Bangor’s Health

The parents at Griffin Park in Bangor are worried and they are right to be. They report that an overwhelming number of the children in the housing complex are persistently ill and they know nearby Birch Stream, which catches runoff from Bangor International Airport, is badly polluted. Whether a link can be established between the two is less important than the city treating residents’ concerns seriously and ensuring that those in the housing complex are safe.

Griffin Park residents surveyed their neighbors and say that in 25 of the 30 apartments there children suffer severe headaches, sore throats, nose bleeds, exhaustion and a number of other ailments. They say these symptoms lessen when the children go to school, disappear when they move away and have reappeared for those who have returned to visit. Many trips to physicians to check for strep throat, etc., have turned up nothing, they say – their kids remain sick, often unable to play, and the parents understandably fear for their long-term health. Even if the stream turns out not to be the source of the illnesses suffered by the children at Griffin Park, the city should be interested in finding the actual cause.

The smell coming from Birch Stream got so bad last April that the Department of Environmental Protection investigated and found an abundance of propylene glycol, an ingredient in the de-icer used by the airport and the adjacent Maine Air National Guard. To the credit of the city, it quickly made plans to install a drainage system to prevent the de-icer from reaching the stream. But that won’t stop other pollutants – tests found elevated levels of heavy metals, jet fuel, gasoline and oil – from entering the stream and it doesn’t clean up the pollution in the stream bed.

The state and the city disagree over which of them is responsible for investigating this problem, and their dispute has so frustrated the Griffin Park parents that the parents have given the city two weeks to meet a series of demands or they and the environmental group Maine Rivers will bring in lawyers and ensure the process becomes painful, protracted and pricey. The parents want air-quality testing, health and environmental assessments, restoration of the stream, improved drainage, public information meetings and the phone numbers of city and state officials to contact.

The last item may be the most important: Had the city assigned someone to help these parents navigate the bureaucracy, their list of demands probably would not have been created. It’s not too late for Bangor to take the reasonable steps demanded and turn this situation into a positive demonstration of its ability to balance its business and residential obligations.