|
Please post
----- Forwarded Message ----- From: "crborello@aol.com" <crborello@aol.com> To: RECA Working Group <reca-working-group@googlegroups.com> Sent: Tuesday, August 25, 2026 at 01:03:14 PM EDT Subject: Fw: US EPA Response to Congresswoman Emilia Sykes regarding Citizens request for technical data on gases and water contamination , including radiation
RECA: When you meet in Denver, please remember us here in Ohio with deadly Plutonium buried, Tc99, Tritium, all freely continue to flush into our area's sole source aquifer system unchecked. Many have died, innocent babies, and no measure of justice looms ahead for our people of Uniontown IEL.
Sent: Tuesday, August 25, 2026 at 12:58:14 PM EDT Subject: Re: US EPA Response to Congresswoman Emilia Sykes regarding Citizens request for technical data on gases and water contamination , including radiation
Congresswoman Emilia Sykes c/o Dominick Crosier
Dominick,
So, EPA is completely refusing to be responsive to citizens very reasonable requests by simply following through in providing the Uniontown IEL data pertaining to both gases and water from the past five years, as was routinely done in the past? Outrageously, they even have the audacity to tell our Congresswoman,..."EPA has been investigating newer contaminants at the site".. In truth, didn't EPA permit the polluters (with tremendous potential liabilities/ a vested interest in an unchanged outcome), to do all the site investigations of the vapors and groundwater?
What was found in that data by the polluters? And, what data gaps remain that EPA failed to require the polluters to address as yet, even after all these decades?
With such ongoing obfuscation , we are forced to conclude that those results will provide us evidence showing that the EPA was dead wrong when it bowed to the IEL polluters in permitting the killing off of even the basic institutional controls meant to contain/isolate and prevent further migration of deadly poisons into the air and water. .
Instead, isn't this response telling Congresswoman Sykes "too bad, "your constituents have to wait until EPA (and the polluters ) have finalized their conclusions?. Only then, after the fact, on the back end, ( and it's too late), can they perhaps see the data EPA based it's final decisions upon - decisions that potentially affect the health , safety and welfare of this community literally forever?
Clearly this is not acceptable. We request Congresswoman Sykes immediately share this with fellow elected Congressionals, along with all relevant information sent to your Office by CCLT over the past two years, in order to explain to other officials the full sordid backstory on the IEL case. Much is at stake. EPA has used Uniontown IEL as their "case in point" for all other Superfund Sites around the nation. If there is no scientific accountability, it is not just our Ohio Community that will suffer.
Ironically, EPA Administrator Zeldin promised a different Ohio exposed community EPA"gold standards", best available science would be used . Once again, we are compelled to ask, why the double standard for our people?
In a correspondence forwarded recently to your Office written by one independent radiation expert bluntly captured the essence of what was done here: He wrote how EPA "has brutalized" our community for 30 + years. Today the response you just sent CCLT indicates the EPA plans on continuing to this injustice, this "brutalization" of our community, unless our elected officials chose to intervene, as we saw Senator Josh Hawley did in his taking a strong stance for his constituents at the St. Louis Missouri landfill..
Respectfully,
Chris Borello , spokesperson for Concerned Citizen of Lake Twp. , Uniontown IEL Superfund Site, OH.
On Tuesday, August 25, 2026 at 09:35:50 AM EDT, Crosier, Dominick <Dominick.Crosier@mail.house.gov> wrote:
Hello,
Good morning. The exact response received from the Congressional liaison for the EPA is below. Please review:
'Thank you for your inquiry
regarding your constituent concerns regarding the
Industrial Excess Landfill (IEL) Superfund Site located in Uniontown, Stark County, Ohio.
EPA has been investigating newer contaminants at the site, including 1,4-dioxane and per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, at the same time it completed the
Sixth Five-Year Review (FYR), signed April 30, 2026. These contaminants were first identified for follow up after the
Fifth FYR, dated April 20, 2012. EPA plans to put the investigation results into a supplemental remedial investigation report, human health risk assessment, and a focused feasibility study. Completion of these documents will be used to establish cleanup
levels, remedial action objectives, and remedy selection for these emergent contaminants.
Once finalized, the supplemental documents will be made public. They are expected to address most of inquiries with exception of the item on radon and radiological monitoring.
As stated repeatedly to the CCLT: “Regarding your concerns of radiological waste at the IEL Superfund site, EPA’s position has not changed. Based on the site record, numerous investigations, and information collected to date, EPA considers any concerns
regarding radiation at the site to be addressed.”
Once these investigation results are available to be shared, EPA will consider more formal community engagement activities to explain this information, which we will also share
directly with your team. At that time, we could provide a briefing for your office."
Unfortunately, the response did not provide a specific timeline for when the supplemental remedial investigation report, human health risk assessment, and focused feasibility study will be made public.
I will follow up with the EPA to press for a more specific timeline, particularly regarding when the remedial investigation findings will be released and made available to the public. I will also continue to press for additional information regarding the radiological
and radon concerns raised by the community.
I apologize that this response is largely lacking in the substantive information you were seeking. I understand the importance of getting clearer answers, and I will continue working to obtain them.
Best,
Dominick Crosier
Dominick Crosier (he/him) | Sr. Constituent Advocate
Office of Congresswoman Emilia Sykes
121 S. Main St., Akron, Ohio 44308
O: 330-400-5350
Dominick.Crosier@mail.house.gov
From: crborello@aol.com <crborello@aol.com>
Sent: Monday, August 24, 2026 10:10 AM
To: Crosier, Dominick <Dominick.Crosier@mail.house.gov>
Subject: Fw: Fw: ONE MORE CASE IN POINT.., Dr. Ketterer raising National Security in letter , Tritium, Tc99 - but now IEL victims don't "deserve" to be on RECA
Dominick,
What the heck is going on with R5 sitting on the data? What are they saying?!
----- Forwarded Message -----
From: "crborello@aol.com" <crborello@aol.com>
To: Vina Colley <vcolley888@gmail.com>
Cc: Greg M. Schwartz <greg.m.schwartz@gmail.com>; terry witsaman <ccwits@sbcglobal.net>; tammy proctor <tammyproctor@hotmail.com>; joe mosyjowski <jmosyjowski@cs.com>; herb kohler <herbkohler@kohlercoating.com>; gcoleridge1@gmail.com <gcoleridge1@gmail.com>;
damsel16@aol.com <damsel16@aol.com>
Sent: Monday, August 24, 2026 at 10:07:43 AM EDT
Subject: Fw: ONE MORE CASE IN POINT.., Dr. Ketterer raising National Security in letter , Tritium, Tc99 - but now IEL victims don't "deserve" to be on RECA
Vina,
PLease scroll down...
Here's the letter Mike sent to US EPA Nov. 2nd, 2022 and including Sherrod Brown top staffers. How does he reconcile now saying Uniontown ( and Wingfoot) do not deserve to be on RECA, after writing this? You wrote several emails to Greg and me the past few
days, how I should go to Denver anyway, and present our evidence to Congressionals..
Do you now understand why I am not letting go of this duplicity? It is beyond cruel. He knows what Dr. Simon told us about IEL being a small Rocky Flats. He knows about Dr. Panitz/Beltz attorney telling us her preliminary findings were our cancer rate is
7-8 times the national average, weirdly exactly what his pal Mangano said about PORTS...btw.
CCLT failed to challenge Sue Ruley when she flipped. But we had the CAG group smearing us at the same time, along with Tetra Tech 's Community Involvement Report ..so we were intimidated, no question. Who wouldn't be. But I regret that we didn't push back
harder. Even POGO's Danielle Brian wrote a letter about the Tetra Tech Report, how disgusting that orchestrated effort was ( all to block CCLT from obtaining a third TAG grant, that would have skewered the killing off our our entire cleanup!
So not our first rodeo...But lessons learned...
Mike's 2022 letter, it actually went to R5..SCROLL DOWN to second letter after Dr. Hirzy's.. Mike raising the evidence of Tc99, Tritium, national
security and ..."close to an environmental emergency"....etc. etc.
AND, he wrote, ..."nexus with PORTS, IEL, """...given the Tritium, Tc99! Dear Lord, Greg...so reference BOTH emails he sent...and now, he pushes FOR SPAIN to be included in RECA, and zero mention anymore
on Unontown? ( Worse now, he claims the IEL picture doesn't "deserve RECA".)
What happened to his imminent information, asking Chris "Please TRUST him"...? ( I did, got him access to private wells.... very burned, but not about me, but for all her people....past, present and
future sicknesses...
Dear Lilly and Board,
I wrote to you yesterday expressing how difficult it is for us to be excluded in Ohio given how our state was so heavily used for the Manhattan Project. Indeed, between me and Vina (PORTS), folks in
RECA got an earful over the past two years regarding our extreme frustation on why Ohio was left out.
I have provided to your org. and RECA network some highlights involving reports from the various experts who had weighed in over the years, particularly the former
head radiochemist at DOE from RESL in Idaho , David Sill. Please find below one of those letters sent to US EPA by Dr. Mike Ketterer back in 2022, along with Dr. Bill Hirzy's. Note: Dr. Hirzy headed up the US EPA Union for professional scientists,
and I personally spoke with Dr. Hirzy, did my best in keeping him briefed.
Important. Please carefully note Dr. Ketterer's comments with regard to PORTS, Wingfoot and IEL.
Unfortunately, when Mike had flown in to Ohio back in 2022 to collect a handful of offsite samples, because he had a change of plans from driving in vs. flying that Fall, he was not able to preserve
properly those samples with acid on the front end, which DOE's Sill vehemently stressed repeatedly to CCLT can and does cause significant loss of Pu to walls of jars.Sill even provided us a specific audit he'd performed describing a test on an Oakridge Lab
( he intentionally did not preserve the spike sent to the lab, they caught it upon receipt, hitting with acid, but just that short turn around in travel time caused the Lab to fail to recovery 70 % of the plutonium!!
We likewise learned that not preserving can also lead to man made U 236 to be missed. You will hopefully recall that Dr. Ketterer and reconfirmed for Dr. Baskaran the presence of U 236 in an offsite
private drinking water well NW of IEL.
It is sufficient to say that we have witnessed pressure placed on various people regarding Uniontown, like Twp. Trustee, Sue Ruley, who had helped us for years, swearing
she "knew" the radiation was "up there" at IEL, only to do a 180 and throw us under the bus.
Please keep all this in mind as you read the two letters from Dr. Hirzy and Dr. Ketterer..
Regards,
Chris for CCLT, Uniontown IEL Superfund Site
and Victims of Wingfoot
From: john william hirzy <jwhirzy@gmail.com>
To:
thompson.robert@epa.gov <thompson.robert@epa.gov>;
muhtsun.ruth@epa.gov <muhtsun.ruth@epa.gov>
Cc:
crborello@aol.com;
regan.michael@epa.com
Sent: Wed, Nov 2, 2022 12:41 pm
Subject: Re: letter to R5 today from Dr. Ketterer, radiation expert
US EPA Washington D.C. -- URGENT
ATT: Please forward this email to Director Regan for his personal review. Thank you.
Concerned Citizens of Lake Twp./Uniontown Industrial Excess Landfill Superfund Site, OH.
Mr. Thomson and Ms. Muhtsun:
I am seconding the expressions of concern of Dr. Ketterer, below.
For 27 years between 1981 and 2008 I was senior scientist (GS-15) in the Office of Pesticides and Toxic Substances at EPA Headquarters in DC. In addition to my direct work for OPTS I also served as an organizer and president of the labor union representing
professional employees at HQ.
I came to EPA as a GS-15 because of my work on the Priority Pollutant and one of the first ten substances under Agency attention under the Toxic Substances Control Act, viz., phthalate esters, while employed by Monsanto Industrial Chemicals Company (MICC).
I had developed a comprehensive environmental risk and management program during that time, getting buy-in from the Chemical Manufacturers Association and its Phthalate Esters Panel member companies. During that time I served as Chairman of the CMA Panel’s
Human Health Research Committee - for a while.
I was removed from that position and my position in the MICC Environmental Management group and relegated back to the research bench as an R&D chemist because of my outside activity involving nuclear wastes in St. Louis County, MO.
The radwaste involved were residues from uranium refining operations by Mallinkrodt Chemical Co.during the Manhattan Project. Among other things I pointed out off-site contamination of a Little League baseball field across the street from the first storage
site of those wastes at Lambert International Airport in St. Louis County. EPA , Department of Energy and the Atomic Energy Commission had all dropped the ball on managing those wastes and were proposing to return them from insecure interim storage back to
the original site.
Some of the wastes were eventually moved to a landfill about five miles northwest, where they currently reside while a subterranean fire burns its way toward them. Recurring radiation exposures continue, related to periodic flooding of Cold Water Creek
which runs adjacent to the original Airport storage site and which then runs through a densely populated community. The baseball field was closed several years after my complaint about likely contamination. As my literary hero Kurt Vonnegut says….”and so it
goes."
Bottom line: I learned a lot about radwaste management and mismanagement during that period, and I second Dr. Ketterer’s letter of concern.
After returning to the research bench I applied to EPA for a job where I could continue to work for the benefit of the public in prevention of unreasonable risks, and after about seven months got an offer.
Please pay attention to Borello family and Dr. Ketterer.
J. William Hirzy, Ph.D.
Mr. Thompson and Ms. Muhtsun:
I'm reading Chis Borello's messages to EPA Region 5, and I must say, as a US citizen, and also as a former employee of USEPA, that I'm really disgusted with R5's lack of responsiveness, in general to the IEL problem, but in particular, to Ms. Borello 's
valid concerns about this site.
You may not want to hear this, but EPA R5 is heading close to having an environmental emergency on their hands with the IEL. It did not have to be, had EPA done their job decades ago.
It is quite apparent, in hindsight, what happened with the IEL to effectively derail any real cleanup: preliminary indications were that there was a good deal of DOE-derived waste at the IEL (e.g., how else does one explain the presence of Tc-99, or non-fallout/cosmogenic
tritium). Of course, the DOE stepped in, in a heavy handed fashion, and squashed all information about these radioisotopes under the guise of "national security", which in DOE's mind, superseded any public health concerns about the IEL.
Instead of sticking up for your mission of "protecting public health and the environment", EPA listened to DOE, and abandoned any real cleanup plans, and let DOE completely off the hook.
The clock does not go backwards, but EPA should at least have the decency, in 2022, to reveal any/all conversations R5 had with DOE around the time that the decision was made to halt cleanup.
Now R5 is haplessly contending with a site having a widespread plume of 1, 4 dioxane, just as I mentioned in my April 23, 2021 public comment (which you never addressed other than to acknowledge receipt).
My next question: where are your PFAS data on these same contaminated groundwaters? How long does it take to do this? I told you about this 18 months ago, and people are still drinking this contaminated water. How is that "protecting public health
and the environment"?
It looks to me as if R5 prioritizes protecting pockets of PRP's, over paying attention to what's in the water.
What Ms. Borello is also mentioning, is the possible nexus between Portsmouth, Goodyear/Wingfoot and the IEL.
How else does one explain the Tc-99 that was previously detected at IEL?
Don't even try to tell me it's naturally occurring, it's from nuclear fallout, or "it's not at levels that are hurting anybody".
You say things like that - in my book, those are 18 USC 1001 offenses.
You don't get it: Tc-99 is not supposed to be in groundwater, and if it is, it is from the DOE.
It does not matter what the activity concentrations (pCi/L) are: it's from the DOE if it is there.
In part, I'm utterly disgusted with how EPA R5 is addressing IEL, because, as a former EPA employee, all I see from R5 s a mixture of incompetence, contempt for the public, regulatory capture, bureaucratic stonewalling, and malfeasance.
You can look me up: from September 1987 to July 1993, I was a chemist for the USEPA Office of Enforcement, at the National Enforcement Investigations Center. We supported civil/criminal litigation under CERCLA, RCRA, and other programs. Our Center supported
the 1989 case against Rockwell (Rocky Flats). I personally assisted the US Department of Justice with many civil cases, and I assisted the EPA Criminal investigators (including one Agent from R5), FBI agents, and US Attorneys with enforcing the laws, with
some teeth, and with threat of civil litigation and/or criminal prosecution. You can look me up: I testified on behalf of the United States in US v. Sharon Steel, US v Bell Petroleum, US v. Michael Battery, US v Tri-State Mint, and others. I helped the
US DOJ pin down who was responsible for the pervasive lead contamination at the Bunker Hill CERCLA site.
What things of significance have you done, Ruth and Robert, to enforce the environmental statutes that are on the books?
What I see from R5 pales in comparison to the fulfillment of EPA's mission that was expected of me when I worked there. It really appears you've not paid any attention to Ms. Borello, nor to my public comment.
Michael Ketterer, PhD
c/o Robert Thompson & Ruth Muhstun
It is believed that Uniontown IEL has the same waste stream potentially as down at PORTS.
NRC contacted our citizens' group, CCLT, back in March 1994, telling us about Wingfoot Lake centrifuge activities, ( saying Wingfoot preceded PORTS in developing/testing centrifuge prototypes)..My own Dad and Uncle worked out at Wingfoot. One prototype blew
up in the "pit" my Dad helped design under ground, ( reportedly now the blimp dock) - and he said he was sent down to look for structural damage. He was livid when I called and told him what all the NRC had laid on my shoulders about Wingfoot...He said he
wasn't told they were using live radiation, and
didn't provide him with any protection.
A few days later, after the NRC had put me on a speaker box with various agency officials, probing about our IEL dump site long-standing radiation concerns, the NRC called back
and read "for accuracy" they said, their "action memorandum to superiors to take Uniontown IEL dump over by the Nuclear Regulatory Agency to conduct full-blown field studies- cores
samples, gases, the stream"...
Of course, this did not happen, because we were told that US EPA backed the NRC off from taking over the site, citing the IEL SAB report...( which is fatally flawed scientifically - most of the panel weren't
even qualified to understand rad testing!)
During this same time frame, an Ohio Dept. of Health rad expert, Ruth Vandegrift called CCLT, and further probed , asking what all types of radiation had we seen in
"both valid and invalid data"...We responded, Plutonium 238, 239, 241,
tritium, uraniums, elevated gross Alpha and Betas etc. and Vandegrift responded:
"I'll get shot for saying this, but let's presume it's Goodyear's UF6..it's called crapped up fuel, crapped up nasties" she says....
Vandegrift sent us an important doc. sent to ODH by the PRPs rep., acknowledging in essence, the kind of testing being planned in 2000 was only appropriate for naturally occurring rads, vs. man-made radiation believed to
be dumped at IEL...Meaning, once again, the wrong test methods were being erroneously applied here at IEL to fit their predetermined wishes...TO NOT find it.
(You can find this memo sent to ODH in Greg Schwartz' 4 part series published in 8/20).
s Borello <crborello@aol.com>
Sent: Mon, Oct 31, 2022 4:33 pm
Subject: 📄 Vina Colley posted an update
|
|
|
| |
Ohio has an important decision to make... | |
|
|
| |
|
|
|
|
|
|
