PALM BEACH COUNTY, FL--In his FAU lab, environmental geochemist Dr.William Louda talks about soil and water tests done on the playground of Western Pines Middle School.
Louda pours over data detailing elevated arsenic levels in soil from ground level to two feet down.
Choosing his words carefully, he calls it 'an 'orange' not a red flag. And says it's worth looking at again.
"Arsenic is known, nasty as far as it pertains to nervous systems, including the brain, so it's one of the eight EPA toxic metals that really, really need to be looked at," Dr. Louda says.
The water the kids drink at the school is safe. It's piped in from West Palm Beach, but ground water at 11 feet is contaminated enough to be undrinkable.
And that goes right to the heart of concerns for The Acreage residents, the vast majority of whom have wells that dip into the aquifer that flows under their homes.
"All of these wells, they're all sipping out of the same underground river that runs through the limestone, so a little elevated arsenic here is a small flag we should pay attention to the well water data when it comes in," he says.
Dr Louda says whatever the source, if indeed there is a source for the cancers, it was almost certainly transmitted by water moving thru the sponge-like earth beneath The Acreage.
Thursday August, 27 the state's exhaustive research on cancers in The Acreage will be released.
And the stakes are enormous. It could launch a full blown cancer investigation or shoot down theories that man-made contaminants are making people sick.
