Faced With an Elevated Cancer Rate, Residents Fight for Their Lives

“Nobody grows old in this neighborhood,” laments one resident. “Everybody dies of cancer before their time.”

Merle Brewer has been in the Kirschner-Purtell neighborhood 20 years. And he’s giving his view of the five-block area with about 40 small homes where a Missouri Department of Health study recently found a cancer death rate twice that of the rest of the state.

Residents say the cause is the heavy industry that surrounds the homes and that the people living there are being robbed of the “right to a healthy life.”

“I can take you to each house around here and show you someone who’s died of cancer,” said another resident, Charles Springer. “This is a question of jobs being more important than people, and officials telling us we don’t have a right to a healthy life.”

But officials for St. Joseph and the state Department of Natural Resources dispute those claims and say the plants that surround the neighborhood comply with federal and state regulations on hazardous waste and pollution.

Therefore, say the companies, they cannot be blamed for elevated cancer rates.

City officials also point to claims that the high incidence of cancer in the area could also be attributed to lifestyle and genetics.

Kirschner-Purtell homes are on quiet, narrow streets located on a flood plain about 1 mile from the Missouri River. Some of the homes appear to have been built within the last 20 years. Others were constructed well before 1972, when the city zoned the land around the homes for heavy manufacturing.

Most of the 300 residents are middle-aged or elderly. Only a handful work of have worked for the 14 nearby plants, which include Farmland Industries, a chemical manufacturer; St. Joseph Light & Power Co.; Stone Container Corp.; Albaugh Chemical Co., and Schurpack, which makes plastic packaging.

The state health department’s study was coordinated by Kathleen Anger for its bureau of smoking, tobacco and cancer. Anger said the study found 18 confirmed cancer deaths from 1980 to 1990. Given the size and age of the population, only 8.8 such deaths would have been expected, Anger said.

The study also found more than twice as many leukemia and breast cancer cases than expected, more than three times the number of expected cases of lung cancer among men and more than three times the expected cases of colorectal cancer in women.

The comparison area was the state of Missouri for death data, and a combination of several areas in the United States for the new cases.

Some of the residents say they want government to buy their homes. One such plan, which would have given residents $35,000 an acre, was turned down by the Chamber of Commerce and the city in 1991, Hall said.

City Manager R. Patt Lilly said St. Joseph, a city of about 75,000, 50 miles north of Kansas City, hopes to find a way to determine what is causing the elevated cancer rates. Without a known cause the city does not plan to buy the homes.

“It’s difficult to proceed when you’re really not sure what needs to be done,” Lilly said.