Illnesses, deaths haunt Piketon
WASHINGTON — In the years before the Scioto Valley Local School District closed Zahn’s Corner Middle School over concerns about radioactive contamination, school board member Wayne Smith began keeping a private tally of all the kids at that building who had been diagnosed with cancer. Two recovered.
Two others died — that made four. While one was still alive, Smith helped her
walk, weak from her illness, across the stage at her high school graduation.
A fifth child — and the reason he began his grim tally in February 2013 — was his beautiful, brave daughter Katlyn. She died about a week before she would have turned 16 of rhabdomyosarcoma, a cancer of the soft tissue.
As Pike County grapples with fears that the cleanup of a former uranium enrichment operation in their community has contaminated the air and water near the plant, many are making similar counts of loved ones dealing with everything from cancer to debilitating skin conditions.
The illnesses’ link to the former Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant in Piketon, they acknowledge, is hard to prove: People get sick, and sometimes no one knows why. Health conditions are often worse than average in southern Ohio for a variety of reasons.
But in a county of 28,000, sickness seems prolific. And the May 13 closure of the middle school, with an enrollment of just a little more than 300, has spurred a creeping fear that the health problems are not just an unwelcome twist of fate.
“If you have half a thyroid here, you’re doing good,” said Ramona Davis-lee of Waverly.
Davis-lee, who grew up less than a mile from the plant, had a craniotomy in 2012 to remove a benign brain tumor from her skull. Her mother, who worked in the plant, was diagnosed with an ocular melanoma that metastasized and eventually killed her.
For years, many assumed the illnesses were largely limited to those who worked in the plant. But Zahn’s Corner has made that fear far broader.
“Zahn’s Corner really set it off,” said Davis-lee. “The fear of what’s happening — is my child going to die from cancer? Is my child going to have some illness? Is it true they’re covering this up? Is it true they’re not doing the cleanup properly? What else do we not know?”
At least two class-action lawsuits — one filed in late May and one filed last week — have documented those fears. The first alleges that neighbors of the former uranium enrichment plant were exposed to radiation as a result of the construction of a disposal cell on the site beginning in 2017.
The second alleges that the community is being put at risk by the cleanup’s “poor containment and shoddy shutdown procedures.” It reports that tests on deer killed by cars showed uranium isotopes in the livers of the deer as well as traces of uranium found in milk and egg samples from area farms.
Pike County’s cancer rate in 2019 was the secondhighest in Ohio, according to the Ohio Cancer Incidence Surveillance System at the Ohio Department of Health.
Matt Brewster of the Pike County Health Department said he has asked the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta to do a cancer cluster study on the region, but the center won’t do that until a third-party assessment of the contamination is complete.
Meanwhile, 479 people have filled out an online cancer cluster study form along with an additional list of 115 names from a community group — a total of nearly 600 responses from people who say they have cancer or negative health effects and live near or are connected to the plant. It is, he said, “an alarming number for a community our size.”
The challenge is determining whether the cancer is linked to radiation or other causes, such as genetics, other environmental factors or lifestyle choices such as smoking.
Scientists agree that radiation causes most kinds of cancer. But, said Martha Linet, a senior investigator with the National Cancer Institute, “there’s not a strong biomarker that says, ‘this cancer was caused by radiation.’”
“We know the causes of a fair number of things,” she said. “But the causes of most cancers are unknown.”
Linet said most of the research done to gauge the impact of radiation was conducted on 120,000 survivors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings in Japan.
Scientists found three notable facts: First, those exposed were 11% more inclined to develop cancer — that number changes each year, as the affected population ages. Second, the age when they developed cancer was the same age when cancer typically develops.
Third? “If you were a younger child at the time of your exposure, your risk is overall higher than if you were an adult at the time of the exposure,” she said.
Linet said it would be difficult to study Pike County’s suspected cancer cluster for a variety of reasons, including the small population of the region.
“Unfortunately, epidemiology is a pretty crude tool for cancer clusters, because the numbers are small,” she said, saying it’s even tougher when the types of cancers are different.
Arjun Makhijani, president of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research, acknowledges that cancers can be caused by a variety of factors. But radioactive contamination, he said, can be associated with an increase “in every kind of cancer — some more than others.”
The lower the exposure, he said, the lower the risk. But children are much more susceptible, and women are more susceptible than men.
Though the Department of Energy has repeatedly assured the communities that the levels are safe, “nobody wants to breathe plutonium,” Makhijani said.
“I’ve long advised the DOE to not say there are levels that are safe,” Makhijani said. “Unfortunately, that’s not normally the process which they follow.”
Kim Ealey of Portsmouth worries that the plant caused her son’s chronic illness.
Nathan Hawkins, who now lives outside Lexington, Kentucky, is 38. His problems include severe asthma, eye problems that caused him to have a cornea transplant and a severe skin condition.
“His dermatologist said he’s never seen anyone like him,” she said, sharing that her son “has suffered his entire life.”
She and her husband both worked at the plant. She had non-hodgkin’s lymphoma, and he had prostate and skin cancers.
For years, she wondered whether her son’s illness was caused by her work in the plant — if maybe something had hurt him while she was pregnant with him. But the revelations about Zahn’s Corner broadened her worries. Her son went from kindergarten through fifth grade there. She wonders whether the contamination was present even when he attended.
She wishes that the Energy Department had notified the school the minute the contamination was noticed, rather than two years after air monitors picked up neptunium.
“Why didn’t they get them in off the playground, if nothing else?” she said.
Davis-lee, 53, tells people she’s not afraid to talk about her suspicions that the contamination from the old “A-plant” has spurred health problems in her community. She has nothing to lose, she said.
Her brother, who worked in the plant, had four types of lung illnesses. He smoked, but also was exposed to asbestos at the plant. He died in 2012 in a fire.
Her mother worked there, with cancer taking her in 2014. And in 2012, DavisLee, who never worked at the plant, was diagnosed with a meningioma — a benign brain tumor. Though Davis-lee had brain surgery, the remaining headaches, dizziness and vertigo are debilitating, she said.
She said she is among six people who went to Zahn’s Corner who have had meningiomas — a condition so rare that only 32,000 people in the United States are diagnosed with the tumors each year, according to the American Society of Clinical Oncology. The malady is believed to be caused by radiation, among other factors.
Though cancer seems omnipresent in the community, she said that many residents also deal with other chronic health conditions.
“That plant — I’m sorry, but it’s causing a lot of issues,” she said. “And people don’t understand just how much has happened.”
Katlyn Smith’s cancer was discovered after she and her father were horsing around and their hands collided.
Her hand swelled up, and the family figured she’d broken a bone. But doctors saw something far more troubling on her MRI. A series of tests pointed to one diagnosis: cancer.
Years later, Wayne Smith still remembers his daughter’s face, stunned, silent, in the rear-view mirror as he drove her home after her diagnosis.
Still, she was fearless. Her Make-a-wish Foundation wish was to meet country singer Luke Bryan. The two struck up a friendship, exchanging calls and texts, with Bryan making sure she had tickets to his shows when he was in Ohio.
Once, she brought her friends and their mothers, and, as usual, Bryan met them all backstage.
“How do you like your seats?” the country star asked.
“Well, Luke,” she said, hilariously blunt. “They suck.”
Bryan moved them closer to the stage.
She was a hoot, her father remembers. She loved to toilet paper people’s houses. Her nurses helped her toilet paper her cancer doctor’s house.
When she died in 2013, they had her funeral visitation at the high school gym. The funeral director told him later that 2,500 people had attended the visitation; 2,000 came to her funeral.
Wayne Smith said he wants to see the A-plant property cleaned up. But he also wants the Department of Energy to make sure the work it’s doing doesn’t contaminate the air and water.
“They talk about it being low dose in air monitors, but my thoughts are if a kid is outside playing every day at recess, taking in breaths of air every day from running, taking that small dose in …”
He doesn’t know for sure that it was the radiation that caused the cancer that killed his child.
But he can’t risk the possibility that it might take someone else’s.
“Kids shouldn’t be around it,” he said. “To me, enough is enough.”
jwehrman@ dispatch.com @jessicawehrman