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Cancer Clusters?
How A Grieving Mom Is Pushing For Research On Local Contaminants

ELLENVILLE – It was still only six months since her son Jackson's death from a rare form of brain cancer that local mom Kim Anne Candela decided to step forward with her suspicions about an Ellenville-area environmental problem that could have been a cause for her family's great tragedy. She had seen online videos posted by Wawarsing activist and gadfly Mike Wendel that talked about serious contamination at various sites around town, some former factories or dumps, others possibly linked to never-disclosed testing programs tied to the local prison, and possibly even the federal government's secret drive to come up with the atom bomb back during the World War II years.

"I was a little skeptical," she admits. "I'm local, a normal person who is not aware how these contaminants work. But I want to make sure we're not living in a dangerous area."

Candela first came out to speak about her cancer cluster fears at an October 20 town board meeting in Wawarsing, where she asked for use of the town meeting room for a public information session and was turned down. The story, without attribution, suddenly showed up on a regional news network and was picked up by a daily newspaper. Last Friday she called a press conference at the Ellenville Library only to find that the library was closing when she showed up. She nevertheless was interviewed by Time Warner Cable News.

"I'm getting the point out," she says.

The young woman with an AA in Occupational Therapy from Orange County Community College moved to Ellenville when she was eleven... from New Jersey via Middletown. Her mother passed away from cancer in 2008; she's renting from her father now in Summitville. Her second boy, Gunner, is now three.

"I was living on Warren Street in the village when Jackson was born. We went to Northern Dutchess Hospital because they had midwives," she says. "My mother grew up in a house near the old Kodak factory in New Jersey and got lung cancer, my grandma died of a brain tumor. Who knows?"

Throughout her son's illness — which included crowdfunding the cost of hospital stays and therapy during his later stages — Candela says the busy-ness and horrors of caring for a dying child were paramount to her. But then afterwards, as she moved through the agonizing stages that are part and parcel with grieving, she started listening to other stories she'd heard about cancer in our area. She started listening to talk about buried scrap metal and chemicals, about contaminated water supplies and skyrocketing disease figures.

She contacted Wendel, who showed her his voluminous research papers that seek to tie together contaminated areas from the old Napanoch Paper Mill, now an abandoned federal Superfund site, to Channel Master and Hydro, uncovered copies of test results for local groundwater conducted by the U.S. Geological Survey that seem to indicate high radiation levels, and obscure references to U.S. Army experiments on mentally incapacitated prison inmates to study the effects of fallout on agricultural crops. He talked about his attempts to start a local disease registry with help from Empowering Ellenville, as well as his videos and push to create a film about what he's been finding.

Candela talked to the press last month about putting together a slide show, with maps of local rivers and factories, attempting to connect the dots with known cancer cases. Now she says that it may be enough to survey local residents about their histories of cancer, including all they've heard over the years.

"I've talked to about 100 people," she notes.

We talk about the importance of scientific data in such crusades, and how Erin Brockovich's renowned story involved the law firm she worked with, the clout brought in by an outside state cancer registry, and the many doctors and scientists who worked to build evidence.

Candela says she's in regular contact with her son's doctor, now at Montefirore's Albert Einstein College of Medicine. She wants to contact other academics tracing cancer clusters around the region, as well as the Cary Institute for Environmental Studies. She seems ready for the long haul.

"I'm not going to change it myself. Mike's not going to change it by himself. We need people," she said. "We let things like this slide under the rug. Who wonders how things from 50 years ago can hurt us now? I don't want to scare people but it IS scary watching someone die from cancer and a lot of people know this. It seems cancer is skyrocketing, and if I can help change this region I love for the better it will help make what I went through that much more bearable."

To contact Kim Ann Candela and aid her mission, look her up on Facebook. Or try Wendel's blogsite at www.maximumwaters.com.



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