May 9, 2009 7:18 pm US/Central
Crestwood Residents Show Rage at Town Hall Meeting
CRESTWOOD, Ill. (CBS) ―
Congressman Booby Rush (D-1st) called in the experts to talk about the water in south suburban Crestwood. Regulators have said a contaminated well was used for drinking water for years. But the mayor of Crestwood says the drinking water was safe. Saturday's meeting was emotional and CBS 2's Mike Puccinelli was there.
It was standing room only in the Oak Forest Hospital conference room Saturday, where Congressman Bobby Rush held a town hall meeting. At issue was more than two decades of possibly contaminated tap water in Crestwood.
"I got my cancer in Crestwood," said resident Mary Lou Freeman. It's contamination that Mary Lou Freeman blames for her cancer and many other residents blame for theirs.
"That's the first question they asked me: 'what toxins were you exposed to?' I couldn't tell thembecause I didn't know until now," said another resident at the town hall meeting.
The questions came fast and furious.
"We've already been victimized once, by this crappy water and now number two, we're the ones who have to pay all these lawsuits with higher taxes and whatever else. Who protects the residents?" said another meeting attendant.
And those in the firing line did their best to answer them. Illinois EPA leaders say Crestwood officials misled them and stated they weren't using the contaminated well to supplement the town's water supply which was supposed to be coming from Lake Michigan.
"They told us they were going to switch to lake water and they told us that every single inspection we did," said Rick Cobb of the Illinois EPA.
Cobb said the well is now filled in with concrete.
An expert with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says there were no elevated levels of cancer in a Chicago suburb where officials allegedly drew drinking water from a contaminated well.
Mark Johnson works at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry. He said at a meeting in Crestwood on Saturday that he reviewed a report that detailed Illinois cancer from 1998 to 2002.
Johnson says the agency is just at the beginning of its investigation.
U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin had written the agency and asked that health experts study if anyone became ill after drinking the water. Federal agents searching for evidence of environmental crimes raided the village's offices last month.
Rush, himself a cancer survivor, has vowed to introduce legislation in the coming weeks where he says he hopes will prevent what happened in Crestwood from ever happening again.
And Rush says he wants wrongdoers prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.
"We've all been left in the lurch," Rush said.
The Congressman says he may hold Congressional hearings to find out why that didn't happen.
Mayor Robert Stranczek could not be reached for comment by telephone Saturday.
Last month, he told residents at a public meeting the state's Environmental Protection Agency considered the village water supply safe. He said if any well water was used -- it was mixed with water from Lake Michigan. So any possible contaminants were diluted.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
(© MMIX, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.)
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