The tribal governments of Alaska's St. Lawrence Island in the Bering Sea say they’re living with the toxic legacy of Cold War military installations on their land, and this week they took their complaint to the United Nations special rapporteur on toxics and human rights.
About 4,000 miles from home, at a press conference Wednesday in Washington, D.C., tribal leaders spoke about troubling health problems on the island.
Vi Waghiyi works with the Alaska Community Action on Toxics. She said her family lived at the most contaminated location on St. Lawrence, the Northeast Cape, for five years when she was growing up.
“I’m a cancer survivor. I’ve had three miscarriages. I’m 66,” she said. “My mother had a … stillborn child after me. Heart disease, strokes, diabetes and cancer. Her name was Della Waghiyi. I want to say their name.”
Sandra Gologergen from Savoonga said her father and his brother salvaged materials from the military buildings at the Northeast Cape, and, unaware of any contamination risk, built a cabin.
“We stayed there every summer, not knowing,” she said. “My father and his brother always worked and camped together. And then they both died of cancer, three months apart.”
The Yup’ik people of St. Lawrence Island have PCB levels in their blood 4.5 to 9 times higher than the average in Lower 48 communities, according to the Alaska Community Action on Toxics. ACAT recognizes that much of that is not attributed to the military but notes research showing that those who lived near the Northeast Cape have higher PCB levels than residents of other parts of the island.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers spent more than $130 million to clean up the island and considered the work largely done a decade ago. The Army Corps says it continues to monitor and review the site and expects to do so indefinitely. A federal public health agency concluded in 2017 that the number and type of cancer cases on the island are similar to those in other Alaska Native communities in the region.
St. Lawrence leaders call the cleanup superficial.
Their 42-page complaint is now in the hands of the U.N. special rapporteur, an independent expert. He can’t order a cleanup, but his work could add pressure to the federal agencies.
It might seem like the Trump administration isn’t sensitive to that kind of pressure. News broke Wednesday that the administration intends to close all offices of environmental justice in the Environmental Protection Agency.
Attorney Claudia Polsky, who helped write the St. Lawrence complaint, said no matter what policies the administration rescinds or which offices it defunds, the law still applies.
“Whether we call it environmental justice, whether we call it hazardous waste cleanup, whether we call it something else, there is still a law domestically that is being violated and that is enforceable,” she said, “and this is the time to make it happen.”
