Dominican Republic town blames U.S. firm for birth defects

[Judi Lynn]

Posted on Friday, 11.06.09
Dominican Republic town blames U.S. firm for birth defects
A small Dominican Republic town plagued by birth defects wants to know if a U.S. power company is to blame.

BY FRANCES ROBLES
[e-mail]
ARROYO BARRIL, Dominican Republic -- Maximiliano Calcaño is 2 and was born with no arms.

``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.'' 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.

She lives in a small wooden house with no indoor plumbing in a rural village in northern Dominican Republic, not far from where coal ash generated by Virginia-based AES Corp. wound up at the edge of the sea. More than 50,000 tons of coal ash laden with heavy metals 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 has been six years since a contractor from Delray Beach brought the black dusty residue to the province of Samaná, and three years since the ash was cleaned up. Several civil lawsuits and criminal cases later, just when everyone thought it was over, the other shoe has dropped.

A civil lawsuit filed Wednesday in Delaware charges that toxic levels of waste dumped at the Arroyo Barril port has made people nearby sick. After years of repeated miscarriages, women whose blood levels show abnormal levels of arsenic are giving birth to babies with cranial deformities, with organs outside their bodies or missing limbs.

More:
http://www.miamiherald.com/news/americas/story/1319257.html