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Source: http://www.zwire.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=16019633&BRD=2626&PAG=461&dept_id=536271&rfi=8
Hometown concerns aired on Web site When Sue Sturgis returned to Hometown to care for her dying father in November 1998, she soon realized he wasn't alone in being ill. Sturgis' Web site, "Hometown Hazards, A Rural Pennsylvania Community Battles Toxic Pollution" is the latest in an increasing number of Internet sites focused on Schuylkill County environmental issues. "Within just a few days of getting here, I started realizing everybody was sick," said Sturgis, a Raleigh, N.C., resident who has revisited the region many times since to gather information and do interviews. A Web log containing her findings, called a blog, emerged last week at www.hometownhazards.com just one day before a controversial statistical cancer study by the Pennsylvania Department of Health was presented to the community. Although Department of Health officials have insisted most cancer rates in the region are not statistically above the state average, local residents and environmentalists say a comparison to national averages tells a different story. Sturgis did not at first connect the kidney cancer diagnosed in her father, Daniel, in the 1980s to local environmental factors since he had worked at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant shortly after the partial meltdown in 1979. She discovered, however, that three men within a few blocks of her parents' Frankford Avenue home had also been diagnosed with kidney cancer, including two in their 30s and 40s. "These are not older men getting sick of whatever is going to get them in the end. These were predominantly younger men," Sturgis said. Sturgis found from talking to neighbors, local physicians and pharmacists that not only did there seem to be an unusual number of cancer cases of various types, but also a high rate of autoimmune diseases like multiple sclerosis and rheumatoid arthritis. A former reporter for the Raleigh News & Observer and the Independent Weekly of Durham, S.C., Sturgis spent her time in between visiting her father at the hospital doing research to discover the reason why. Her site, created with a simple online application called Blogger which required virtually no programming experience, is the latest in a growing number of Internet outlets for environmental concerns in Schuylkill County. Two and a half years, ago the Tamaqua-based Army for a Clean Environment, a group protesting the use of coal combustion ash and a plan to use New York and New Jersey river dredge in a local stripping pit launched a site at www.armyforacleanenvironment.org. "One of our members was a Webmaster and he suggested it and volunteered to do the work on it for free," said Dante J. Picciano, a West Penn attorney with genetics training who serves as the group's spokesman. Unlike Sturgis' site, which contains data on a variety of local pollution ranging from the air emissions of many local industries to local Superfund sites but draws few conclusions, The Army for a Clean Environment site contains a distinct point of view. It offers press releases, political cartoons, T-shirts and bumper stickers in opposition to the Springdale pit reclamation project being carried out by Pottsville mining company Lehigh Coal & Navigation with the backing of the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection. The site is another example of how the Internet has given rise to an increasingly diverse group of voices fragmenting forces that once bound societies together, said Jack Carroll, Edward Frymoyer chair of Information Sciences and Technology at Penn State University. While Carroll said the positive side of that unity is that it gives communities a common ground and outlook, the negative aspect is the promotion of conformity. "I don't think it's a very simple thing at all. I think it's absolutely right to see this as democracy. This is the way it was supposed to be," Carroll said. Carroll's specialty is community informatics, a multidisciplinary study of the way in which computers are being used in civic life, politics and activism. For every point of view on the Internet another can be found, Carroll says. An example locally is www.ultracleanfuels.com, a site promoting a proposed coal-to-oil refinery in northern Schuylkill County by Waste Management and Processors Inc. The site is countered by www.ultradirtyfuels.com, created by ActionPA, a Philadelphia-based environmental group in partnership with local activists, pointing out what they see as the problems with the project. Carroll says the Internet does far more than simply allow local groups to communicate with the world at little or no cost, it also allows them to find allies with common interests and goals and pool information in a way never before possible. Picciano says his group's Web site has already attracted interest from groups in California and Hawaii who are also concerned about coal combustion ash issues. "There have been community groups that have been concerned for a long time about some of these issues, but now there's a technology that makes it so easy to share information," Sturgis said. |
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