The Massachusetts Department of Public Health, swamped with calls from concerned Valley residents, has warned the City of Northampton against trumpeting a recent MDPH study as evidence that the city's landfill poses no threat to public health.
"That's why we wrote the letter," said Suzanne K. Condon, MDPH's Director of the Bureau of Environmental Health, referring to an Oct. 2 letter to Northampton's health director Xanthi M. Scrimgeour that calls for "more comprehensive environmental monitoring" of the landfill. The letter is signed by Jan Sullivan of MDPH's Community Assessment Program.
In recent weeks, Mayor Clare Higgins, as well as the editorial page of the Daily Hampshire Gazette, has publicly cheered a recently released MDPH study of available health statistics for neighborhoods near the municipal landfill. The study, opined the Gazette, concluded that the landfill is "not responsible for any health problems, including cancer, among the city residents."
According to Condon, the study did not reach such a conclusion. In fact, she said, given that cancer, for example, is unlikely to show up in reported statistics "until 20 to 40 years after an exposure," the MDPH study has almost no value in determining whether the landfill is a threat to public health today. "People who get cancer today were likely exposed [to a carcinogen] in the 1960s," Condon said in an interview with the Advocate last week.
Condon said the MDPH study is of little value in weighing the risks of Northampton's proposal to expand the landfill over the Barnes Aquifer. "If you want to expand a landfill, you need to ask the right questions," she said. "Is the landfill causing health problems today and will it cause health problems if it's expanded? Our study didn't answer those questions." Condon said the city should do more sophisticated studies of the flow of air and groundwater from the landfill—studies that she says the Department of Environmental Protection will likely demand before giving final approval to an expansion of the landfill.
