For almost 20 years, the Spence family believed they had the American dream on their rolling 80-acres near Liberty.
From their garden, they canned vegetables, and from the trees, they preserved fruits and jellies. They splashed in the stream, played hide and seek in the tall grass, and when they had the urge, picked berries and mushrooms in the woods.
Sometimes though, they caught a foul odor floating in the breeze from a nearby landfill, but usually disregarded it.
That is until the family’s animals began to die, and their cows gave birth to calves with terrible deformities.
Then three generations of the Spence family members got sick with a myriad of ailments, including a cancer usually associated with exposure to dangerous chemicals, according to a lawsuit filed by the Spence family last year in Clay County District Court.
Lee Spence, the family patriarch, suffers from cramps in his arms and legs so severe one can actually see what looks like “worms crawling under his skin,” while others in the family suffered tremors, seizures and cognitive impairments.
What the Spence family didn’t know for years was that they were living next door to a hazardous chemical waste dump.
From 1971 to 1983, BFI Waste Systems dumped more than 160 million pounds of dangerous chemicals, including solvents, herbicides, heavy metals and chrome sludge, and acids, according the lawsuit filed by the Spences against BFI Waste Systems of North America, Republic Services, which now operates the landfill, and several others.
The Spence family contends the soil and water on their property is contaminated with the toxins and made them sick.
“We were healthy before we moved out here,” Lee Spence said. “I saw beautiful land when I bought the place…but no longer.”
BFI denies that hazardous chemicals from the dump have made family members ill.
“We are sympathetic to their apparent health conditions, but there is zero data to support the claim,” Russ Knocke, a spokesman for BFI and Republic Services, said.
The lawsuit was filed last year and it may be almost another year before the case goes before a jury, said Ken McClain, the Spence family attorney.
“My clients were told there was nothing on the site at the very point in time this site had nothing but bad materials in it,” McClain said.
In 1972, BFI leased the Missouri City Landfill at 8501 Stillhouse Road from Lincoln Brothers, according to the lawsuit and the Missouri Department of Natural Resource state investigative reports.
BFI dumped the usual home garbage in the sanitary landfill, but the company also began collecting hazardous chemical waste and disposing of it by pouring it on the ground, according to MDNR’s annual report.
The hazardous waste contained toxins that if someone is exposed are known to attack the central nervous system, kidneys, lungs, gingival tissue and skin, MDNR’s annual report said.
In 1983, the federal and state governments strengthened rules on landfills, including how companies can dispose of hazardous chemicals and what they can dump.
BFI shut down its hazardous waste site, according to the lawsuit and MDNR.
McClain claims BFI did not clean up the site because the government did not require it, even though the government did require it to monitor the pollution and track its movement.
The lawsuit said the chemicals are believed to have migrated to the Spence property and other property in gas, liquid and solid forms.
For decades, the chemicals mixed, blended and combined into a “toxic soup,” which escaped through limestone-based holding trenches, creating a plume of pollution in groundwater, the lawsuit claims.
The lawsuit also contends pollution traveled through vapors above ground contaminating the Spence’s topsoil and streams, exposing the Spence family to the chemicals by breathing them, by touching the soil, by wading in the contaminated creeks and pond and by eating game that had drank the water.
The Spence family should have been warned by BFI before they were sold the property, the lawsuit notes.
Instead, the lawsuit contends that BFI told them that “nothing bad” was buried there. The lawsuit said that was a lie.
In 1980, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency ordered an investigation after it was determined the landfill was contaminated, 13 years before the Spence’s bought the land.
The investigation found that the landfill did pose a potential hazard to health and the environment and that the hazardous pollution was migrating from the disposal site. The investigation also raised concerns that chemicals could contaminate the local water supply.
BFI was ordered to monitor the pollution and determine the quantity of chemicals at the site.
In 1988, the Missouri Department of Natural Resources found 68 “deficiencies” at the landfill. The state said BFI had not calculated how much pollution had migrated from the landfill and found that the groundwater migration rate was “orders of magnitude” faster than originally theorized.
BFI was ordered to conduct a six-year investigation. The lawsuit said that investigation revealed hazardous materials had contaminated the groundwater.
BFI said, as of 2014, “All proposed wells by regulatory authorities are in place.”
But even as BFI was in the middle of conducting that investigation in the early 90s, Lee Spence in 1993 decided to purchase the neighboring 80 acres from Lincoln Brothers, who owned the landfill that BFI leased.
Lee Spence and his wife Alice, spent time on the land and eventually moved into the farmhouse located about 200 feet directly northwest of the landfill site.
His son Mark and his granddaughter Julia moved into a house on the land in 1997.
Lee Spence said he was told by a BFI employee before he bought the land that “that if anything bad was on the property he would not be there,” the lawsuit states.
Another time, Mark Spence contacted BFI Waste’s corporate headquarters to ask about the future development of the landfill and was told “the property was likely to be turned into baseball fields or a golf course.”
Mark Spence also was told the landfill only contained municipal waste.
The Spence family has seen many ailments, which they attribute to the waste from the landfill. According to the lawsuit:
- Lee Spence has cancer, cognitive impairments, neurological problems and pain and cramping.
- Alice Spence has seizures, headaches and other neurological issues including tremors and cognitive impairments.
- Mark Spence too has neurological and cognitive defects as well as chronic leukocytosis and peripheral neuropathy.
- Julia Spence has health problems that are severe and lifelong and prevent her from having children.
But BFI’s Russ Knocke said the Spence’s should have known when they purchased the property in 1993 that there was a hazardous chemical waste dump next door.
“There is no logical reason why BFI would attempt to mislead them while at the same time making compliance data about the facility available to the general public,” Knocke said.
He also said the dump is in compliance with its permit.
But the lawsuit said state and federal government environmental agencies found that BFI has committed several violations and failed to obey the conditions of the permits.
Knocke disagrees BFI did anything wrong.
“The Spence property is regularly monitored and the science continues to disprove the assertion that there are chemicals in the soil on their property,” Knocke told 41 Action News.
However, in 2010, the state DNR once again identified six issues that it was “particularly concerned with,” the lawsuit said.
“To this day, and despite being warned again and again of the health risks and inadequacies of their monitoring program, no defendant has undertaken to install wells near the Spence’s house nor have they increased the monitoring system on the Northwest corner of the property,” the lawsuit said.
