River Cleanup Employee Blames Cancer on the Work

He helped scrub cancer-linked chemicals from Wisconsin's Fox River. Now he's fighting cancer—and the system—himself. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel chronicles the ordeal of 66-year-old Scot Meisenheimer, who spent five months in 2013 driving a loader inside a Green Bay processing plant that handled PCB-contaminated sediment in the largest PCB cleanup project ever. Meisenheimer says he worked in thick dust with minimal protective gear, no respirator, and ate in the same space as the toxic sludge. "If they tell you it's safe and they're the manager, you just know it's safe," says Meisenheimer, recalling his thinking at the time. Two years later came Stage IIIC melanoma; then an aggressive lymphoma; then more recurrences—four cancer diagnoses in all.

Reporters Caitlin Looby and Tamia Fowlkes detail how Meisenheimer's doctors and independent PCB experts strongly suspect his cancers are linked to the exposure, even as Tetra Tech, the multibillion-dollar firm that ran the site, denies responsibility. A limited workers' comp settlement, an insurance company that won't pay, and a maze of OSHA–EPA finger-pointing over who policed worker safety form the backdrop to his ongoing legal fight. Read the full story, which includes the backstory on the decades-long chemical pollution that created the sediment in the first place.