SANTO DOMINGO.- Reports by UPI and the Miami Herald on a lawsuit filed in the United States, and babies born with deformities in a Dominican port town eye a potential link with the pollutant rock ash dumped there six years go.

UPI reports on the lawsuit filed in Delaware charging toxic levels of coal ash dumped at a rural in the Dominican port at Samana made area residents sick, while the Miami Herald sees possible links to the deformities.

“Maximiliano Calcaño is 2 and was born with no arms,” is the lead paragraph in a report today by Miamiherald.com on the scandal of the rock ash dumped on the ports at Arroyo Barril, Samana, and Manzanillo, Monte Cristi during Hipolito Mejia’s Presidency (2000,2004).

“When I was pregnant, I was dizzy, vomiting and could barely walk,'' said Maximiliano's mother, Anajai Calcaño, 20. “My tooth cracked and fell out. Then my baby was born like that, without arms. Nothing like that had ever happened here before,'' she said quoted by the news source.

“By ‘before’ Calcaño means before a U.S. power company's coal ash arrived at a nearby port, sitting there for more than two years,” near where she lives, “not far from where coal ash generated by Virginia-based AES Corp. wound up at the edge of the sea.”

The thousands of tons of rock ash mixed with the lethal fly ash “was left at a port abutting local homes for years while the company, politicians, prosecutors, environmental activists and bureaucrats argued -- and residents got sick,” it says, and mentions the several civil lawsuits and criminal cases filed after, “just when everyone thought it was over, the other shoe has dropped.”

“The case highlights the debate over coal ash, an unregulated byproduct of coal energy, which when processed and recycled is used in everything from cement to the foundation for golf courses. Popular Mechanics magazine this month calls a concrete made from coal ash one of the “10 Most Brilliant Products of 2009.''

However, when the rock ash scandal first broke almost six years ago, the investigator Billy Adams told DT that while the rock ash by itself wasn’t considered a hazardous material, one of its components fly ash is, since in addition to arsenic, contains the carcinogens , beryllium, cadmium, chromium, lead, mercury, nickel and vanadium.

The miamiherald.com notes that the ash, a concentrated form of naturally occurring contaminants, is a by product from coal fired plants. “It usually contains arsenic, lead, cadmium, chromium and nickel. But as towns in Tennessee and Maryland clean up massive spills of the substance, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is poised to rule on whether it should be classified as hazardous -- which would be a tremendous blow to influential power companies that have long lobbied against such a classification.”

Quoting a The New York Times report, it states that coal recycling is big business. “Some 131 million tons was used in 2007, up from less than 90 million tons in 1990.”

Wednesday's suit against AES seeks unspecified compensation for seven clients and medical monitoring for the entire neighborhood.

The report also noted the Dominican Government’s suit in U.S. federal court, which led to AES paying US$6 million to clean up the site and settle the claim.

Startling tales

“Arroyo Barril's stories are startling. Altagracia Maldonado keeps her grandchild's deformed fetus in a jar for safekeeping. Her neighbor, Maribel Mercedes, gave birth to a two-headed baby who died after a few hours. Daniela Altagracia, a 5-year-old, is going bald,” it said.

It quotes doctor Eduard Ortíz, in Arroyo Barril: “last year in November, there were four cases of children born deformed. In one month, I saw two ectopic pregnancies -- when the baby is in the fallopian tubes. You see one today, another tomorrow, and start to ask yourself, `What's happening?' ''

“Ortíz whipped out his cellphone to show his photo of a baby he delivered that afternoon. The grainy picture showed a grossly misshapen face,” the report said.

Called for a statement by DT in its offices in Santo Domingo early Friday, AES Dominicana said it would contact their headquarters in Virginia and get back to us.

Related article: www.dominicantoday.com/dr/local/2005/10/31/6559/New-revelationson-rockash-dumped-in-Montecristi