Kim Candela, with Jackson, who died in April
ELLENVILLE – A Summitville mother, with over 90 people waiting to hear her speak, has been denied a venue by both the Town of Wawarsing and the Village of Ellenville, for a public discussion regarding a possible cancer cluster.
Kim Ann Candela was living in the Village of Ellenville in the Town of Wawarsing, while pregnant with her oldest son, Jackson Joshua Smith. The child died at the age of four, of brain cancer, on April 12, 2016. She suspects the nearby Channel Masters site, later owned by Imperial Schrade, and Hydro Aluminum, as the cause.
“A lot of people have questions; it’s an important issue,”
Candela noted. “If there’s a chance this town is contaminated,
and we may never know, I don’t want anybody else to have to go through
that,” she said, referencing her son’s tragic death. Candela
intends to present a slide show, with maps of local rivers and factories,
attempting to connect the dots with known cancer cases.
Other potential indoor meeting places are now being pursued for a forum, including local firehouses and the Ellenville Public Library. So far, a video of her appeal to Wawarsing Town Supervisor Leonard Distel, posted to Facebook, has received 2,800 views – more than half the population of Ellenville. https://www.facebook.com/mike.wendel.127/videos/1129091067176746
Distel argued on camera last Thursday, that it would be too difficult to have someone turn off the alarm system at Town Hall, after the regular 4 p.m. closing time, to accommodate 100 local cancer victims seeking answers. Village officials refused as well, despite the fact that their building stays open late, and houses the police department.
“I don’t give up that easy. If anything this motivates me more, and I’m thankful for that,” Candela said. “I’m a strongly opinionated loving bitch, who has been through hell and refuses to be bitter. We were just hoping our local elected politicians would help.”
Additional contaminated areas include the old Napanoch Paper Mill, now an abandoned EPA superfund site, written off as a lost cause in 2014. Environmental activist and local gadfly Mike Wendel of Maximum Waters has linked ownership of the paper mill to Channel Masters, through property deeds in the Ulster County Clerk’s Office.
Tests conducted by the United States Geological Survey between 2009 and 2011 reveal the presence of strontium-90 and uranium in the groundwater below the Ellenville State Police Barracks. The corresponding well is indexed as U1647, on pages 34-35 of the report. http://pubs.usgs.gov/sir/2012/5144/pdf/sir2012-5144.pdf
The radioactive waste allegedly originates from experiments conducted by the US Army on mentally incapacitated Napanoch prisoners starting in 1945, to study the effects of fallout on agricultural crops. The alleged government program was headquartered near the penitentiary, at the old Pepsi bottling plant, which later became a pogo stick factory. This secret human experiment was disguised as a facility to manufacture blood transfusion kits.
