Residents of Stratford, Connecticut have been collecting signatures for a petition aimed at urging Environmental Protection Agency officials to completely remove asbestos contaminated soil from city limits. Asbestos, which may cause mesothelioma cancer, is a known carcinogen. The soil is located at twenty-four separate locations and the original proposal from the Environmental Protection Agency seeks to deposit the soil from all the areas to one specific area in Stratford.

Although the soil would be covered in order to prevent exposure to dangerous asbestos fibers residents are still concerned that the safety of those residents living near the site and those passing through may jeopardized.

Exposure to asbestos fibers is highly likely to result in the development of any one of a number of asbestos-related diseases which include lung cancer, asbestosis, and mesothelioma. All such diseases tend to have a significantly long latency period that many times leaves the diagnosed with very few effective treatment options. In most cases such a disease will already be in advanced stages by the time it’s discovered.

The petition being signed by many residents and has already received more than four-thousand signatures. The petition proposes moving all of the contaminated soil to a decontamination site located in Buffalo, New York. There are approximately five-thousand truckloads of the asbestos-contaminated soil to be dealt with. The cost to relocate the material in town would be approximately $21 million while the cost to move the material to Buffalo would total nearly $60 million.

The soil comes from the brake and clutch manufacturing firms Raybestos-Manhattan Inc. and Raymark Industries which shut-down in 1989.