Years after a U.S. Coast Guard facility in Tisbury was found to have contaminated the surrounding soil and affected people living on the property with lead, work is finally under way to remediate the soil.
Remediation work has been underway at West Chop Lighthouse Station since at least Friday to clean up lead from paint that was historically used to paint the building.
“Impacted soil will be excavated and transported offsite for disposal or reuse at a licensed facility. All excavated areas will be backfilled with clean material and restored to match existing conditions,” reads a banner fastened to the fence around the construction site.
The West Chop Lighthouse was under scrutiny when two Station Menemsha chiefs and their families left Coast Guard housing on the property in 2018, after testing found elevated levels of lead. The Coast Guard would admit the following year that it failed to warn the family of possible risks of lead before moving them onto the property, a decision that was made partly because of the difficulty of finding housing on the Vineyard. This would result in two children, ages 4 years and 11 months old at the time, to have elevated levels of lead in their blood. Documents obtained in 2019 by The Times through a Freedom of Information Act request found the Coast Guard had expressed uncertainty about whether the property had safe levels of lead, despite determinations made by a consultant that it was safe.
According to the World Health Organization, there is no safe level of lead exposure, and children are particularly vulnerable to lead poisoning. Even at lower levels, when there may be no obvious symptoms, it can affect a child’s brain development, resulting in a reduced IQ and lower attention span.
The investigation into the West Chop Lighthouse also exposed lead contamination at other locations in 2019, such as at East Chop Lighthouse, and at Station Eaton’s Neck on Long Island, N.Y., where five families were moved out of Coast Guard housing while cleanup took place.
It is uncertain whether there are any plans to have Coast Guard personnel live at the West Chop Lighthouse in the future after cleaning up the property. A Coast Guard representative did not immediately have answers for The Times.
West Chop Lighthouse isn’t the only property where contaminants are being removed from the ground.
“There’re numerous projects across the state for this,” said Sean Young, Tisbury conservation agent. He highlighted the removal of asbestos from land around the Pink House in Newbury, a historic building that was demolished in March by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
Anyone with questions or concerns about the work at West Chop can reach out to Elizabeth Kirkpatrick, project manager from U.S. Coast Guard Civil Engineering Providence, at 401-302-0296 or Elizabeth.L.Kirkpatrick@uscg.mil.
I am happy the Coast Guard has finally found the funds for this much delayed cleanup. My hope is that the CG invests the money to rebuild and or replace the existing two modest military family homes. I remember seeing CG families raising their families at the facility years ago which gave the West Chop loop a year round population with an additional stop for the school bus at the lighthouse.
The actual life saftey problem with West Chop light is that it is barely visible from most angles in Vineyard Sound. There are a few trees, but one huge one in particular, that stand front and center and blocks the view of the tower and light from mariners and tourists seeing the light house from the waterside. The closer to West Chop you get, the harder it is to see.
Please cut those trees down while you are replacing the soil that the people that the lighthouse was installed for were never going to eat. Please also put the fog horn back into service. It has been mysteriously silenced for the past two years.
When will we decide to spend a few billion dollars to clean up the lead in the campground ? Here’s an interesting quote : “Lead has long been considered to be a harmful environmental pollutant. Cited cases of lead poisoning date back to the early 20th century.[1] In the July 1904 edition of its monthly publication, paint manufacturer, Sherwin-Williams, reported the dangers of paint containing lead, noting that a French expert had deemed lead paint “poisonous in a large degree, both for the workmen and for the inhabitants of a house painted with lead colors.”[2] ” It took until 1978 to ban it from residential houses. We know PFAS, microplastics and many everyday products are harmful– How long will we continue to pollute the environment our children and our grandchildren are growing up in ?