By:Victoria Congema
For far too many years, I have watched people die - many friends much too young, others acquaintances I would wave to on a familiar street with a mutual smile of recognition.
I was born in the Old Lindenmere section of Merrick. I stayed there part my childhood, but with plenty of time to form bonds and friendships that would last generations. It was a middle-class neighborhood in the 1960's where children were plentiful, playing happily in the streets as parents watched, laughing and truly enjoying one another's company. Life was safe then, or so we believed, as we saw the world through children's eyes, knowing the good life consisted of family and neighbors living in harmony in Cape Cod homes on a tree-lined block.
I can almost hear the sound of the roaring cars across the hill at Freeport Stadium, smell the fireworks that we watched from the corner gas station where we would all congregate with lawn chairs on the Fourth of July. I can still taste the way my neighbor made toast with butter in the broiler. That was heaven to me. My oldest sister, Maria, remembers it all fondly also.
There are other memories, however.
We remember playing in the ashes that would gather on the street from the local town-dump incinerator. My mother remembers shaking the clothes that she hung to dry, as ashes would collect on them as well.
Nobody suspected the neighborhood's destiny of years to come; how so many people who made Old Lindenmere their home then would suffer rare cancers, autoimmune diseases and birth defects. It's safe to say that these and other diseases have affected 50 percent of the neighborhood. The illness rate became too alarming over the years to call it coincidence.
It all becomes very personal when those you have loved have suffered and died. I still have vivid memories of Daniel Lubrano, the oldest son in an Italian family and brother of my best friend, Alice, sitting at his kitchen table on Rugby Road, lovingly teasing a little sister who looked at him with genuine adoration. His mother thought the sun rose around her only son. I also remember 17-year-old Alice and her grief-stricken parents having to bury this beautiful man who lost his battle with a very rare cancer in 1979 at age 30.
Alice is still my best friend, and through the years, I've watched her struggle with Daniel's death, as well as giving birth to a beautiful daughter with Down syndrome and coping with her sister's multiple sclerosis.
I feel my heart ache every time I watch my first-born boy tease his 4-year-old sister, and I wonder, my God, how could I ever go on if this happened to us. Could it? Unfortunately, too many families have suffered the same fate.
Maria was my neighbor in Old Lindenmere, the daughter of my mother's best friend and my bridesmaid. She had such passion for life. I remember her screaming at Yankee stadium. She was the team's biggest fan. She helped a nervous bride without ever knowing the joy of a wedding day herself, as she too lost her life to cancer much, much too young. I recently heard that two of her family members have also battled cancer.
My own mother suffered from breast cancer (with no previous family history) with great courage, as did many of her friends in the neighborhood. Some survived, some did not.
An old neighbor used to say that man plans, God laughs. I don't think God had anything to do with this at all. Man did, and man can stop it.
Some believe the cause of all this hardship and pain was the unregulated burning of garbage at the Town of Hempstead dump in Merrick. Some believe it is the unregulated operation of Freeport Power Plant No. 2, which has run on dangerous diesel fuel with no pollution controls since 1970. Plant exhaust sweeps directly into the Old Lindenmere neighborhood, releasing dangerous carcinogens that the community has breathed for more than three decades. Diesel exhaust is now linked with many rare diseases and birth defects.
Merrick's incinerator closed long ago. Freeport still operates Plant No. 2.
Those who called Old Lindenmere home in the 1960s and '70s -- those who survived -- and many more-recent arrivals to the community are now taking a stand and seeking to find out what caused so much sickness. To not do so would be reckless to humanity.
We put our babies in car seats, we feed them properly, and we make sure they are safe. To not do so would be negligent. How is this different?
There is strong opposition to the stand against the plant. After residents recently picketed against Freeport's Power Plant No. 2, seeking help, the village responded by running the plant for a week after the rally, like some heathen god of spite. What can I say? Simple inhumanity.
People are dying, mothers, fathers, children, sisters and brothers. Whose responsibility is it to find out why? Who in power will take a stand, a risk?
Will we stop this health threat, Plant No. 2, or is it "Ashes, Ashes, we all fall down"?
