Waddy's childhood bedroom window.

When neighbors get together at Holy Band Church, they complain of strokes, cancer, kidney disease, breathing problems. To them, the cause remains clear, even though Rouson told them it will be hard to prove.

On Wednesday, Bertha Winslett stood up and told those assembled that her mother agreed to exhume dad, if need be. Winslett's willingness - even eagerness - to take her father from the ground provides some measure of the suspicions that have taken root in South Brooksville.

Winslett, too, is leaning toward signing with Rouson. She likes his history of confrontational activism with the NAACP. He was upfront about his struggle with crack cocaine, which earned her respect.

But she's worried her neighbors will lose interest if their cases aren't taken. "I hope everybody can stick together."

The county has said that bureaucratic mistakes, not race, explains why it failed to make the cleanup a priority for nearly 15 years. The past three weeks, the county has redoubled its efforts to win the trust of the neighbors.

The county held a community meeting at the site. Commission Chairwoman Diane Rowden walked door to door on the street behind the site, assuring residents that the cleanup is top priority. The commission relocated a school bus stop so that children no longer walk home from school along a path contaminated with arsenic. The Public Works Department has asked to spend more than $200,000 on additional testing, including in residents' yards.

But at the meetings at Holy Band, it's clear that residents are not reassured.

"They did go for a long time trusting that the county was going to do the right thing for them, and take care of them, and it just wasn't done," Rowden acknowledged.

"It's hard to heal those wounds."

[Last modified April 30, 2006, 00:59:09]