MAGA! WV Residents Get 5-Minute, Largely Inaudible EPA Presentation On Potential Cancer Cluster

GLEN JEAN — Minden residents, the leader of a local citizens’ group, a local physician and a Beckley attorney were angered Friday, and an elected official expressed dissatisfaction with a community meeting hosted at the National Guard Armory here by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Minden resident and Headwaters Defense member Susie Worley and HD founder Brandon Richardson displayed 106 black balloons — representing the neighbors they say have been diagnosed with or died of cancer in Minden over the past four years, but federal and state health officials told residents that current data does not support a cancer cluster in Minden.

Around 45 Minden residents walked into the armory Friday evening to find 12 chairs and a sound system that was largely ineffective in carrying the words of EPA agent Melissa Linden, who stood at the front of the room and gave a presentation that lasted around five minutes.

At the beginning of the meeting, residents raised their voices to ask questions in the large, gymnasium-like room where EPA agents and the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR) and the West Virginia Division of Health and Human Resources (WV DHHR) had set up informational booths — a format that those in the room protested.

Projecting her voice, Andrea Small, a 46-year resident of Minden who had lived above an underground slate dumping site that was on fire for years, told Linden that her dad, a worker at the contaminated Shaffer Equipment Company site, had died of melanoma and that her brother had been recently diagnosed with cancer. She asked EPA to test her mom’s property for PCB contamination.

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http://www.fayettetribune.com/news/epa-meeting-angers-residents/article_59606356-bf75-11e7-bd71-6b7faedca55c.html