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COPYRIGHT 2004 Vegetarian Times, Inc. All rights reserved.
Terry Mejdrech's old home movies just don't afford the same enjoyment they once did. "When I look at those supposedly carefree images of our kids taking baths or laughing while they're splashing in the sprinkler out in the backyard," the 40-year-old Lisle, Illinois, wife and mother says, "I just cringe."
Six years ago, the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) informed Mejdrech (pronounced MAY-drek) and 1,500 of her neighbors in this community of large lots and grassy lawns 20 miles west of Chicago that their groundwater had been contaminated by trichloroethylene (TCE), a toxic chemical and carcinogen.
For more than 20 years, starting in the late 1960s, TCE seeped into the neighborhood's aquifer from an industrial plant operated by Lockformer, a company later acquired by Honeywell International Corporation. Honeywell, along with two other companies, agreed in September 2003 to pay $12.5 million in damages, subject to a bankruptcy court's approval. Honeywell and the other defendants in the class-action suit brought by Mejdrech and her neighbors also agreed to pay to hook up the communities to alternative water supplies.
That's cold comfort to the Mejdrechs, who have three boys, 4, 6 and 9 years old, two of whom grew up drinking the contaminated water, taking baths in it, eating food cooked with it off of plates washed in...
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