Lee, Lenox, and Stockbridge — Following a recent report reflecting that there is not a higher rate of cancer among residents along the Housatonic River, Tri-Town Boards of Health (Tri-Town) agreed to push for answers from the issuing state agency to three questions surrounding the study.
Tri-Town represents the health boards of Lee, Lenox and Stockbridge.
The group’s September 24 discussion homed in on the Massachusetts Department of Health’s (DPH’s) September 12 release of a study that contemplated patterns of higher incidences of the disease in five towns along the waterway—Pittsfield, Great Barrington, Lenox, Lee, and Stockbridge. Specifically, the study looked at whether exposure to the now-banned polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) increased cancer rates among those individuals living along the Housatonic River.
A copy of that report can be found here.
Those residents may have been exposed to PCBs after the chemicals were deposited into the Housatonic River by General Electric Company (GE) from the manufacture of transformers at its Pittsfield plant from 1932 to 1977. The actions have since prompted an Environmental Protection Agency Superfund program cleanup of the river. A 2020 agreement details a long-term project to dredge the rest of the river—spanning from the east and west confluence of the Housatonic River at Pittsfield’s Garner State Park through Connecticut—and send the most toxic materials out of the area while transferring those materials with lower toxicity to a to-be-constructed Upland Disposal Facility (UDF), or waste repository, in Lee.
In response, some local stakeholders called the DPH report “vague” and an effort “to limit liability” on behalf of GE and agencies involved in the remediation.
Tri-Town member Robert Wespiser said the study summary provided “there is no clear increase in cancer rates based on their data along the Housatonic River corridor in the cancers they looked at.” “I wanted to make sure our minutes reflect we are aware of [the study],” he said.
Wespiser intends to solicit from the state responses to three questions about the report, documentation that was not drafted as a formal scientific “paper” with an explanation of methods and a description of results.
For Wespiser, the statistical analysis is broken down into five-year periods but lacks providing an analysis of the whole period from 1994 to 2018; the study uses census tracks within Pittsfield to isolate individuals closer to the waterway but does not apply that same technique to the other monitored communities and further downstream; and, the release lacks the raw data to be analyzed by the group and the town of Lee.
“It’s long, and it has some problems, but it’s at least mostly what [the DPH] promised,” he said of the study that was initially to be released last year but saw numerous delays.
In 2002, the DPH evaluated incidences of six types of cancer diagnosed in residents of Pittsfield, Great Barrington, Lenox, Lee, and Stockbridge from 1982 to 1994, with those results, according to the agency, not “suggest[ing] a relationship to PCB exposure or that a common environmental exposure pathway played a role.”
In January 2021, however, the Pittsfield Public Health and Safety Committee urged the DPH to undertake an updated evaluation of cancer incidences in the relevant geographical area from 1995 to 2019. The scope of work for this latest evaluation was finalized in 2023, with that action resulting in the current study.
For Tri-Town Chair Charles Kenny, Wespiser’s review and subsequent request for state clarification is “a very important thing for the community to have a fair understanding of what’s being presented.” Members were also given the opportunity to pose more questions of the DPH in Wespiser’s upcoming communication.
“I accept the outcome,” Tri-Town member Elias Lefferman said. “It’s different than I thought it would be.”
Although Wespiser agreed, he opined that further analysis of the raw data may prove beneficial. He said he was “curious” about what Lee’s perspective is, including its PCB Advisory Committee, particularly: “how robust was [the study], what were the methods, what does the raw data contain and how was it sampled and those sorts of epidemiological approaches.”
Created last year, the Lee PCB Advisory Committee advises town officials on decisions related to the project’s dredging, transport, monitoring, storage, disposal of PCBs, and the use of its settlement monies.
With the new information, Wespiser suggested another study could be advocated “using more modern techniques [and] the ability to query discrete data fields” since the report data was performed using cancer registry paperwork. “Much of epidemiologic health, Medicare, cancer rates, etc. is much more retrievable in the digital world,” he said.
Wespiser said he “believes the data as [it was] presented, in the manner it was presented, using the techniques [DPH] used.”
But the cost to GE, relative to the price of the remediation project, to dig in to this data further is minimal, he said. “If GE is spending $700-or-so million dollars on building a 12- or 10-story [UDF] in Lee/Lenox Dale filled with more concentrated PCBs, before we do that, I think we should really know in a more robust study that may be down the road,” Wespiser said. “Take just 1/100 of that [$700 million], $7 million would go a long way toward an epidemiological analysis by a whole department in an academic setting.”
