21 Years and Counting: A Toxic Town Fights Back

JANE KEON is our guest speaker at Wednesday evening's free public gathering. She is a founding member of Pine River Superfund Citizen Task Force, an EPA-sanctioned Community Advisory Group monitoring the cleanup of three Superfund sites, a radioactive site, and other contaminated sites in St. Louis, Michigan. The task force was organized in 1998, and Keon served as chair for 12 of the 21 years. She is currently serving as secretary.

The Superfund sites were established in the 1980s following the closure and departure from Michigan of Velsicol Chemical Corporation. The chemical company manufactured over 250 compounds, including DDT, the subject of Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring, and PBB, the cause of the 1970s PBB Disaster, still the largest food-contamination event in U.S. history.

In 2015 Keon published a book about the first 16 years of the task force. Its title, Tombstone Town, refers to a warning marker left at the former Velsicol Chemical site in St. Louis after the first cleanup of the Superfund site in the 1980s. Instead of using an ordinary sign, government agencies erected a grave marker on the buried chemical plant site. Finally, in 2013, after working with the U.S. Department of Justice and a federal judge, the task force and the City of St. Louis were allowed to remove the tombstone from downtown and move it to their historical museum.

In addition to her involvement with the task force, Keon serves on the board of Healthy Pine River, another citizens group endeavoring to clean up the upstream portion of the Pine River that is polluted not with chemicals, but with bacteria, including antibiotic resistant bacteria.

Keon is the mother of two, the grandmother of six, and great-grandmother of four. Her family has lived in Gratiot County near the Pine River since 1854.