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County Looks at Testing Wells in McCullom Lake

Village president urges action

By KEVIN P. CRAVER
kcraver@nwherald.com

McHenry County leaders might be open to the idea of commissioning water tests in McCullom Lake to check for chemicals blamed for an alleged brain cancer cluster.

Village President Terry Counley met privately Tuesday with County Board Chairman Ken Koehler and several other officials. In the wake of a failed effort to get the University of Illinois at Chicago to investigate the situation, Counley said, it was time for the county to test the village’s private wells.

"It’s ‘show me don’t tell me’ time, and I made that perfectly clear," Counley said.

Thirty-one lawsuits since April 2006 blame brain and pituitary tumors on decades of air and groundwater pollution from the Rohm and Haas and Modine Manufacturing plants in neighboring Ringwood. The first case against Rohm and Haas goes to trial in September; Modine settled out of court in 2008.

Counley said that county officials talked about working with the Illinois State Water Survey to determine where in the village of 1,100 residents and about 400 homes to test. The McHenry County Department of Health has tested the same dozen wells and the village’s namesake lake each year since the lawsuits first were filed. No test for any of the chemicals in the lawsuits has come up positive.

Counley said the conversation also included the potential cost and how to pay for it, but not how to investigate the Lakeland Park subdivision in neighboring McHenry, where a number of the plaintiffs lived.

Koehler, R-Crystal Lake, declined to comment on the meeting, which also included health department supervisor Patrick McNulty, Environmental Health Director Patti Nomm and Lyn Orphal, chairwoman of the County Board Public Health and Human Services Committee.

"Until we meet with a couple of other people, I’m not going to make a big issue of this, because to be quite frank with you, I don’t know what we’re going to do," Koehler said Thursday.

Counley also expressed his opposition at the meeting to a plan to have the health department and UIC hold a town-hall meeting with village residents to discuss environmental health issues. The college’s Division of Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences declined a request from Koehler to study whether the village is safe today, but offered to help perform education and outreach.

"I stressed my point pretty well that it would be a waste of time," Counley said. "What are they going to come out and tell us?"

In the meeting and a story in Sunday’s Northwest Herald, Counley also said that many residents would not believe what UIC or the health department ended up telling them.

A month after the first lawsuits, the health department presented village residents an analysis that concluded that cancer rates were normal and that contamination never reached the village. Northwest Herald investigations since 2007 have concluded that the health department’s work was flawed and biased in favor of the companies – Rohm and Haas officials got to review the department’s presentation beforehand.

A July 13 story called into question UIC’s assertion that staff could serve as "neutral observers." Court records show that an epidemiologist with the school who supervises the UIC department had worked as a consultant for the plaintiffs before she promptly backed out, a day after receiving a call from an expert retained by Rohm and Haas.

"Speaking as a resident, I didn’t trust what the [health department] had to say when they first spoke to us, and I wouldn’t today," Counley said. "And with UIC, I wouldn’t believe what they have to say, either."

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