Conscious Choice: Mom Brigade

November 2004

Mom Brigade

North suburban mother spearheads a coalition to shut down Evanston Hospital’s incinerator, inspiring the governor to order similar shutdowns statewide

by Peter Bernard

Clare Kelly Delgado, a Spanish teacher at Evanston Township High School, said all she set out to do was be a good mother to her children. As a result, this diminutive dynamo became the center of a vortex that coalesced many North Suburban residents around the fight to close down the Evanston Hospital incinerator.

Delgado and other activists, including her neighbor Dr. Matt Wynia, formed a group called No Burn Evanston. The group, along with the Sierra Club, pressured the Evanston City Council to order Evanston Hospital to shut down its medical waste incinerator by Oct. 15. In doing so, they grabbed the attention of Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich, who has requested the 11 remaining medical waste incinerators in the state shut down or face a state order to do so.

A 33-year resident of Evanston, Delgado says her quest began in 1999 when she simply set out to determine what the hospital was burning and what kind of emissions were coming from the smokestack.

“In 1999, my husband and I moved into this house with our two sons, and when the hospital fired up the incinerator every morning the stench of burning plastic filled the air,” Delgado said. “I knew that there was no way those fumes could be good for you, and I was appalled that a hospital — a place that’s supposed to be dedicated to curing people — was poisoning the air in a residential neighborhood. ... This is about my children, my family. What else was I supposed to do?”

So she wrote a Freedom of Information Act letter to the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency requesting the annual emission reports for the hospital’s incinerator.

“But the data wasn’t complete,” she said. “Documents reporting toxic emissions had been omitted or blacked out, and I hit a lot of roadblocks from the state and the hospital to get the information.”

With two small children and a full-time job, Delgado decided the task of bringing down the incinerator was a “behemoth” and gave up for the time being. But she got back into the fight when she went to a block party with her neighbors in the summer of 2003. “For the most part, the neighbors didn’t know about the incinerator, much less what it was burning, like plastics and medical equipment that contain mercury, for one thing.”

It was then that Delgado’s concern caught the ears of other neighbors.

Soon, the grassroots group called No Burn Evanston was born, with seven members meeting with aldermen and hospital officials, and educating the public about the hazards of burning medical waste. Wynia, an infectious diseases specialist and expert on public health, did a lot of research that aided the group’s cause.

“At council meetings, the incinerator was being treated as a local issue,” said neighbor and No Burn Evanston member Tricia Boyce. “But incineration is a global issue and you just know it’s wrong when you see that most of the others have closed.”

Boyce said it was Delgado’s conviction in her beliefs that inspired everyone else to keep the pressure on the city and the hospital.

Earlier this summer, No Burn Evanston took its cause to the public and the media, posting red signs reading “Stop the Evanston Hospital Incinerator Now” in hundreds of yards and sending flocks of protesters to council meetings.

Suddenly, television news crews and newspaper reporters were covering the issue. Hospital officials appeared before the council, asking for a year to turn off the incinerator, which they said would allow them time to retrofit a boiler powered by the incinerator to run on natural gas and to find a new way to dispose of the waste, all the while insisting that emissions from the incinerator were safe.

Opponents to the incinerator weren’t buying it.

“They were terrible, hemming and hawing, doing anything they could to stall the process,” said Bruce Nilles, an attorney and senior Midwest representative for the Sierra Club. “We tried to work with them for three months, and it became impossible. So we took it to the people in the schools and neighborhoods, and that’s where we found the support needed to win.”

Letters from Illinois Environmental Protection Agency officials sent to hospital president and CEO Ray Grady on March 9 and April 19 of this year first charged the hospital with submitting incomplete emission reports that failed to report any toxic emissions, including cadmium, mercury and dioxins, which virtually all incinerators emit in small amounts.

“We finally had confirmation of what we knew all along, that the incinerator was emitting the ‘big three’: toxins known to cause cancer, respiratory disease and other illnesses,” Delgado said. “We also found out that their claim that they needed the incinerator to run a necessary boiler also wasn’t true.”

To comply with city council and state deadlines, the hospital recently acquired the needed equipment to retrofit the boiler to burn natural gas, said hospital spokesperson Mary Ann Lando.

Grady declined to comment for this article and referred all requests to Lando, who said: “The hospital stands by everything that has appeared in the public record up to this time, and has done nothing but try to work with the community to resolve this issue. We are doing everything in our power to meet the community’s timetable”

As fall sets in, Clare has settled back into her happy but harried routine, teaching Spanish to high school students and spending time with her family in the evening.

A tight smile cracked her lips when she recalled the summer, and the victory she won with her neighbors. “It feels good,” Delgado said. “It’s just a relief to know we made a difference.”

Peter Bernard is a freelance writer who lives in Evanston, Ill.

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