Check the dirt

05/20/2009 10:00 PM


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Protect Our Parks, the dedicated community advocacy group, chided the Chicago Park District for not exercising the same concern for public safety and the environment as displayed by Waukegan, its neighbor to the north.

POP is now suing the Chicago Park District and Latin School to force them to conduct independent health and safety testing of the artificial turf soccer field that was crammed down into Lincoln Park over community protest.

POP claims that the effects of the toxic substances that now exist at the soccer field site are insidious, cannot be detected until after a child has been poisoned and once ingested cannot be cured.

In response Chicago has invoked every legal trick in court to fight POP and refused all proposals to conduct independent testing, at any time, of any sort, by any knowledgeable agency.

Unlike Chicago, POP points out that when a lone citizen in Waukegan, entirely on her own, went out and collected soil samples from the Orchard Hills Golf Course, slated to become a Waukegan Park District sports complex, sent it for testing by a private testing facility, and discovered the presence of toxic arsenic levels and the danger of park users inhaling the poison, the Waukegan Park District responded responsibly by agreeing “as a precautionary measure” to strip 3,000 cubic yards of the contaminated soil and truck it to a protected landfill, and to construct the sports complex with 13 multi-purpose “natural grass” playing areas.

POP charges that the Chicago Park District, lacking Waukegan’s fiduciary dedication, has chosen to stonewall all the health and safety warnings about how they are exposing young children to the high risk dangers of toxic substances in the Latin School artificial turf soccer field.

These multiple toxic substances including lead poison, cited in POP’s current lawsuit against the Park District, are detailed in the independent reports of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the School of Public Health of the University of Illinois at Chicago and the studies of public health agencies throughout the country.
Herbert Caplan
Lake View


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