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The effects of creosote contamination The hazards of human exposure to the popular wood preservative known as creosote — from skin rashes to lung cancer — are well known to government regulators and scientists. The federal Environmental Protection Agency recognized creosote's perils in 1978, announcing its intention to phase out the coal-derived preservative's required registration. That was more than 200 years after London physician Percival Pott's ground-breaking discovery of high cancer rates among British men who cleaned soot from chimneys. Yet despite those well-documented risks, coal-tar creosote has been a timber industry staple for the past century. Each year, 825 million pounds of creosote are used to protect telephone poles, marine pilings and most of the nation's countless miles of railroad ties from wood-boring pests and foul weather, according to industry estimates. When mishandled, it seeps into soil and groundwater. Its fumes permeate the largely poor and rural neighborhoods surrounding wood treatment plants. And its toxic chemical cocktail leaves behind a legacy of suspicious illnesses and premature deaths. "These chemicals have been known to be hazardous," said Jay Feldman, executive director of Washington-based Beyond Pesticides, one of more than a dozen advocacy groups suing the EPA in an effort to stop the use of creosote. "We have a national problem with these contamination sites." Coal tar creosote and two related wood preservatives have been found in at least 100 current or former sites on the EPA's Superfund National Priorities List or state contamination lists. In Louisiana alone, public health officials have identified 32 creosote hazardous waste sites — a problem severe enough to earn the state a $1 million grant from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to track cancer clusters. "It's a witch's brew, a convoluted concoction of chemicals," said James Cain, a Lake Charles, La., attorney whose law firm has won three settlements against the Kerr-McGee Corp. over creosote exposure in Louisiana, Mississippi and Pennsylvania. Retrieved 4 Dec. 2008: http://www.mindfully.org/Pesticide/2004/Creosote-Illness-Death24may04.htm |