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Aplastic Anemia News - Return to News Menu
A Wagner grad uncovers a deadly dump
Veteran journalist Charles Bermpohl has made an indelible mark as an investigative reporter
By TERENCE J. KIVLAN
WASHINGTON - June 26, 2005 - While investigating the incidence of disease last year in one of this city's wealthiest neighborhoods, veteran journalist Charles Bermpohl made a startling discovery: Two cases of aplastic anemia, a rare bone marrow disorder, had occurred in a single house over a 20-year period.
The victims, an elderly man and an 8-year-old girl from a different family, both died of the disease. "There are about 300 to 1,000 new cases of aplastic anemia a year ..." Bermpohl, a Wagner College alumnus, said recently. "It's like Bubonic Plague. It's very rare, and it's devastating."
One possible explanation for double lightening strike of the deadly anemia on the home: It is located on a street -- Cedric Street -- below which the Army buried large quantities of chlorine, arsenic, cyanide, ricin and other toxic substances after abandoning a chemical weapons development program at nearby American University at the end of World War I.
"There are two circular trenches (of dumped chemicals) below Cedric Street, and it is loaded with disease," Bermpohl said.
OLD MUNITIONS
The trenches are part of a vast under-ground dump of World War I-era munitions accidentally unearthed by developers more than 10 years ago in Spring Valley, home to 27 foreign embassies and a former neighborhood of three presidents, Richard Nixon, Lyndon Johnson and George H.W. Bush.
Using records gathered from government sources and Spring Valley community activists, Bermpohl canvassed a 345-house section of the 1,200-home area and found 131 current or former residents with serious chronic illnesses, such as diabetes, various kinds of cancer and kidney, colon and heart disease.
Among the victims were former President Bush and his wife, both of whom suffer from a thyroid disorder known as Graves Disease, and their youngest son Marvin, whose colon had to be removed due to colitis in the mid-1980s.
Bermpohl's paper, the Northwest Current, a weekly, published the results of his 1 1/2-year probe last fall in an eight-page, 13-article special edition. "I took the information and made a big map plotting where the diseases were," he said. "It wasn't scientific but it was the best I could do under the circumstances."
Although official studies have failed to confirm a link between the chemicals and diseases, the project won Bermphol some major accolades, including a Pulitzer Prize nomination, an investigative reporting award from the Society of Professional Journalism, and some attention from the other news media in the metro area here.
Although official studies have so far failed to confirm a link between the chemicals and the diseases, the project won Bermpohl some major accolades, including a nomination for a Pulitzer Prize and some attention from some of the other news media in the metro area here.
Bermpohl, however, is not a stranger to news scoops. Another big score in his nearly 40-year journalism career: A 1986 story for the Jacksonville-based Florida Times Union demolishing Republican Sen. Paula Hawkins' reelection campaign strategy of portraying herself as a crusader against drugs.
MADE FALSE CLAIM
In a campaign commercial, Ms. Hawkins claimed to have met with Chinese Communist leader Deng Xiaoping during a trip to Peking and persuaded him to stop his country's importation of Quaaludes to the United States.
Bermpohl, then a Washington correspondent, learned from the State Department cables on the expedition that the meeting did not take place. "She was at a great hall where there was a banquet for 500 people," explained Bermpohl. "He was in the back at a big table. She never got to the table."
The story appeared on the front page of the Times Union and then soared into orbit in the state-wide and national news media. Ms. Hawkins promptly went from three or four points behind her opponent, then Florida Gov. Bob Graham, to an insurmountable deficit of 10 points-plus.
The only problem with the story for Bermpohl was that, of the more than two dozen Florida papers that took sides in the contest, the Times Union was the only one that supported Hawkins.
When Bermpohl filed follow stories to the scoop, his editors bumped them way inside the paper. "They even ran an editorial against my story, without mentioning my name, of course," he said. "One thing led to another ... I eventually resigned."
The Brooklyn-born Bermpohl, who lives here with his wife Barbara, a real estate agent, entered Wagner College in 1956 and left at the end of his junior year in 1960 to continue his studies at what is now the New School University in Manhattan. But he views Wagner as his alma mater.
"I go back there about twice a year, for reunions and homecoming," he said. "It is a pretty campus."
He began his journalism career in 1966 as the editor of a weekly newspaper in Woodstock, N.Y. Over the next decade or so, he reported for various upstate dailies.
Bermpohl started at the Florida Times Union as a City Hall reporter. He cherishes the experience. "It was like having a front row seat at the circus," he said. "A lot of development was going on and there was always a political battle."
WORKED AT OTHER JOBS
After leaving for the Times Union in 1986, he worked several years as a private investigator and then for a builders' association before taking a job with the Northwest Current covering Spring Valley and other neighborhoods in the affluent northwest quadrant of the city.
His journalistic coups at the Current also include the discovery of the long forgotten grave of a Little Big Horn survivor in a small Jesuit cemetery near Georgetown University. He was Captain Tucker French, a sharpshooter who served under Major Marcus Reno, a deputy of General Custer.
As he was approaching Sitting Bull's encampment, Custer diverted Reno's battalion away from the main body of the 7th Cavalry to pursue a party of fleeing Sioux.
Bermpohl's next project: A book about the Spring Valley chemical dump and its health implications for the area. Although 65, he has no intention of retiring from journalism anytime soon.
"Reporting is a way of getting close to the truth," he said. "It really is the greatest thing."
Terence J. Kivlan is Washington correspondent for the Advance. He may be reached at terence.kivlan@newhouse.com.
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