Grandmother's death prompts cleanup.

• Author: Benton, Sherrole

Ashland, Wisconsin Bill Kolodziejski's grandmother didn't drink. But when she died in 1991, the doctors told her family the cause was chemical induced cirrhosis of the liver. For the last year of her life, Louise Lemieux's family--who belong to the Bad River Chippewa Band--had tried to find the cause of her illness. One family member called the Bureau of Indian Affairs to have the water tested from the family's well.

"The doctors were concerned about where these chemicals were coming from," Kolodziejski recalls. The family talked it over, and all they could think of was the dump where the local paper mill used to take its sludge, near Lemieux's house in rural Ashland. "We remembered even as kids seeing those trucks of waste coming from the paper company," he says. "The sludge floats in the water. We used to call them paper rocks. We used to pick up chunks of it and throw it at each other."

From 1964 until the early 1970s, the American Can Company dumped paper sludge in the sandy soil S00 feet from Louise Lemieux's house on County Road A. In the mid-1970s, the company moved its dump to an other location, on Government Road, and covered the old site with dirt. Bill Kolodziejski's family is convinced that the sludge leaked and contaminated the ground water. But according to previous tests by the Environmental Protection Agency and the Indian Health Service, there were only low levels of contamination which posed no significant threat to human health and the environment.

A year after Kolodziejski's grandmother fell ill, family members still hadn't heard anything new about the chemical contamination.

"In June of 1991 we were cleaning and moving some of her furniture and a report fell out of her bookcase that was mailed in October 1990," Kolodziejski says. "At that point, my grandmother was so ill she wouldn't have been able to comprehend what that report said or what it meant. But it did state on there, this was from the Bureau of Indian Affairs . . . that five of the EPA's priority pollutants were found in my grandmother's well water. It also listed several steps to take for further investigation. So that's how we found out about it. We still hadn't heard from the tribal government whether it was safe to drink...