Huge ‘chat’ piles of mining waste in Tar Creek, OK, are one focus of research.
The Department of Biostatistics hosts the workshop annually as one of the highlights of its Summer Program in Quantitative Science. The four-week program is geared toward undergraduates from underrepresented minority groups, first-generation college students, or individuals from low-income households. The aim is to interest them in careers in biostatistics, epidemiology, behavioral sciences, environmental health, and public health research - and in graduate programs at HSPH and other schools at Harvard. Nine students are participating in this summer's program.
This year, the workshop focused on the stages of cleaning up hazardous sites, including the initial steps of alerting authorities, assessing the risks, studying the health impacts, and reclaiming them for community benefit. "We wanted to help researchers or experts from one field get a broader sense of the lifecycle of a hazardous site from the moment it is closed to when it is redeveloped in a sustainable use," said Isabelle Anguelovski, diversity program coordinator in the Department of Biostatistics.
"Most people want to [know] if a disposal site is safe to live near or not," said Joanne Fagan of the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection. "Clean" and "safe" can be relatively subjective terms determined in large part by the licensed site professional and by immediate health risks, she said.
Toxic sites can languish if there is no party available to pick up clean-up costs and if no one is thought to be in immediate danger of exposure to harm. In some projects, land and water can be cleaned up to less stringent standards. For example, in a cost-versus-benefit judgment call, the department may accept a $2,000 excavation of contaminated soil to meet the standard of "no significant risk" instead of a $3,000 job to reduce the risk further to "background." Some less clean sites may be deeded to restrict future use.
The department maintains a database of contaminated and cleaned sites, issues noncompliance notices, signs off on remediation plans developed by the responsible parties, and audits about 20 percent of the privately funded licensed clean-up professionals.
Fagan encouraged communities to get involved. "The more involvement, the more you keep everyone on their toes," she said. A written petition by 10 or more residents of a community requires the property owners or operators to involve the public and to share information.
Risk assessment provides facts to help officials and communities decide which hazardous sites must be cleaned and in what order, said Jonathan Levy, Mark and Catherine Winkler Associate Professor of Environmental Health and Risk Assessment at HSPH. The margin of uncertainty in risk assessment may provide opponents with fodder to question the scientific credibility of findings, but "we're better off being open and honest about the uncertainties," he said. "The key point is that uncertainties do not imply that no action is warranted."
As an example, community concern about power plants in Massachusetts drove and informed a long process to reduce emissions of two coal-fired power plants, Levy said. The community concerns helped to frame a subsequent study of the health risks of the particulate matter emitted or formed in chemical reactions with the emissions, demonstrating links between risk assessment methods and community interests.
A different kind of risk - financial - determines if and how contaminated real estate, also called brownfields, will be reclaimed for other uses, said James Hamilton, a lecturer in urban studies and planning at MIT and managing director of CLF Ventures, the non-profit affiliate of the Conservation Law Foundation that uses market-based efforts to protect the environment.
"From a developer's perspective, it's all about risk," said Hamilton. High land values make a contaminated site worth the risk. Lower land values make the deal riskier. Thanks to insurance products and predictable regulatory programs, "contamination is not a big, huge, giant boogeyman," he said. "Community support and politics is the wild card." Communities have the leverage, local knowledge, and power to shape the destiny of brownfields in their neighborhoods, he said, although it can go untapped or be squandered in the clash of cultures between citizen groups and businesses.
Communities themselves can have many conflicting view points, discovered Robert Wright on repeat visits to the Tar Creek Superfund site in Oklahoma. Located mostly on tribal land, the site was a dumping ground for mining waste and is one of the largest Superfund sites in the country.
This water has turned orange in Tar Creek, OK, a Superfund site.
Research at Tar Creek, some of which is organized at HSPH, continues. Two years ago, for example, the Center for Children's Environmental Health and Disease Prevention Research was established at the School.
Several speakers provided success stories. In Ecuador, researcher Leo Buchanan of the University of Massachusetts Medical School and the Harvard University Health Services and his colleagues have helped lower the blood lead levels of children living in an Andean Ecuadorian community. Their main tool was a lead prevention and education program that has reduced the children's exposure to a lead-based glazing compound and its fumes from a local ceramics industry-without apparent threat to the livelihoods of their parents, who work for the industry.
In another win, the waterfront city of Chelsea, Massachusetts, recently celebrated the opening of the Mill Creek walkway. The thoroughfare provides the only community waterfront access to Chelsea Creek, one of the dirtiest tributaries feeding into Boston Harbor. The walkway is part of a master plan developed by the Chelsea Collaborative. Volunteers went door-to-door and asked people what they wanted in their backyards. The vision balances open space, industrial use, and redevelopment aimed at the needs of current residents, said Roseann Bongiovani, the green space program director and a Chelsea city councilor.
The Chelsea Collaborative is now fighting a proposed brownfield redevelopment project to build a new power plant along the creek banks. Chelsea is a low-income city that is already burdened as a storage and transfer hub for three-quarters of New England's heating fuel and 100 percent of Logan Airport's jet fuel, said Bongiovani.
The diversity workshop was co-sponsored by the National Institute of Environmental Health Science Harvard Superfund Basic Research Program and the Community Outreach Program of the Center for Children's Environmental Health and Disease Prevention Research.
A booklet based on the workshop is under development. Most of the presentations are available online .
--CCM
Intensive Training in Epidemiology and Statistics for Undergrads
Top row (left to right): Kody Kinsley, Nicholas Wells, Quincy Greene. Next row: Justine Frazier and Gabriel Murillo. Next row: Shelah Roanhorse, Jennifer Lykken, Rosa Maria Alvarez, Jennifer Tillett
The Summer Program in Quantitative Sciences at HSPH is an intensive four-week introduction to biostatistics, epidemiology, and public health research for undergraduate students.
This year, the students kicked off their internship with a day-long workshop in June on hazardous sites. The workshop provides the experience of attending a professional conference.
Copyright, 2009, President and Fellows of Harvard College
