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Apr 20, 2008 9:18 pm US/Eastern
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Panel Recommends Disclosure Of Park Contamination
BALTIMORE (WJZ) ―
City leaders target the state a year after a Baltimore park was closed for arsenic poisoning contamination that was ignored for decades.
Mike Hellgren reports a final report has been released that explains what went wrong.
Swann Park is fenced off and locked up and has been for almost a year.
It's one of more than 100 contaminated sites in the city. A new task force report demands that the state enforces cleaning them up.
The discovery of high levels of dangerous arsenic stunned neighbors and left Swann Park closed since last year.
Now the final report from a task force the mayor put together says the state could do more, much more to alert citizens to environmental dangers with stinging criticism.
"Maryland has not had sufficient resources to assess and fix all the contaminated sites it has identified, nor has it aggressively enforced cleanup by responsible parties," the report states.
The danger came to light after the disclosure of 30-year-old documents from a chemical company operating adjacent to the park.
It showed high levels of arsenic as far back as 1976.
"That factory was manufacturing using arsenic. They were making pesticides. One of their buildings was called the arsenic shed," said Dr. Joshua Sharfstein.
Arsenic has been linked to cancer, lower IQ in children, damage to blood vessels and an abnormal heart rhythm.
The task force report identified 134 hazardous areas in Baltimore City alone.
Many are listed on the Maryland Department of the Environment's web site, but the report stated the ranking of which sites are the most hazardous has been poorly communicated to the public, and there is no single, easily assessable list of contaminated sites.
Plans are in the works to clean up Swann Park. It remains gated and locked, and task force members say the state could learn important lessons from this case to keep citizens safe in the future.
Swann Park is set to reopen this time next year.
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