Erin Brockovich

Bob Bowcock spent much of his time at the American Legion Hall on Wednesday evening talking about the Lehigh Valley Train Derailment Site and spilled TCE at a community meeting originally billed as a joint appearance by Bowcock and Erin Brockovich.

Brockovich didn't make the trip. According to Bowcock, she developed a staph infection following a hospital visit with her pregnant daughter.

About 100 people attended the event, plus pretty much every news outlet in Batavia, Rochester and Buffalo.

Bowcock said his goal for the meeting was to empower the community with knowledge and help them seek answers for apparent environmental hazards in their community.

While he said he considers the identified dangers real and significant, he doesn't believe they are connected to the tic outbreak among mostly Le Roy High School students last year.

He also hasn't ruled out an unidentified environmental cause.

He noted that the girls who have been treated by medical doctors have gotten better and the girls who were treated by mental health doctors have gotten better.

"Why they got better, I don't know," Bowcock said. "I don't think any one scientist can articulate (why)."

The three environmental concerns for Bowcock in Le Roy are the derailment site, MTBE (an outlawed gas additive) found in water wells on Harris Road, and the natural gas wells on school property.

Bowcock made it clear, he considers the EPA's handling of the Superfund site on Gulf Road both slipshod and irresponsible.

The spill should have been remediated decades ago, he said.

"It's a situation that's not good," Bowcock said. "It's not healthy," adding, "I think the EPA should be ashamed of themselves. They need to get out here and they need to get serious."

Lehigh Valley Railroad is a multimillion-dollar holding company, Bowcock noted. There are homeowners who have seen their property values decline, potentially, because they must disclose TCE contamination below the surface of their homes. More than a dozen of them must constantly run noisy filtration systems.

The property owners, he suggested, should be compensated for their losses, possible related health problems and time, aggravation and any of their own expenses for dealing with contaminated water.

Bowcock said there should be extraction wells in the area, drawing up contaminated water and "cones of depression" to help draw the water out. The water should then be treated and the contaminates incinerated.

"Not one gallon of water has ever been treated at that site," Bowcock said.

Though it's never been statistically documented, people in the Limerock area believe just about every home within the plume area has had one or more cancer patients.

Bowcock noted that scientists have criteria for identifying "cancer clusters," but nowhere in the United States has a "cancer cluster" ever been scientifically validated. He doesn't expect that to be the case in Limerock.

"If every household in a community has a cancer patient, if that's the case, I wouldn't call it a cancer cluster," Bowcock said. "I would call it a catastrophe."

At one point during the meeting, Bowcock introduced a representative from the environmental law firm Weitz & Luxenberg. 

Brockovich has been a paid spokesperson for Weitz & Luxenberg.

Asked about any possible perception that Bowcock's community meeting might be an infomercial for Weitz & Luxenberg, Bowcock said that certainly wasn't an impression he intended to leave.

"I actually kind of went out of my way to downplay it, if anything," Bowcock said. "I didn’t allow her to speak. I introduced her only after somebody asked 'who’s the girl sitting next to you?' If the perception is we were doing an infomercial for a law firm, I wouldn’t know what we were doing an infomercial for, because there’s been no decision made that we would even litigate."

On the Harris Road issue, Bowcock noted that the DEC was out on Harris Road yesterday for the first time getting its own water samples from the possibly contaminated wells.

As for natural gas wells on Le Roy School District property, Bowcock said he didn't care what kind of extraction was being used, whether fracking or some other method, they are natural gas wells and the district needs to be fully transparent about what's going on with them.

"There are six natural gas wells on school property that need to be regulated in a format or a formula that the community is comfortable with," Bowcock said.

Bowcock did praise the district for being far more transparent in the past several months than he at one time expected and said he believed the district would do the right thing.

On any environmental issue, Bowcock stressed that while the meeting was meant to bring some sense of closure on a number of lingering questions from community members -- he said he gets daily emails from people in Le Roy -- he said he and his firm were not abandoning Le Roy.

"I will be back at your invitation and your invitation only," Bowcock told the audience near the end of the meeting. "We will fight to get that TCE removed with you and only fight with you if you fight with us."

There are three open issues Bob Bowcock wants to discuss with the Le Roy community next Wednesday, and none of the topics will involve high school girls with tics, except to say, he and his team found no environmental cause of the tics.

Bowcock, head of Integrated Resource Management, based in Claremont, Calif., was hired by environmental activist Erin Brockovich to investigate possible environmental causes for the tic outbreak in Le Roy about 10 months ago.

"We're not going to come out with a smoking gun and say, 'this is what caused it,' " Bowcock said.

If anything, he hopes to calm matters down, he said.

Bowcock will be with Brockovich at the American Legion Hall on Wednesday.

He said he felt an obligation to come back to the community to discuss what environmental and regulatory issues he and his team did uncover.

First, there is the four-mile-long, mile-wide TCE plume emanating from the Lehigh Valley Train Derailment Site on Gulf Road. While the federal Environmental Protection Agency acted quickly after all the recent attention was drawn to rusting barrels at the remediation site, he said there is no evidence the EPA is doing anything further to deal with the plume.

One of the issues the IRM team researched was whether there has been a greater number of cancer patients in Limerock and Caledonia. 

"We found two micrograms per litre of TCE in surface water in winter, and that’s bad, that's just bad," Bowcock said. "If we draw attention to that and the EPA steps it up, great, victory."

There was a study completed by the state in 2001 which showed in that ZIP code there were a couple of more lung cancer patients and a couple fewer prostrate cancer patients per capita.

The differences, Bowcock said, were insignificant.

The second issue is MTBE (a now-banned gasoline additive) found in three residential wells on Harris Road.

Bowcock said he wants to draw attention to that issue in the hopes it will lead to the municipal water line being extended to Harris Road.

Bowcock said the source for the MTBE has not been identified.

The third issue was brought out in the testing and report completed by Leader Professional Services. In June, the school district released the report from Leader saying the stack on the school's boiler system needed to be taller.

Bowcock said he will discuss any community concerns over that issue, but said the school district has shown quite a bit of cooperation with the community since February and school officials have done everything they said they were going to do.

There are three constituencies asking Brockovich and Bowcock to release information on these issues, with some home owners emailing weekly -- the people in the Limerock and Caledonia area, the residents of Harris Road, and environmental groups that have been monitoring the situation in Le Roy.

The meeting, Bowcock said, is meant to provide concerned citizens with information. While not excluding the media, no press release went out notifying the media of the meeting because he is not trying to stir up any controversy or alarm in Le Roy.

"If anything I hope to dispel all of these community issues that are still out there," Bowcock said.

The timing of the visit coincides with Brockovich and Bowcock conducting an unrelated environmental community meeting in Watertown on Thursday.

PHOTO: File Photo of Bob Bowcock