The Mystery of Newtown Creek - The Ripple Effect: The Fate of Freshwater in the Twenty-First Century - page 15

ing that I call her Sister Newtown Creek, as some of her friends still do in Greenpoint.
“Think of all the young families living there that could be polluted!”
“TOO MUCH OF A COINCIDENCE”
One of those families, the Pirozzis, lived on Devoe Street, not far from the site of the
1950 explosion. The family's youngest son, Sebastian, was energetic and spent much of
his time outside, playing tag and stickball; he played near the creek but not in it. Many
of his “old-school Italian neighbors” raised vegetables in their backyards, where the soil
and water used to tend the plants may have been contaminated, he recalled.
In the 1970s, five of Pirozzi's neighbors contracted osteosarcoma, a rare form of bone
cancer. (It is unclear what causes osteosarcoma, but it is associated with exposure to
chemicals. According to the American Cancer Society, osteosarcoma “is not a common
cancer,” and only nine hundred new cases of the disease are diagnosed annually, on av-
erage, in the United States. The NewYorkPostreported that in 2006, in New York City,
only twenty-four new cases were diagnosed compared to an average of ten thousand
new cases of breast cancer diagnosed annually in the city at that time.) Two of Pirozzi's
osteosarcoma-stricken neighbors had their legs amputated, and one of them had an arm
amputated; a teenage girl whose leg was not amputated died; a friend nearby developed
bone cancer in his shoulder and died. Pirozzi's father contracted colon cancer but sur-
vived. After the Pirozzis moved from their Devoe Street apartment, the woman who re-
placed them contracted bone cancer . She fought it for a decade, but the cancer killed
her at age sixty-two.
In 1977, when he was fourteen years old, Sebastian Pirozzi was diagnosed with os-
teosarcoma . The doctors said that his was an extremely grave case. After a year of
chemotherapy, his right leg was amputated, and he began an arduous recovery. Since
then he has undergone surgeries on his shoulder and knee, had part of his lung re-
moved, and had to cut short a promising career on Wall Street to tend to his health.
Pirozzi no longer works and now lives on Staten Island with his wife and three children.
“I used to think my cancer was an act of God. But now that I know more about the
pollution, I'm rethinking that,” he said. “I'm coping, I guess. But I still have sleepless
nights.” Although he lacks conclusive epidemiological evidence, Sebastian Pirozzi be-
lieves the oil spill and Greenpoint's cancer cluster are linked. “Bone cancer is very rare,”
he said. “To have all this rare cancer in one place? It's just too much of a coincidence.”
he oil underground was invisible and easy to overlook, he said, and no government
or oil company officials explained the possible health consequences of industrial pollu-
tion. In the 1970s Greenpoint residents “didn't even know what an oil spill was,” Pirozzi