Milillo honored for raising awareness of health risks posed by Superfund site

Over the past few years, residents of Buffalo’s Delevan-Grider neighborhood have wanted a better idea of exactly what they are living next to.

Collaborating with UB chemist Tammy M. Milillo earlier this spring, they found out: Tests from 10 residences bordering the industrial site at 1001 East Delevan Ave. revealed PCBs — a known carcinogen — present in eight of the soil samples taken from the homes.

“The analysis revealed PCBs present at the 2-inch level — which is below EPA screening levels (of what is toxic) right now,” Milillo says. “We cannot prove the contamination is coming from the plant grounds. However, PCBs are not found in nature, so there is no other source in that neighborhood that they could be coming from.

“But they were certainly found in the soil two inches down and immediately outside of this industrial site,” she explains.  

“We are planning to meet with officials of the Department of Environmental Conservation to alert them of our findings and to let them know we found them on people’s property outside the site’s fence line in this series of samples.”

Earlier this spring, Milillo’s work citing dangers to community health posed by the PCBs was recognized by state Sen. Tim Kennedy and Buffalo City Comptroller Mark Schroeder with a Certification of Recognition and a Citation of Community Service.

Formerly the site of the GM Saginaw/American Axle complex, the property is owned by Buffalo-based Ontario Specialty Contracting (OSC). Now home to specialty steel manufacturing, Niagara Lubricants and OSC Manufacturing and Equipment Services, the site also contains a large chunk of Buffalo’s industrial past.

“In addition to components that were assembled for automobile manufacturing, the facility also housed six oil-fired burners, machining and painting equipment and a waste water treatment plant,” says Milillo, research assistant professor in the Department of Chemistry.

She says there have been many plans to clean up hazardous polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), as well as oil and grease also present on the site, but ultimately, expenses and bankruptcies claimed by both companies prevented the toxic wastes from being removed from the property.

“It is a New York State Department of Environmental Conservation Stage 2 Superfund Site,” she says. “In order to be on the DEC’s Superfund site list, an area has to pose a health danger to the environment, animals and humans.

“This site is on their priority list,” Milillo says. “The Buffalo News revealed that on April 21, 2013. But at the time, no one had tested to see if PCBs — which the DEC knew were present on site — had migrated off site into residential soil.

Milillo says she first heard about the project from Delevan-Grider resident Virginia Golden and retired UB architecture professor Lynda Schneekloth.

“At that time — this was in 2012 — we just wanted the companies on the site, and whoever owned it, to clean up,” says Golden. “They had fences around their property along East Delevan between Cornwall and Northumberland. The fence was knocked down and no one was repairing it.

“With General Motors and American Axle, this happened at least twice a year. They would get it repaired immediately,” she says. “After the plant changed hands, and the fence was laying there for months, we started wondering, ‘Who owns this?’”

Golden adds this was when heavy trucks began rumbling through the neighborhood, which, she says, was prohibited.

“Also during this period, there were two fires on the site — one burned for two days,” she recalls. “The fire department didn’t know what kind of chemicals were burning. So there was a long delay while teams went out to the airport to obtain the type of foam that was used for jet fuel fires.

“DEC has been monitoring there — at this site, every week — for quite a while,” Golden says. “They do not allow anyone on those sites to bring in the harsh chemicals they had been working with before.”

By last December, Milillo and her team of students finished taking soil samples, which were sent to ALS, an EPA-certified independent lab, for analysis.

“We did a whole suite of chemicals, testing for heavy metals — 138 chemicals in all, with different grades of toxicity,” she says. “We were particularly interested in PCBs. They are the most worrisome class of contaminants and the reason why the former American Axle plant was put on the EPA Superfund list.

“The DEC has done a lot of sampling of soil on the industrial site up to the fence line,” Milillo adds. “But they have never gone across the street from the plant or onto residents’ properties to do additional testing for these chemicals and contaminants.

“PCBs are persistent organic pollutants, and the real danger is they build up over time. They do not degrade or disappear,” she says. “PCBs are a class of contaminants that you would not typically see unless there was a source.”

Golden says the samples are vital for her neighborhood’s health and safety, and emphasizes that Milillo and UB are doing this work at no charge to the Delevan-Grider community.

“These 10 home owners agreed to allow testing to be done on their properties because of the package we put together to have UB arrange this soil testing,” she says. “It was going to be confidential between them, UB and the soil-testers. They felt they had some control about this process, and that was very important.

“Our community group partners hold an annual awards meeting, and this year everyone felt that Tammy deserves this recognition,” Golden says. “We notified Sen. Kennedy and City Comptroller Schroeder of this just before Easter.”

Milillo plans to continue working with the residents and is applying for environmental grants to obtain funding.

“If the grant applications are successful, I intend to stay in these neighborhoods, giving this money back to the communities,” she says. “There are many questions to be answered. I see community outreach as an important part of my job here at UB.”