Chemical Plants

South Baltimore's chemical companies attempted to shed their image as polluters yesterday by releasing a report saying they are responsible for less than 1 percent of their area's cancer risk from air pollution.Curtis Bay and Brooklyn residents have long complained that they are the exposed to high levels of cancer-causing chemicals because of their proximity to South Baltimore's industrial area, which includes 11 chemical plants.But the companies said the largest exposure to airborne carcinogens comes not from chemical plants but from car exhaust and gasoline vapors, and a smaller portion comes from dry cleaners and other small businesses.

A year after the state announced a legal settlement requiring cleanup of long-standing pollution problems at a chemical plant near Chestertown on the Eastern Shore, the work remains stalled by disputes with the plant's owner. Genovique Specialties Corp. has balked at demands from the state Department of the Environment that it do more testing of soil and groundwater for toxic and potentially cancer-causing chemicals at its manufacturing facility, which sits beside an unnamed stream that ultimately flows to the Chesapeake Bay. The company, based in Rosemont, Ill., first submitted a plan last August for investigating contamination at its Kent County plant, which manufactures "plasticizers" - substances that make plastics flexible.

WASHINGTON -- The Clinton administration announced new environmental regulations yesterday designed to scrub 90 percent of chemical plants' toxic emissions from the nation's air.The sweeping new regulations issued by the Environmental Protection Agency require chemical manufacturers to modernize and improve pollution-control efforts over the next three years. The rules also add 112 chemicals to the list of federally regulated hazardous materials.The EPA estimates that the regulations will reduce acid rain and improve the respiratory health of many Americans by removing 506,000 tons of toxic chemicals from the atmosphere.

Robert Melton Jr., who at 78 was the oldest worker at a Hawkins Point chemical plant, died June 26 after suffering a heart attack. The Park Heights resident collapsed near his home as he was returning from the plant. Born in Ferriday, La., Mr. Melton moved to Baltimore in 1948. He served in the Army in the 1950s and was stationed in Germany, where he constructed communication lines. He later worked at a gas station and at the Arrow-Crown window-washing business. In 1972, he took a job at Millennium Inorganic Chemicals Co. on Fort Armistead Road in Hawkins Point, which was earlier the Glidden-Durkee division of the SCM Corp.

Jeannette Skrzecz, an environmental activist who fought chemical companies to protect her neighbors in Baltimore's Wagner's Point from illness, died of cancer late Friday at Mercy Medical Center. She was 56.The high-energy grandmother with short, spiky hair and snapping brown eyes was determined to see that she and her neighbors in Baltimore's working-poor enclave got a fair deal from the factories that surround their homes.Family members said she was convinced that her colon and liver cancer was from exposure to pollution from the chemical plants.

Louise Regiec and Andy Skrzecz sat silently a seat apart in a Brooklyn catering hall last night, their lips pursed, as two chemical plant managers in blue sport coats pleasantly spelled out the formula for the price of the spouses they recently lost:$5,000, the managers said. $5,000 for every man, woman and child who lived last year in Wagner's Point.For more than a year, residents have asked the chemical plants that ring their tiny southern Baltimore neighborhood for money -- any money -- to help them escape the foul-smelling air and the suspicious cancer cases of the Fairfield Peninsula.

With the federal government playing matchmaker, community activists and chemical plant executives in industrialized South Baltimore and northern Anne Arundel County plan to gather tonight for an uneasy summit on how to improve the local environment.The meeting at St. Athanasius Church at Church and Prudence streets is the kickoff for the "Community Partnership for Environmental Protection," a year-old effort by the Environmental Protection Agency to forge an atmosphere of trust and cooperation in the gritty old waterfront neighborhoods of Brooklyn, Cherry Hill, Curtis Bay, Fairfield, Hawkins Point and Wagner's Point.

WASHINGTON -- The nation must move rapidly to bolster protection of its chemical plants against a terrorist attack, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said yesterday, urging Congress to adopt regulations that the industry has already largely endorsed. The remarks by Chertoff, in a speech before industry leaders, were the latest chapter in an unusual turnabout by the Bush administration. It is now lobbying for regulations that senior administration officials worked privately to block shortly after the 2001 attacks, saying then that voluntary measures would be sufficient.

For 25 years Jeannette Skrzecz fought City Hall, the Environmental Protection Agency, the chemical companies that surrounded her home, and anyone else she suspected of polluting or neglecting tiny Wagner's Point, the Baltimore neighborhood where she lived since age 3.Late Friday, Skrzecz, 56, lost a battle she couldn't win, against cancer of the liver and colon. Fifteen years ago, she beat breast cancer, the disease that killed her mother. Doctors say the disease that killed Skrzecz was caused not by pollution, but genetics.

However far-fetched, this is the fear: A rail car at a chemical plant in southern Baltimore ruptures without warning, releasing its full contents -- 180,000 pounds of chlorine -- into the atmosphere in a scant 10 minutes. The resulting toxic plume spreads for 14 miles, putting 1.6 million people at risk of property damage, injuries or worse.That worst-case scenario -- considered improbable if not impossible by experts -- was one of several disclosed yesterday morning during an awkward set of open houses at six of the state's largest chemical plants, all located near Curtis Bay.During the three-hour session, chemical executives shared with the public their worst nightmares about their plants -- and, in the next breath, insisted that residents have nothing to worry about.

WASHINGTON -- The nation must move rapidly to bolster protection of its chemical plants against a terrorist attack, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said yesterday, urging Congress to adopt regulations that the industry has already largely endorsed. The remarks by Chertoff, in a speech before industry leaders, were the latest chapter in an unusual turnabout by the Bush administration. It is now lobbying for regulations that senior administration officials worked privately to block shortly after the 2001 attacks, saying then that voluntary measures would be sufficient.

We inherited a retaining wall of landscape timber built into our sloped backyard. I want to plant a few edibles by the wall but am concerned about arsenic leaching from the wood (built about 1992). Can I test the soil's safety? Old landscape timbers may be treated with creosote or CCA (chromated copper arsenate). Their chemicals can leach into soil and be taken up by plants. CCA lumber was phased out beginning in 2002 because of possible health risks. We recommend that treated lumber not be used for raised beds where edible crops will be grown.

Maryland is ahead of most states in trying to prevent terrorist attacks on plants that make dangerous chemicals, but more needs to be done on the federal level to make sure the industry and local governments have the tools to prevent a catastrophe, said a panel of experts that met in Towson yesterday. Congress and the Bush administration are debating steps to more uniformly regulate the chemical industry, which has so far beefed up security under a voluntary industry program. The effort has particular resonance in Maryland, where more than 1 million residents live downwind from chemical facilities that make or stockpile chlorine and other chemicals that could cause mass casualties if scattered over a wide area.

FMC Corp. said yesterday that a weak economy and global competition is forcing it to consolidate operations at its Curtis Bay plant and lay off between 60 and 65 employees. The Philadelphia-based chemical maker is combining three facilities that make herbicide and pesticide ingredients within the Baltimore plant so that they can be operated as one. The changes will begin in early January and are expected to be completed by April. "We're struggling like many other chemical companies in the weak economy, and we are competing on a global basis, and in order to compete we have to look at ways to become more cost-competitive," said plant manager Michael Sheffield.

WASHINGTON -- There's an old truism that says "information is power," and activist groups are using the Internet to provide terrorists with information despite the horror of Sept. 11 -- giving them the power to kill and maim still more innocent people across our country. Unbelievably, our open society has created an open door to information that could help terrorists attack chemical plants, storage facilities and other tempting targets. Activist groups are posting this information on the Internet for all to see. The postings have created a user-friendly "Terrorism for Dummies" guidebook in cyberspace.

WASHINGTON -- The magnitude of a terrorist attack on U.S. chemical facilities could easily exceed the loss of life suffered on Sept. 11 in New York. So it is time to address the vulnerability of this industry. Recent events underscore the immediacy of this threat, including the two nationwide security alerts by the FBI and a 72-hour moratorium by the railroad industry on carrying chemicals such as chlorine. Even President Bush was at risk. On Sept. 11, when Air Force One landed in Louisiana, the president joined more than a million Louisiana residents who live every day in a region that is blanketed by chemical "kill zones."

Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke said yesterday that he would prefer to move all residents out of the tiny southern Baltimore section of Fairfield, but the city does not have the money for another public relocation.Schmoke's comments, which disappointed Fairfield residents, came a week after city lawyers stopped a quiet housing department effort to buy up the property, 14 homes in two small pockets of Fairfield. Residents there have asked to be relocated along with their neighbors in Wagner's Point, an area of 270 people the city is buying out.Housing officials said they were honoring a 20-year-old offer to help residents in Fairfield, an old, predominantly African-American section bordered by chemical plants and tank farms.

Pollution monitors in the Baltimore area have found what many people long suspected: The air we're breathing is bad for us.Four air sampling stations set up last year by the Maryland Department of the Environment have detected an invisible "soup" of nearly 40 toxic chemicals blanketing the city and Dundalk in southeast Baltimore County that includes high levels of cancer-causing compounds linked mainly to car exhaust and gasoline vapors.The samples were collecyed for 24 hours every six days.

Millennium Specialty Chemicals, one of the worst polluters in Maryland, was fined $165,000 yesterday after pleading guilty to diverting wastewater from the Broening Highway plant near the mouth of the Patapsco River around environmental monitoring equipment. The company pleaded guilty to tampering with a monitoring device and making a false statement to environmental officials. Baltimore Circuit Judge Stuart R. Berger ordered Millennium to pay $100,000 to the Maryland Clean Water Fund and $65,000 in restitution to Baltimore City.

State Del. Mary M. Rosso says that areas of northern Anne Arundel County and Curtis Bay in southern Baltimore have had more than their share of cancer deaths and that some might be attributed to toxic waste from Curtis Bay's chemical plants, steel firms, power stations and landfills. The legislator led a tour yesterday to promote a resolution she has introduced in the General Assembly that links pollution in the areas to their cancer rates. It also urges the state Department of the Environment to prohibit new chemical plants from moving into Curtis Bay. Resolutions passed by the legislature are nonbinding and express the opinion of the General Assembly.