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Koehler's Call Disingenuous

Henry County board Chairman Ken Koehler has called for an investigation into whether health risks exist today in McCullom Lake.

Thirty lawsuits allege that industrial pollution from Rohm and Haas and Modine Manufacturing in Ringwood dating back to the 1960s caused brain and other cancers in and around tiny McCullom Lake. Both companies for decades disposed of hazardous chemicals in on-site waste pits. In the suits, plaintiffs’ lawyer Aaron Freiwald alleges that resulting air and groundwater contamination led to a cluster of rare cancers in and near McCullom Lake.

Koehler wants an independent all-clear to help residents to reclaim a sense of security. He also believes it would help negate damage done to property values. Specifically, Koehler suggested that the Northwest Herald’s coverage of the brain cancer cases has done great harm to McCullom Lake.

Since the first lawsuits were filed in 2006, annual tests of about a dozen of the village’s 400-plus private wells by the McHenry County Department of Health have found no trace of the carcinogenic chemicals targeted in the lawsuits.

This – along with the facts surrounding the filing of the lawsuits and the county’s slipshod response to the public health alarm those suits sounded – has been duly reported. No one to our knowledge contends that the conditions alleged to have led to the lawsuits remain in existence today.

Koehler’s fingerpointing regarding harm done to McCullom Lake is, at best, disingenuous.

McHenry County officials, from the start, exhibited more concern for the companies involved than the people who may have suffered tremendous – in some cases lethal – harm.

Koehler and many of his colleagues may have preferred to stick their heads in the sand and hoped the issue went away. That is not, nor will it ever be, the practice of this newspaper.

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