The anxiety of living in a neighborhood where a toxic chemical lurks underground showed clearly Tuesday as current and former residents from the Como area of southeast Minneapolis discussed the rediscovery of trichloroethylene, or TCE, in their soil.
"This may be the answer to the mystery, to everything that has been going on," said Patty Manion, who grew up in the neighborhood and lost a mother to multiple sclerosis, a sister to liver cancer and a brother just last month to multiple myeloma.
Manion attended the first of two community forums led by Minnesota health and pollution officials to discuss efforts to detect and remove TCE, a degreasing solvent that had been dumped from 1947 to 1962 in a pit behind a now-defunct General Mills plant.
The state is asking some 200 property owners near Van Cleve Park to allow testing in their basements to determine whether TCE vapors in the soil below their foundations are finding a way into their homes.
Prolonged, substantial exposure to TCE has been linked to certain cancers such as non-Hodgkin's lymphoma as well as birth defects.
While there is no evidence that cancer or other health problems are more prevalent in the neighborhood, state officials said they are acting out of caution as science has revealed more about the way TCE can evaporate from groundwater and rise through soils.
"We're all hopeful [that] we're going to conduct this investigation and we're not going to see the types of exposures that will even require mitigation," said Jim Kelly, manager of environmental surveillance and assessment for the Minnesota Department of Health.
The neighborhood's TCE problem has been known since the early 1980s, when the old General Mills property at 2010 E. Hennepin Av. was declared a federal Superfund cleanup site.