[A local factory was once the largest producer of thorium in the
world. This fall, the “radioactive capital of the Midwest” is
doing one last cleanup.]
[[link removed]]

WEST CHICAGO IS CLEANING UP THE LAST OF ITS NUCLEAR CONTAMINATION.
RESIDENTS EXPOSED TO RADIATION SAY ‘IT’S NOT OVER’  
[[link removed]]


 

Liuan Huska
July 12, 2022
Borderless
[[link removed]]


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[[link removed]]
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[[link removed]]
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[[link removed]]

_ A local factory was once the largest producer of thorium in the
world. This fall, the “radioactive capital of the Midwest” is
doing one last cleanup. _

The couple lived in West Chicago when the city was cleaning up
radioactive waste left behind by the Kerr-McGee Chemical Corporation.,
Jonathan Aguilar/Borderless Magazine

 

Sandra Arzola was relaxing in her West Chicago home one weekend in
1995, when she heard a knock at the door. Recently married, she shared
the gray duplex with her husband, mom and sister, and family members
were constantly coming and going. But when Sandra answered the door
that day, what she learned would change how she looked at her home and
suburban community forever.

At the door was a woman representing Envirocon, an environmental
cleanup company. There was thorium on the family’s property, the
woman said, and if it was OK with them, workers were coming to remove
it. It was the first time Sandra had heard of thorium.

“It took me by left field,” she said. “But [the representative]
made it sound like everything was going to be fine.”

Unknowingly, the Arzolas had bought their way into what the _Chicago
Tribune _in 1979 called “the radioactive capital of the Midwest.”
Not long after they purchased the property, the U.S. Environmental
Protection Agency designated it a Superfund site because of the
hazardous waste in their yard.

The source of the danger was the old factory one block to the south of
the Arzola home, which Jesse Arzola frequently went past while walking
their dogs. From 1932 to 1973, the factory was the largest producer
of rare earth
[[link removed]] and
radioactive thorium compounds in the world. It started out producing
lamps and later supplied thorium for the federal government’s atomic
bomb development. But perhaps the factory’s most lasting legacy, at
least in West Chicago, is the harmful radioactive waste that was
dumped in ponds, piled at the factory and buried around homes and
sidewalks across town.

Residents raised health concerns as early as the 1940s about the toxic
material, but these were regularly dismissed by the factory, last
owned by the Kerr-McGee Chemical Corporation. Comprehensive
environmental protection rules weren’t put in place until the early
1970s, leaving the factory largely free to dispose of its nuclear
waste for decades.

It has taken just as long for the company and government to clean up
the radioactive waste. As of 2015, the radioactive sites under federal
jurisdiction near the factory have been cleaned to EPA standards.
There are no remaining health risks from the land, according to
government officials.

The closed Kerr-McGee factory in West Chicago, Ill., Oct. 24,
1979.Photo courtesy of Erika Bartlett

But below the factory, the groundwater is still polluted with a range
of toxins – particularly uranium – that exceed protection
standards. The Illinois Emergency Management Agency, which has
jurisdiction over the site, expects remediation to begin this fall.
Although people in the area don’t use that polluted groundwater, the
state says it’s the last known contamination issue – and removing
most of it will hopefully eliminate any lingering concerns for
residents.

While city officials and some residents are eager to erase the stigma
of nuclear contamination from the town’s image, many newer
residents, including myself, are just now learning about their
neighborhood’s long thorium history.

“People don’t want to discuss it,” said Jesse Arzola, “because
they are afraid of the unknown.”

The Arzolas were part of a wave of new residents who moved into the
suburb 30 miles west of Chicago starting in the 1980s. From 1980 to
2007, white residents in the factory area declined by two-thirds and
Hispanic residents nearly doubled, according to an analysis by the
Daily Herald
[[link removed]].
Many new West Chicago residents, especially those who did not speak
English, didn’t know of the radiation danger when they moved in.

Prolonged or high levels of radiation exposure can damage genetic
material in cells and cause cancer and other diseases later on,
especially for children, who are more sensitive to radiation
[[link removed](15)61167-9/fulltext].
Only two public health studies, published in the early 1990s
[[link removed]],
have been conducted in West Chicago. Both found elevated cancer rates
in the 60185 zip code, which includes the neighborhood around the
factory.

A hand-written sign outside a home reads “Warning! This property is
still radioactive” in West Chicago, Ill., in the 1990s. The "Th"
circled and crossed out stands for thorium, a radioactive metal. Photo
courtesy of Erika Barlett

Today, many residents still suspect that their cancers and other
debilitating illnesses are related to factory contamination. Language
barriers and discrimination add to the mistrust for many Latino
residents.

And decades of secrecy around the factory have left a legacy of
worries.

When Sandra Arzola first toured their home in 1990 with her mother and
sister, she saw signs in the windows of neighboring houses with a big
“Th” circled and crossed out.

“What’s all that about?” she asked.

“Oh, I don’t know,” the realtor replied.

Sandra Arzola wishes she had been told the truth when she was looking
for a home. Decades later, she and her husband are living in another
home in the same neighborhood. She still doesn’t trust official
statements that their property and the city drinking water are safe.
They use bottled water instead of tap water to cook and drink because
of their concerns.

“If the realtor had been more forthright initially, then I could
tell her, ‘It doesn’t matter’ or ‘Show me something
else,’” Sandra Arzola said. “But she wasn’t honest.”

DECADES OF UNREGULATED DUMPING

The challenges facing West Chicago residents today began 90 years ago,
when Charles R. Lindsay moved his lamp factory from Chicago to what
was then an undeveloped little town with multiple rail connections.
The factory, now officially known as the Rare Earths Facility, took
monazite ore and used powerful acids to extract minerals to make gas
lanterns, which burned thorium nitrate to emit an incandescent glow.
During World War II, it also supplied thorium to the federal
government
[[link removed]] to
develop the atomic bombs that were later dropped on Nagasaki and
Hiroshima, Japan.

During its four decades of operation, the Rare Earths Facility
processed up to 141,000 tons of monazite. The liquid waste from the
extraction process was dumped into unlined ponds around the factory,
seeping into the surrounding water table. Solid waste, a black,
sand-like material known as thorium tailings, piled up on site.
Old-timers share stories of sneaking into the factory grounds and
playing on “Mount Thorium.” When the pile got too big, the waste
was trucked down the road to a new pile in Reed Keppler Park.

Facing mounting piles of toxic waste, Lindsay came up with another
solution: offer the waste to residents for landscaping. From the 1930s
through the 1950s, radioactive thorium tailings were distributed
across town, mixed with concrete to pour foundations, mixed with
topsoil for gardens and spilled along roadways. The company continued
to do this as the risks of radiation exposure became widely known
starting in the late 1940s through its effects on Japanese atomic
bomb survivors
[[link removed]].

Soon after the factory moved to West Chicago, people started
complaining. In 1941, nearby residents sued Lindsay Light for
releasing airborne hydrofluoric acid that killed trees and shrubs
nearby.

The federal government did not begin regulating nuclear materials
until 1954 [[link removed]].
Starting in 1957 the company received repeated citations for safety
violations, including failing to fence off radioactive storage areas,
exposing workers to radiation levels above standards and improper
waste disposal.

As the environmental movement gained steam through the 1960s, growing
public pressure pushed Congress to create the Environmental Protection
Agency and pass the Clean Air Act of 1970 and Clean Water Act of 1972.
That resulted in sweeping new regulations – and obligations to the
American public – for companies like Kerr-McGee, which had gotten
used to operating with limited oversight.

Internal memos from the time show company executives scrambling to
respond.

“This visitation is the forerunner of many future visits and closer
surveillance and we must learn to stay one step ahead,” wrote O.L.
Daigle, a plant manager for the Rare Earths Facility, in a 1972 memo
about an upcoming EPA visit.

A house contaminated by thorium in the midst of being cleaned up in
West Chicago, Ill., in the 1990s.Photo courtesy of Erika Bartlett

By the next year, Kerr-McGee had not complied with a broad slate of
new environmental safety regulations. The EPA denied the company’s
request for an operating permit and the factory shuttered in 1973. It
was cheaper to cease operations than follow the new rules.

By 1980, Kerr-McGee had started the process of closing down the West
Chicago facility for good. Pressure from residents and the city pushed
the company to begin cleanup on 119 contaminated residential
properties.

Still, Kerr-McGee had another plan that worried residents: to
permanently store 13 million cubic feet of radioactive waste at the
factory site in a four-story, 27-acre clay-covered cell. Concerned
residents formed an organization, the Thorium Action Group, to fight
the company’s proposal. This spawned more than a decade of legal
battles
[[link removed]] between
residents, the city of West Chicago, and state of Illinois — who
wanted the thorium out of town — and the company and the federal
Nuclear Regulatory Commission, who insisted the waste could safely be
stored in this densely populated neighborhood of West Chicago.

After the state of Illinois took over oversight of the factory waste,
the dispute finally appeared close to a resolution. In 1991, state
lawmakers passed a bill that would charge the company $130 million
each year to store the waste on site. Rather than pay the bill,
Kerr-McGee decided to ship the contaminated materials to a hazardous
waste disposal site in Utah.

MANY NEW RESIDENTS WERE IN THE DARK

Moving the thorium waste out of town would take over two decades to
complete. In the meantime, there was still the problem of radioactive
tailings embedded around the neighborhood.

The EPA did a series of flyover scans, street-by-street surveys and
other testing to assess the damage. By 1991, contaminated residential
properties – the final count was 676 out of 2,174 surveyed – as
well as Reed Keppler Park, a wastewater treatment plant and Kress
Creek south of the factory were placed on the EPA’s National
Priorities List as Superfund sites. The wastewater treatment plant’s
contamination came from receiving thorium tailings as fill during
construction, not because of polluted sewage, according to the EPA.

The Arzola family’s home was among these sites. After the Envirocon
visit, cleanup got underway. Workers in white hazmat suits excavated
soil up to eight feet deep around the property. “The only thing left
intact was the house,”Jesse Arzola said. “They dug right up to the
foundation.”

The cleanup crew also tore up the sidewalk. To get to their front
door, the family, including the couple’s two-year-old daughter,
crossed four-foot wide wooden planks over the gaping hole in the
ground. They didn’t trust the sturdiness of the guardrails, and
instead walked carefully along the center. After the digging, the area
was backfilled with clean dirt. The entire process took over six
months.

The Arzolas’ experience is far from rare. Realtors in West Chicago
have operated with a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, said
longtime realtor and former West Chicago resident Dan Czuba. Unlike
for radon or lead, realtors never received directives from the state
or any licensing board to disclose other harmful thorium byproducts.

People have had to do their own homework and decide whether or not a
home was a risk. “To this day,” Czuba said, “I still don’t
know that there was an official statement of, ‘Thorium will hurt
you.’”

An aerial view of the Arzola’s house, front and center, and the
field behind where the former Kerr-McGee factory once stood in West
Chicago, Ill., Saturday, June 25, 2022.Jonathan Aguilar/Borderless
Magazine

Latino residents also continued moving in during the decades following
the factory’s closure. “The Mexican community wanted home
ownership,” said Czuba. “They took the slop and the junk from the
non-Hispanics. They didn’t argue and complain, they fixed them
up.”

By 2010, West Chicago became the only town in DuPage County with a
majority-Latino population. Today, 55% of its over 25,000 residents
speak a language other than English at home, and 32% are foreign-born.
 Activists feel that many of the newer residents weren’t fully
informed, or informed at all, about the risks of living near the
former factory.

“There was a lot of white flight, which brought in Mexican families
who didn’t know [the history], and in many cases didn’t even speak
the language to know,” said Cristobal Cavazos, a local immigrant
rights activist with Immigrant Solidarity DuPage.

Throughout the decades, various groups have tried to get the word out
about thorium. The Thorium Action Group was active through the early
2000s. Once the EPA got involved and Kerr-McGee agreed to move the
waste out, the group dissipated. “We all felt for the most part that
the message was heard and it was getting done,” said Czuba, the only
realtor in the group.

”“To this day,” Czuba said, “I still don’t know that there
was an official statement of, ‘Thorium will hurt you.’”

Czuba notes that no Latino residents were involved in the group,
though West Chicago’s population was already about 17 percent
Hispanic by 1980.

Anna Maria Escamilla Jacobo is a former West Chicago resident whose
grandfather, Viviano Escamilla, worked at the factory starting in the
1950s. Jacobo said residents like her grandfather knew of the risks
but were afraid to speak up for fear of discrimination.

“The mentality was, ‘nobody is going to listen to us because
we’re Mexican. We can try, but it’s not going to do us any
good,’” said Jacobo. “My grandfather feared that if he did say
something there would be repercussions for him and the family and the
Hispanic community. He would say, ‘Nothing you can do, nothing you
can do,’ which was really sad.”

In 2007, Kathy Reinke-Bentham started another community group
[[link removed]] because
none of her neighbors knew about the issue. She had watched the
property next door get dug up for thorium and then change ownership.
The next owner, Maria Salazar, had no idea. Reinke-Bentham got
Salazar’s help translating information into Spanish and went around
the neighborhood passing out leaflets and inviting people to meetings.

Today, residents continue to spread the word about the town’s
thorium legacy and newer environmental issues. Cavazos’s group
[[link removed]], which started in 2007,
is among those mobilizing residents against a proposed waste transfer
station in West Chicago. Members of Immigrant Solidarity DuPage see
the station, which would be the city’s second, as yet another
instance of environmental health hazards unfairly impacting this
minority community.

The factory’s toxic legacy in West Chicago also continues to impact
residents. Although the EPA announced that residential property
cleanup finished in 2003 [[link removed]],
the agency later found 13 properties that were not cleaned to its
standards and needed further cleanup.

The agency also said letters were sent out to homeowners once their
properties were remediated. The Arzolas don’t recall receiving one.
City, state and federal officials also decided against instituting
deed notices or restrictions disclosing the contamination, to ensure
properties didn’t have their reputations unfairly tainted, according
to the _Daily Herald_
[[link removed]].
Any information buyers might receive about past radiation scans or
remediation now depends on a sellers’ willingness to pass it on.

The lack of easily accessible information surrounding the
contamination and cleanups has left some residents with the nagging
worry that there may be other hidden pockets of radiation around town.
Some are afraid to plant edible gardens. The Arzolas want an updated
scan of the area. Many have heard enough talk of thorium to cause
concern, but not enough detail to feel confident that their
environment is safe.

“IS IT BECAUSE OF THE THORIUM?”

One house to the west and across the railroad from the Arzolas, Erika
Bartlett grew up playing along the tracks and under her yard’s
sprawling old oak trees. When she was diagnosed with leukemia in 2012,
at age 34, a friend asked if there was anything she could have been
exposed to.

“Wait a minute, I actually was,” Bartlett told her friend. She
thought back to her high school years, when the oak trees, swingset
and above-ground pool at her house were removed during the radiation
remediation. Bartlett realized she had spent her childhood, starting
from age four, in a neighborhood embedded with nuclear waste.

She wondered how many others living near the factory had similar
health problems. That started her on a yearslong personal
investigation into the town’s thorium legacy.

Between 2012 and 2016, as Bartlett was undergoing cancer treatment,
she knocked on doors in the neighborhoods around the factory, an area
covering about one square mile. She found over 200 cases of cancers
and other illnesses that could stem from radiation exposure, including
birth defects, Hashimoto’s and aplastic anemia, the illness that
killed the pioneering radioactivity researcher Marie Curie in 1934.

Erika Bartlett in front of her childhood home in West Chicago, Ill.,
Friday, June 3, 2022. Bartlett grew up less than one block away from
the defunct Kerr-McGee factory, which produced radioactive waste that
spread across West Chicago.Jonathan Aguilar/Borderless Magazine

“When I first started, I didn’t think I’d find anything,”
Bartlett said. “But block after block, it seemed like a bigger deal
than I thought.”

The EPA estimated that [[link removed]],
before the waste was removed, radiation levels in some residential
neighborhoods in West Chicago increased lifetime cancer risks up to
70  times what is acceptable. This means that if 10,000 people lived
in those maximum exposure areas, 70 of them would develop cancer, in
addition to the risk that 1 in 3 Americans will develop cancer in
their lifetime. That doesn’t account for other possible health
effects [[link removed]] such
as thyroid and autoimmune diseases.

The only official health studies
[[link removed]] into
the impacts on people living near the factory were conducted over
three decades ago, by the Illinois Department of Public Health. Among
residents in the 60185 zip code, studies in 1990 and 1991 found
elevated rates of cancer, including melanomas and lung, colorectal and
breast cancers. By grouping exposed and unexposed people together,
however, researchers said more differences may have been masked.

By 2006, follow-up assessments by IDPH concluded that the four
Superfund sites posed “no apparent public health hazard.” That
doesn’t mean that residents aren’t living with ongoing health
impacts. A 1994 report notes that “because of the long latent period
for most cancers, current cases do not reflect recent exposure.”
Today, people may still be experiencing health issues from exposure
decades earlier.

Current and former West Chicago residents Erika Bartlett, Julieta
Alcantar-Garcia, Mike Merrion, and Ester Escamilla Hughes talk about
the effects of thorium contamination on their lives at Pioneer Park in
West Chicago, Ill., Sunday, June 5, 2022.J onathan Aguilar/ Borderless
Magazine

In Facebook groups, West Chicago residents sometimes compare notes
about their health issues. Anna Maria Escamilla Jacobo saw one of
these threads in 2014. Comment after comment, she read about neighbors
with lung diseases, early onset cancer and autoimmune disorders.

“Heck yeah,” she thought, “this is me all over the place.” It
was the first time she realized that her own illnesses might stem from
living near the Kerr-McGee factory.

Jacobo and her sister, Ester Escamilla Hughes, grew up in a little
starter home just west of the factory, across the street from Pioneer
Park.

In 1989, just as Ester graduated high school, an EPA flyover survey
found the area around the factory, including the park and the
sisters’ daily route to school, gave off elevated levels of gamma
radiation. In some areas, the radiation was up to 40 times the average
of what a person might ordinarily encounter.

It has taken the Escamilla sisters years to unravel the potential
impact of living by the factory.

They both moved out of their childhood home by 1995. The next year, at
age 27, Jacobo was diagnosed with Hashimoto’s, an autoimmune
condition that affects the thyroid glands. The thyroid is one of the
organs at greatest risk of damage
[[link removed]] after
radiation exposure, especially in children. Jacobo also developed
rheumatoid arthritis at age 44.

“The rheumatologist told me my lab results and X-rays were that of
an 80-year-old with rheumatoid arthritis,” Jacobo said.

Ester Escamilla Hughes in her apartment in Chicago, Ill., Thursday,
June 9, 2022. Hughes takes several daily supplements to help treat her
autoimmune diseases that she believes were caused by exposure to
radiation in West Chicago.Jonathan Aguilar/Borderless Magazine

Her sister was diagnosed with a range of illnesses shortly after
turning 40, including Hashimoto’s, rheumatoid arthritis and other
conditions affecting her lungs and immune system.

“I started getting rashes, then I started gaining a lot of weight,
my hands hurt, my fingers were turning purple,” Hughes said. “I
was like, ‘What is happening to me?’”

Today, longitudinal studies are difficult. Some who were exposed for
decades have since moved away, while others arrived during or after
the cleanup.

Jesse and Sandra Arzola have had prostate and thyroid cancer,
respectively. Before they talked with me they didn’t connect their
illnesses to past radiation exposure. It’s hard — impossible
really — to tell if any resident’s illness stems from living near
the factory, exposure to other carcinogens, genetic predisposition, or
all of the above.

But each new ailment comes under heightened scrutiny as residents ask,
“Is it because of the thorium?” The community will never have a
definite answer, even as they are haunted by ongoing worries.

Yet others, like West Chicago Mayor Ruben Pineda, spent their entire
lives living near the factory — Pineda even played at the Reed
Keppler dump site — and seem perfectly fine. “I’m not aware of
anybody who was ill from the factory,” Pineda said. He added that if
there were cases, the information would be privileged to clients and
attorneys involved in lawsuits.

Jesse Arzola walks his two dogs in the field where the Kerr-McGee
factory one stood in West Chicago, Ill., Saturday, June 25, 2022.
Arzola regularly walks his dogs through the field, which sits between
the couple’s first home, where his mother-in-law still lives, and
their current home. Jonathan Aguilar/Borderless Magazine

Dozens of lawsuits have been filed against the factory for damages to
health and property. A few — those with political clout or
connections
[[link removed]],
notes the realtor Czuba — won hefty individual settlements. In
1998, a significant legal win
[[link removed]] came for
hundreds of families when a district judge ordered Kerr-McGee to pay
$5 million for “medical monitoring” to account for future health
effects on children living near the factory.

Bartlett’s family was part of the suit. She and her sister each
received $4,000 and in return agreed not to sue the company for future
personal injury. “The lawyer said, ‘Take it. If you get sick
there’s nothing you’re going to prove, they have such good
lawyers,’” Bartlett said.

Bartlett’s leukemia came back in 2014. Newer, effective treatments
have allowed her to live in remission, but have left her with brain
fog, vision impairments and cognitive issues.

The settlement money “doesn’t go far,” she said. “It does
nothing when you’re sick.”

NOT QUITE “PAST HISTORY”

In November 2015, the last rail car of thorium-contaminated soil
trundled away from West Chicago to a hazardous waste dump in the Utah
desert. Mayor Pineda declared it a “watershed moment.
[[link removed]]”
Cleanup had stalled for years after Tronox, Kerr-McGee’s spinoff
company, went bankrupt in 2009.

Today, the Rare Earths Facility is owned by a government trust that
channels federal monies into the remaining cleanup.

In the mayor’s view, the disaster is now “past history.” He’s
proud of the activists that got people in power to listen. Cleanup is
almost done. And now he’s ready to talk about other things.

“I don’t want that word [thorium] to pop up every time you hear
‘West Chicago,’” Pineda said.

That history will come back to life this fall, however, when the
Illinois Emergency Management Agency begins the last phase of
remediation on the factory site.

The extensive groundwater contamination under the factory is currently
contained by sheet piling that goes 70 feet below the ground, which
was initially put in place to protect workers excavating contaminated
soil. It now traps residual contaminants, preventing the groundwater
from naturally diluting them over time.

A network of 122 monitoring wells on and around the site show several
contaminants, notably radioactive uranium, exceed state standards. As
a result, nearby residents aren’t allowed to drill new wells.

“As long as humans are not consuming the groundwater, there is no
true health hazard,” said Kelly Horn, IEMA’s Branch Chief of
Radiation Protection Services.

The agency will use almost all of the remaining $36 million in federal
funds for the operation, which will take three to five years.

IEMA will release an environmental analysis of the cleanup project
this summer, which Horn expects will show no negative impact on
residents.

“Because the soil has been remediated, and the groundwater
remediation will produce minimal waste, there really is no human
health risk,” said Horn.

A faded “no trespassing” sign hangs on a fence surrounding the
site where the Kerr-McGee factory once stood in West Chicago, Ill.,
Friday, June 3, 2022. Some residents in the area were paid just $4,000
after a class-action lawsuit was brought against the owners of the
factory. Jonathan Aguilar/Borderless Magazine

A faded “no trespassing” sign hangs on a fence surrounding the
site where the Kerr-McGee factory once stood in West Chicago, Ill.,
Friday, June 3, 2022. Some residents in the area were paid just $4,000
after a class-action lawsuit was brought against the owners of the
factory.Jonathan Aguilar/Borderless Magazine

The city of West Chicago plans to build a park designed with community
input on the old factory site once remediation is complete. “While
the history will always be there,” said City Administrator Michael
Guttman, “hopefully something pretty stupendous will be in its
place.”

I asked Guttman if the city has considered putting up signs noting the
site’s history. Victims of the atomic bomb fallout in Nagasaki and
Hiroshima are memorialized with peace parks. Some residents want to
see a tribute to the people affected by the Rare Earths Facility,
which supplied materials for those bombs.

“I have not given that a moment’s thought yet,” Guttman said.

“Maybe that’s something the community will have input on?” I
asked.

After a few moments of silence on the other end of the call, I moved
on.

“IT’S STILL HAPPENING”

On the one hand, the story of West Chicago and thorium is one of
triumph: a small town overcomes the odds and makes a big corporation
clean up its radioactive waste. On the other hand, thorium still
haunts some residents, especially those living with illness or deaths
in the family that they suspect are related.

While cleanup is almost finished, Cavazos said his community wants
restorative justice. He wants to see a public forum acknowledging the
damage done to the community by Kerr-McGee, especially to Mexican
families who unwittingly bought contaminated properties.

“The narrative of the past has been lost. Ever since the ‘80s
they’ve tried to fast-forward,” Cavazos said. “People today are
still sick from Kerr-McGee.”

Kerr-McGee no longer exists. Many residents don’t expect help for
their ongoing health issues. And in the absence of an official
response, some are trying to keep the story alive on their own.

Erika Bartlett in front of the home of a former neighbor who died of a
brain tumor in West Chicago, Ill., Friday, June 3, 2022. The neighbor
lived across the street from the Kerr-McGee factory.Jonathan
Aguilar/Borderless Magazine

Abraham Marshall, a former resident whose wife suspects her autoimmune
issues are factory-related, recently published the first of a series
of youth science fiction books [[link removed]] about
West Chicago’s thorium history to honor victims. Bartlett and a
student filmmaker compiled her neighbors’ stories into a 2016
documentary film, “A Lifetime Irradiated
[[link removed]].”

“Companies continue to profit off of people who are vulnerable in
society,” Bartlett said. “What would be ideal is that enough
people are aware of these kinds of practices so it doesn’t keep
happening.”

For Ester Escamilla Hughes, talking about West Chicago’s
thorium-laced past is about finding support for the ongoing health
issues that have cropped up for her and other residents.

The two sisters will never know for sure if living near the factory as
children contributed to their ongoing chronic illnesses. Jacobo once
asked her endocrinologist about it and was shut down. “It made me
feel like I asked a dumb question. So I never went down that road,”
she said. Among the 125 extended family members on her mom’s side,
no one has the kind of serious health issues she and her sister have.

Other doctors told Hughes that her illnesses might have been triggered
by working at a quarry, where she was exposed to silica dust. She
wonders if growing up around nuclear waste was the underlying problem
that her work hazards exacerbated.

Talking with other residents has brought Hughes some comfort that
she’s not alone.

“When you’re sick, you think, ‘Oh my gosh, am I crazy?’
Sometimes the doctors make you feel like you’re crazy,” she said.
But knowing that other residents also share her story helps. “We are
feeling something. Something did happen. And it’s still
happening.”

_Correction 7/28/22: An earlier version of this article incorrectly
stated that the Kerr-McGee factory is north of the Arzola’s home._

_Check out our FAQ
[[link removed]] for
answers to common questions about West Chicago radiation
contamination._

_Have a story about West Chicago that you want to share? E-mail us
at [email protected]. _

_This story is available for free republication. Please contact us
at [email protected] for permission and details on how you can
use our reporting._

_"This story was originally published by Borderless Magazine
[[link removed]]. Sign
up for their weekly newsletter
[[link removed]] to learn the latest about the
Midwest's immigrant communities."_

 _"This reporting was supported by the International Women’s Media
Foundation’s [[link removed]] Howard G. Buffett Fund for
Women Journalists and an award from the Institute for Journalism and
Natural Resources. [[link removed]]"_

_LIUAN HUSKA is a freelance journalist and writer at the intersection
of ecology, embodiment, and faith. She is the author of Hurting Yet
Whole: Reconciling Body and Spirit in Chronic Pain and Illness, a
book weaving memoir, theology, and sociocultural critique. Liuan’s
reporting and essays have appeared in many places, including
Chicago’s WBEZ, Borderless, Grist, Christianity Today, The Christian
Century, and NPR’s Here and Now
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She is a regular columnist for Sojourners magazine._

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